Why ‘Pasta Every Day’ Is My Favorite Pasta Cookbook Ever

I discovered Pasta Social Club, chef and writer Meryl Feinstein’s online community of pasta enjoyers, in its early days. A friend sent the Instagram page to me in 2019, around the time I was starting my own pasta journey, trying to make lasagna and tagliatelle and orecchiette for my friends each week when we gathered to watch new episodes of The Bachelor (ugh, the good old days). There was something very refreshing about following Feinstein’s Instagram account—it felt like you were along for the ride with someone who was just having a very fun time coming up with super creative pasta dishes, and if you didn’t already make homemade pasta, her page made you want to learn. When the pandemic hit, it annihilated my own weekly pasta group, so I stopped making pasta (weak, I know) and just became a spectator. The social dimension of my own pasta adventure had disappeared for the time being, but Pasta Social Club lived on. Now, its Instagram page has 250,000 followers.

Pasta is fun to eat, eternally appealing, and best enjoyed with other people. Feinstein knows this, and has based her whole project on it. In the intro to her new cookbook, Pasta Every Day, which dropped earlier this week, she talks about falling in love with pasta while visiting a balsamic vinegar producer in Modena, Italy; there, she and her husband learned to make pasta from their host, Barbara, who told Feinstein that “pasta is about pleasure, not perfection.” When Feinstein returned to the U.S., she tried to make artichoke ravioli from The French Laundry’s cookbook (i.e., the most ambitious and frankly ridiculous next step possible). She spent hours and hours attempting to make the complex and convoluted dish, only to find that it was unsatisfying, and finally just resigned and ordered pizza. (Ironically, the exact same thing happened to me the first time my friends and I tried to make ravioli from a different cookbook I’m not going to name here.)

Feinstein would go forth to finish culinary school and cook at various Italian restaurants in New York City; then, she founded Pasta Social Club—first as a supper club, then as an Instagram phenomenon and recipe website—and began writing for Food52. Pasta Every Day is the work of someone who labored to learn, someone who prioritizes creativity and simply loves cooking for other people. That’s why it’s one of the best pasta cookbooks I’ve ever read and cooked from.

Pasta Every Day is not your typical pasta cookbook. Instead of delivering a bunch of laws about pasta with the attitude that, if you break them, Don Giovanni will return from his grave and drag you to hell, it plays more like a choose-your-own-adventure private pasta lesson with your homie—and for this type of cuisine, that’s the perfect approach. After the necessary sections about pantry ingredients and tools (I really appreciated the brand recs, which guided my purchase of a new gnocchi board and a potato ricer), Feinstein launches into the fundamental base of homemade pasta: dough. She knows you’ll have questions, and sets up the chapter so that you can easily find info for everything from which flours to use, how to incorporate oil, water, and eggs, and even visual aids for kneading and shaping.

A big part of what makes this book so excellent is that its writer anticipates the questions you’ll have, and answers them before you have to ask. What’s the difference between boiling and baking potatoes for the potato gnocchi? How long can finished gnocchi or cavatelli sit out before I have to cook it? Can I freeze this or refrigerate it for later? Why isn’t my cavatelli looking as sexy as it does in the photo? Should this Bolognese have more liquid in it? These are all questions I had while cooking from the book, and ones that Feinstein anticipated by offering up answers.

I had a powerful moment last night while shaping cavatelli where the finished pasta was just feeling too thick; it’s an issue I had with orecchiette back in the day, and one I just assumed was because I can’t make good dough because I’m a fucking stupid idiot who lives in the Midwest and not a cool chef or grandma in Italy or New York City. “Firmly press down, then drag the dough toward you, with generous pressure, until it curls over and forms a little cave,” Feinstein writes in the cavatelli section. “Don’t be shy; you want to feel tension between your fingers and the dough.” Maybe it’s my ADD, but I’m better at figuring stuff out when I get vivid, clear directions, and “feel the tension between your fingers and the dough” was the absolute perfect advice—I started pressing harder and with more intent, and 10 or 20 cavatelli later, I was making ones that looked pretty similar to the photos.

The book is set up in sections—doughs, shapes, fillings, sauces—and you’re encouraged to jump around in order to be creative with your dishes, which is something that many other cookbooks, whether pasta, pizza, or barbecue, might warn against. (I usually chalk that up to the ego of the writer, since IMO there’s always room for new ideas in home cooking, but that’s another conversation, LOL!) The book’s setup also works in any order. If you know you feel like making black pepper pasta dough, Feinstein will suggest using it in hand-cut pasta, ravioli, farfalle, scarpinocc, or sorpresine; if you go the sorpresine route, that page will suggest sauce options like pantry tuna and tomato sauce, Italian meat broth, and all-purpose tomato sauce.

Because of the freedom it offers, using the book is an incredibly fun and immersive process. The other night, I set out to make the “Casual Bolognese.” (Unrelated, but don’t ask your partner what their favorite pasta is, because they might say one that takes four hours to make.) I began making the recipe for the Bolognese, and also started working on pasta to pair it with. Feinstein recommended things like garganelli, pappardelle, and tagliatelle, but her suggestion of potato gnocchi felt the most interesting to me—it’s a pasta I never would have thought of for this particular dish, but meat and potatoes is a timeless banger of the highest order, obviously, so I went to the page for that. I had to roast potatoes and rice them (holla to my new potato ricer), and after the dough was made, I needed to go to another page to see how to make gnocchi (holla to my new gnocchi board). On that page, I learned how to create gnocchi, before heading to a different section to see how to cook it and add it to the pasta sauce, which I’d been in the process of building this whole time. I know, doing all this might sound fucking insane to you—and if it does, maybe consider Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Mac ‘N Cheese for dinner instead—but it’s very fun. Most importantly, after four (or maybe five) hours, when we finally sat down to eat the Bolognese, it was insanely good—it had that deeeeep, rich flavor that results from a long simmer with great red wine, the savory bite of good grass-fed beef, and the complexity added by good produce and freshly grated nutmeg. Gordon Ramsay would have said “wow” and Guy Fieri would have told me to “shut the front door.”

Comparatively, the tomato broth with cavatelli I made was a very easy affair. The broth had a deeply savory umami flavor, despite having minimal ingredients (that’s what anchovy does, baby!), and with the aforementioned cavatelli advice, it went pretty smoothly (though admittedly there’s plenty of room for improvement).

TL;DR: If you love pasta, Meryl Feinstein’s Pasta Every Day is a choose-your-own-adventure-style cookbook you’ll want to play around with for a long time. Whether you’ve struggled with making your own ravioli, are eager to finally jump into making classic Italian dishes for the first time, or are a seasoned pasta pro looking for great new ideas, this book is the perfect tool—it’s inspiring, and teaches you to think of pasta as a “moving target” rather than a precise and ancient art that you probably won’t master. It might be a while before I run a four-hour Bolo again, but, fortunately, there’s enough here that I won’t need to (at least for a few weeks).

Buy Pasta Every Day on Amazon.

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