When I lived in America, I always secretly harbored this idea that dried pasta was intrinsically inferior to fresh pasta. Maybe it was the Calvinist in me that maintained anything that requires more work is naturally better. I also perhaps romantically believed that all Italians made all things by hand- and by extension that all Italian food was the same. In the 1990s, regional Italian food was largely non-existent in the United States. Even New York, bastion of Italian-American cookery was largely void of regional Italian cuisine. Fine dining chefs served exotic dishes like vitello tonnato (which I never really liked or understood) on the same menus that offered ribollita. The former is from the Piedmont and has some suspicious origins in French Savoy; the latter is a fine example of Tuscan Cucina Povera. Call me a zealot, but those two dishes should never be on the same menu together. It is offensively blasphemous. Unless maybe you are Massimo Bottura and are doing something whimsically ironic.
