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Threads of God

atlasobscura.com

44 pointsthunderbong42 comments

I keep hearing about this rare and extremely difficult to make pasta, but one thing I always wondered is how good it actually is.

My feeling is that it's just an ok dish with a cultural legacy attached to it.

I think your observation applies to most cultural legacies.

Cynic in me agrees with you.

It's a common idea in the modern industrial world that there's still some artisan out there who makes something authentic and impossible to mimic.

But my parents who ran a restaurant could make a simulacrum of pretty much every kind of food they ever came across. And they weren't world experts with a long training at Michelin star restaurants, they had minimal training.

What did they they use their training for? Of course convincing people that they were making authentic Asian dishes in a western suburb.

I've known a few people to try some rare delicacies and the focus is always on it being more of a symbol of status or wealth rather than it tasting particularly good.

One example is those really expensive fruit from Japan. If you look them up on YouTube the general consensus I've seen is that they're good but probably not enough to merit paying that much for them unless you're incredibly wealthy.

Anything that's actually really tasty or unique ends up becoming widespread and it eventually becomes reasonably affordable for anyone to try. One example of this is wagyu beef; at one time it was relatively rare and very expensive, but now you can find it in many asian supermarkets and a small cut is affordable for anyone.

> I always wondered is how good it actually is.

For me "gamey mutton broth" is all I need to know. Yuck. Anything but mutton.

Heh, I was going to say the opposite. Sign me up!

It's essentially pasta in broth. This is common in Italy and expanding the idea to "noodle soup", common in many places. The floor for this dish is certainly higher than "ok". Who doesn't enjoy a warm bowl of chicken noodle soup in the fall? It sounds like it would be like that.

"OK" compared to the average chicken noodle soup, not compared to all the edible things.

Basically, would it be worth the Italy hike to get there, or can I get roughly the same thing at the supermarket?

Is it worth it to crash this village's religious festival just to get a bowl of homemade pasta? No. I don't think it ever would be, but that's not the point. If you have some special connection to the area or to St. Francis of Assisi? Probably, yes.

The 2022 BBC article goes into more depth: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20161014-the-secret-behin...

This pasta is impossible to make. A celebrity chef once spent two HOURS trying.

I heard about this. The famous celebrity chef, someone everyone here has heard of, traveled all the way to Sardinia to learn the intricate technique known by only three women, who presumably have spent a lifetime learning this technique. After a full two hours, the chef declared it impossible.

Mind bending.

Are we playing the Pronoun Game here? Is the famous celebrity chef in question Lord Voldemort?

> Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver also visited Sardinia in hopes of mastering the elusive noodle. After two hours, he gave up.

I heard about this too, here on this very forum, in an article about this pasta, today.

I trekked for twenty miles, at night, so that I could reach the fabled TFA.

TFA - The Fabled Article. "the fabled TFA" is then like PIN Number and ATM Machine.

My bad.

I'm on extremely limited bandwidth right now, so I can only read the HN threads and not the links. I plead oopsie daisy.

That's OK, it gave me a chance to be snarky, which I relish these days. Honestly, I rarely read the articles myself.

Jamie Oliver if memory serves well, so that doesn't exactly tell you much. Behind the scenes he's known for making food that looks good, but not necessarily tasty.

Uncle Roger looking on, unsurprised, as Jamie Oliver tries for two hours and fails. "Like Uncle Roger tried for two hours with ex-girlfriend. <I'm so sorry children>"

The Uncle Roger character is so fascinating to me.

I can't shake the feeling that the popularity is largely from playing out stereotypes for a mass audience. It feels ideologically similar to a minstrel show in ways that I don't have a vocabulary to describe accurately.

I grew up watching yan can cook and uncle Rodger struck me at how inauthentic it is. It feels exactly how you described.

I’ve seen interviews with the comedian/actor out of character, and he insists that Uncle Roger is exactly what uncles from Malaysia are like (I assume exaggerated at least a little for comedic effect).

So maybe it’s okay? Or maybe in a few years he’ll be retiring the character the way Chris Rock retired his “N” routine.

All I know is that it’s not my place to tell him what to do with his heritage.

I think it's a ridiculous claim that he tried for two hours and gave up so it's impossible, but it does tell you something that it's Jamie Oliver and not just anybody. His first job was pastry chef at Antonio Carluccio's Italian restaurant. He was mentored by Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo, also friends with and business partners - their joint high-street restaurant chain was Jamie's Italian. He did a TV show Jamie's Great Italian Escape of him touring Italy, and ten years later a one-off Jamie's Italian Christmas, and with Contaldo they did the show Jamie Cooks Italy. He's been awarded the Order of the Star of Italy, as chef and restauranteur.

That is, he's pretty familiar with Italian cuisine and making pasta compared to a random average person / cook or chef who hasn't specialised in it.

A pilgrimage whose completion you are rewarded for by an ultra rare pasta, love it.

2-in-1 offer! Absolution & digestion, limited offer, bring your phones to take a mandatory selfie!

[Tom Waits voice:]Step right up! Step right up!

Didn't know this song, thanks!

Too much! hope it's not marketed like that.

You don't even have to go to these extremes to understand how rich and delicate Italian cuisine is.

I am lucky to have lived 10 years in Italy and, after they, 25 in Spain. Although Spain is one of the Meccas of food, Italy is simply another level and you can see this from how deeply in the people the food and their techniques are, not just by how good Michelin star restaurants are.

And my prediction is they one day the international community will understand how much there is in Italy beyond pasta and pizza.

How do them compare with Capellini [1]? They have a name connected to the idea of "Threads of God": "capelli d'angelo" or "angel hair" in English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capellini

Well, Capellini is thicker than Angel Hair. ToG is half as thick as Angel Hair.

Nanopasta is a bit thinner, 2,000 times thinner than angel hair pasta (which is 0.8mm thick) https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/chemistry/nanopasta-thinn...

sounds identical to the well known “dragon hair” noodle technique from china.

> use the original title, unless it is misleading

Even knowing (or especially knowing) what Atlas Obscura is, I did not expect an article titled "Threads of God" to be about some freaking pasta, it is definitely misleading.

Titles are really the worst part of HackerNews.

I disagree. It’s a captivating title. The BBC article has more narrative and detail, but the Atlas Obscura article goes straight to the point. My first thoughts about the title’s subject were that it must be astronomy, needlework (lace), or computing. It was a pleasant surprise that none of my thoughts were accurate.

> I disagree. It’s a captivating title.

Yes that's called clickbait and it's also forbidden by the HN guidelines...

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