Ziti

Ziti is a smooth, straight-cut tube from southern Italy, and its name is a piece of wedding lore: in the dialects of Naples and Sicily zito and zita mean "groom" and "bride," and ziti — the betrothed — was the pasta of the marriage feast, served in great baked trays of meat and cheese. Traditionally it came as very long hollow rods, sometimes a foot or more, snapped by hand at the table into rough lengths before cooking, a ritual as much as a technique. Carried to America by southern immigrants, ziti shed its length for the shorter "cut ziti" of the box and became the backbone of baked ziti, an Italian-American Sunday-and-holiday staple of ricotta, mozzarella, and long-cooked tomato sauce. Even the shorthand traveled: "a box of ziti" became New York slang for a thousand dollars after a certain crime drama put it in its characters' mouths.

A medium tube with a smooth surface and straight-cut ends — the plain sibling of penne and rigatoni. Where penne is cut on the diagonal and rigatoni wears deep ridges, ziti is clean and cylindrical: narrower than rigatoni, rounder-mouthed than penne, sized to hold sauce in the bore and to bake without collapsing. A ridged version, ziti rigati, exists as a surface variant, but the smooth tube is the traditional form.

Ziti's smooth walls and open tube are built less for gripping sauce on the outside than for carrying it inside and holding structure under heat. That's exactly why it became the baking tube: it survives a long spell in the oven under cheese and ragù without turning to mush, and the hollow center traps molten cheese for the pull that baked ziti lives on. With a looser sauce it lets the dressing run through rather than cling, which is why thin, oily sauces suit it less than a hearty tomato or a bake.

1. 01Al fornoBaked with tomato, ricotta, and mozzarella; the Italian-American icon.
2. 02Alla genoveseNaples' slow onion-and-beef sauce over broken ziti.
3. 03Al ragù napoletanoLong-simmered Neapolitan meat sauce.
4. 04Con la ricottaSimply dressed with fresh ricotta and tomato.