I love the weird bends of our behavior that come about from taking our made-up rules too seriously. This phenomenon seems to me like the natural opposite of desire paths. Rather than an unconscious breaking of our rules for convenience, it is the choice to do something in the most inconvenient way.
This thought is an old friend in my mind, but only shows itself in the midst of specific, peculiar familiarities. Like when I have to look up a recipe online. I have to scroll through a lot of spam and AI garbage, and then find the directions I need scattered within what appears to be someone’s diary entry or a blog post about life with no central focus, not even the specific foodstuff it is presumably written about.
I’ve been told this feature of online recipes is the result of a quirk in written copyright: current laws do not protect the bare bones instructions for food preparation, so these lifestyle blogs or whatever have to go through this song-and-dance of hiding the information you need to keep it for themselves, even in the process of sharing it with you. This arguably makes finding what you want more difficult than it should ever need to be.
But I love it. Specifically the practice of real people engaging in a weird, backwards project—embedding their recipe in an awkward anecdote—that gets in the way of the purported goal—sharing the recipe. The (un)awareness of this problem and the subsequent hints at grappling with the cognitive dissonance that lie in these works is delicious. Different bloggers betray a spectrum of convictions. Some seem to lean more towards using a recipe as a tool to force you to read their newsletter by concealing it within, while others seem to balance this desire to bring eyes to their prose with an attempt to make the recipe actually useable, but still shrouded in enough contextual type to make it intellectual property. This online niche (and my love for it) is complicated by content farms: the businesses that task hundreds of people (or, increasingly, Artificial Intelligence) to fill the internet with billions of filler articles and scrape as much ad revenue as possible. This content is made only for and in service of the algorithms, so it dominates the ecosystem and easily reaches the singular goal of gaining revenue.
Humans who earnestly attempt to share content are in the awkward position of trying to succeed on multiple levels. They must try to make their work appealing to search engines so it can be found, while also making it appealing to other humans. They might also try to care about what they’re making, and have to square that with making enough money to live. They might even entertain a conception of truth and think it matters to strive for it. They must engage in the undertaking of writing with a volatile mixture of business sense and creative spirit (a kind of hybridization between a well-oiled machine and a well-watered sapling). This task gets endlessly complicated the more things you have to care about.
The detractors of humanity portray these muddied intentions as vestigial weaknesses in comparison to the new system. They damn human endeavors through the lens of efficiency. And indeed, how can one compete with a group that will ignore every inconvenience (copyright law, intellectual property, truth, ego, creative spirit) and focus entirely on producing more of whatever keyword is trending analytically?
More often than not, I feel like I can tell when these anecdotes are artificially constructed—constructed either by AI or by humans for commodification—for precisely the purpose of copyright: half-heartedly recalling the alleged dinner party that a dish was prepared for and received all kinds of compliments, or claiming that this dish saved a marriage, or lauding that this meal carries with it the very essence of fall. It’s one step down from the real deal, but is still much better than the bottom of the barrel: the empty recipe cards broken up by scores of pop-up ads, hosted on pages that are often completely unusable on mobile devices or without an adblocker. The worst offer a pitiable excuse for context via a generated summary of the words in the name of the dish, and maybe, if you’re lucky, incomplete or incorrect directions for putting the ingredients together, or just a list of foods and numbers.
These empty recipes solve the dissonance by removing the human factor and just aiming for accruing capital through content generation. This is revealed in the minutia of preparing the meal itself, specifically by their off-hand directions for seasoning the dish. If a recipe just says “apply/mix these things,” “salt if desired,” or god forbid “season to taste,” I automatically don’t trust it. When they feel the need to defend their seasoning preferences, I know it was written by a human being with feelings and opinions. I know they are to be trusted when they beg you to understand that you are selling yourself short by defaulting to your typical seasoning preferences.
Dan Olson, among others, has observed that “Food is inherently political,” and I agree. What you think is normal and what you think is exotic says a lot about your upbringing and geographical orientation. What ingredients communities have access to determines what ends up in their traditional cuisine. And how a recipe coaxes a reader through the process of making a thing shows how the creator expects you to think, or wants you to feel. The molehills that these people are willing to die on says a lot about their, and our, uselessly human commitments.
SO, HOW DO WE FEEL ABOUT PASTA WATER?
A clarification at the onset—There are really three opinions: Cooking pasta with a pinch of salt, cooking with just water, and cooking with “salt water.” The last is by far the minority opinion, so it is easily confused as being the same as the first option. Professional chefs and “real Italians” make pasta with salt water, a concoction with much more than a pinch. Sources disagree on how much (obviously), but their debate is about the ratio of how many tablespoons of salt per gallon of water. This is what professionals mean when they say to “lightly salt the water” or “boil the pasta in salt water”.
Of all the people in my life, all but a handful remain completely ambivalent about salting pasta water.
My philosophy mentor Jeanine does it, but she doesn’t know why. I know several people who do whatever they think is the “Italian way.” When my dad first walked me through the process he told me: “Some people feel very strongly that you have to.” Most echo the words written in many recipes: “do so if desired.” Why would you desire to? That’s a question for no one. Don’t ask it. Just follow your heart on what feels right.
If you do ask why, there are a lot of reasons offered for why it is the correct step in preparation, with waves of differing evidence to support them. How strongly any individual believes any supporting theory is not relevant. This is an area where almost everyone is just as uninformed. It is often an emotional, irrational line of thinking that relies on tradition and family history. One way is correct, and the other is how the people who don’t know any better do things. You know better, don’t you?
Thinking about salting the pasta water this way allows it to be a microcosm of religion, or politics. The irrationality that we carry with us throughout our lives: our habit for forming rituals, our sensitivity for in/out-group dynamics, the humanness that becomes so harmful in other, bigger contexts is still as present here as anywhere. It’s just a magnitude less, making it much less likely for injustice to be the result. This makes it a perfect case study for examining the idiosyncrasies of the human condition. But I don’t really care about that, I want to know why we should salt the pasta water.
While the statements of professionals should be taken seriously (with more than just a few grains of salt, like the rest of us), I and the rest of the masses are not well-equipped to evaluate what difference salt makes on a chemical or culinary level. The evidence? The vast majority of people are arguing about whether or not to add a pinch of salt, plus or minus a few twists of the rock salt grinder, even if they do cite the experts.
WHY SHOULD WE ADD A PINCH OF SALT?
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- It makes the water boil faster/slower?
A: It is technically true that sodium chloride has a boiling point of 2,669°F, and it is true that salting water raises the boiling point of the mixture, but a touch of salt isn’t going to make a big difference. - You can reuse the water for a different side dish/purpose?
A: You can use it for sauces due to the starch mixed with the water. There are some niche uses, but they are pointless in my opinion. HGTV took the incredibly awkward stance that as long as you’re making organic pasta that you don’t befoul with seasonings, salt, oil, or anything else that makes pasta worth eating, you could recycle the water for your plants. - It enhances the taste in an indecipherable way?
A: Yes, you can definitely make that argument. Cooking noodles with something in the water lets them absorb the flavor. Adding miso or bullion does this. But does a pinch of salt improve the flavor? There are recipes that specify to add a pinch of salt to the water as it heats, and to add (much) more salt as it reaches a rolling boil (or vice versa). Is the initial pinch for flavor? Why not add more? Adding a pinch of salt changes the flavor about as much as residual dish soap. - It’s “more authentic”?
A: Sure—Those who appeal to the nonexistent “universal Italian experience” like the Austrian company Schär insist that the only way to make pasta the “Italian way” is to salt the water. But the question remains—why do “the Italians” add salt? Do they add a pinch? - It changes how the pasta cooks?
A: Adding salt does change the cooking process of the pasta, for instance by limiting the gelatinization of the starch and thus making the pasta less sticky, but the effects are subtle. According to Samin Nosrat, author of Salt Fat Acid Heat, 2% salinity (or just over 5 tablespoons per gallon) is best. To see any significant change you would need to add something like that amount. For those sensitive to sodium or averse to strong tastes (like my seasonally-squeamish midwesterners out there), almost all of that salt stays with the water and leaves with it as it is drained. It is added to alter the cooking process, not to poison you. But this is the rhetoric of professional chefs, who account for a slim minority of the human experience. Most people are debating whether or not to add a *pinch* of salt when they are told to “add pasta to boiling salted water” or to “salt water to their preference.” Looking here, there is no such justification for or against. - It changes the consistency or texture of the pasta?
A: …? I mean, yeah, it might. But can you tell, or is it just the difference between al dente and well done? I’ve consistently made pasta with or without salting it, in many different cooking implements, following or ignoring the instructions printed on the back. I maintain that if you are making it to your mouthfeel, the variety of pasta and how long you cook it contributes much more to your overall satisfaction. As an added wrinkle, I’ve had to eat pasta senza glutine my entire life, which excludes me from ever making a claim to ancestry or authority. While I am descended from many an Italian, I’ve never eaten a dish the way they intended it to be, and had to cope with the fact that every single brand attempts a different alchemical hybrid of grains to achieve a pasta-like substance that behaves erratically when subject to water. Each brown rice-corn-soy-yellow lentil-white rice compound solicits different heats and cooking times. Whether the pasta needs to be immediately shocked with cold water or risk consolidation or never again bathed to risk the same fate is always in question. So, in this wild world of different textures and inconsistent consistencies, when would the salt be the most prominent thought in your mind? - Okay. I don’t know what it does, but I think it adds a dash of mystery into the process of making a meal?!
A: Huh. It’s an odd thing, that. I didn’t realize why I liked doing it until considering what purpose it serves (or doesn’t really). I can’t speak for anyone else, but it seems to me that whether you have questioned the practice or been told it is as unquestionable a practice as Mass, salting the water is a comfort. It is a soothing thing to take a pinch and lightly stir it in to help the water, the great dissolver, in its solvent process. Yes, the freighter is going where it’s going, but I found a lily pad paddle to help us get there faster. I feel closer to my great-grandmother, closer than she’d ever let me stand in her kitchen while she worked. I feel closer to the untold numbers of people that have sat before a vessel and brought the water to heat. Do you want a little incantation? Do you need a dose of faith?
- It makes the water boil faster/slower?
So, should you salt the water? Well, if you want to make magic the way I do, you’ll have to start with a clove of garlic and a tub of water put to the fire. Then, adjust your vestments and mutter invocations OR clap your hands three times, then, if you believe, lightly salt the pasta water…
And then maybe add a whole lot more.
Bennett Mullozzi
Bennett Mullozzi is a graduate of philosophy and psychology from the University of Minnesota Duluth. His philosophical interests underlie his general interests, which span from music and poetry to the deeper corners of the human condition residing in 4 hour long Youtube videos about plagiarism or Hip-Hop beef. Ruminations in the areas of aesthetics, existentialism, and the philosophy of race and gender abound.
