Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
In my last column, “More Pasta Than You Could Eat,” I delved into the histories of the names of more than two dozen Italian pastas. Many of them were pretty straightforward descriptions of what the pasta resembled — for example, farfalle is Italian for “butterfly,” conchiglie means “seashell,” and vermicelli is “little worms.” But mostaccioli, I discovered, has a long and interesting history that needs more space to tell.
Mostaccioli (the plural of mostacciolo) is a short tube pasta with its ends cut at angles. It’s similar to penne pasta, except that penne is ridged on the outside, whereas mostaccioli is smooth. The two are so similar that, in some areas of Italy, mostaccioli is even called penne lisce, and “regular” penne is called penne rigate; lisce means “smooth” and rigate means “striped, ridged, or fluted.”
Different regions of Italy lay claim to originating mostaccioli, and each region has its own take on the recipe. It’s difficult to refute most of the stories of the creation of the first mostaccioli because the name mostaccioli traces its roots back more than two millennia.
Cato the Elder (who died in 149 B.C.) included a recipe for something called mustaceos in his De Agricultura — the oldest known extant work of Latin prose. But it wasn’t a pasta recipe; it was a type of cracker, cookie, or biscuit that was sweetened with grape must (mustum in Latin), a syrup made from reduced grape juice, pulp, skins, stems, and seeds that is set aside during the wine-making process.
There was another kind of cookie called mortarioli that was made with almonds and honey. The name mustaceos might have been influenced by or merged with mortarioli, but the result was the same: a type of cookie called, depending on where in Italy you eat it, mostaccioli, mustacciuli, mustacciuoli, or mustazzoli.
Traditional mostaccioli bear a characteristic shape: After the dough is rolled flat, it is cut into rhombuses — your classic diamond shape. Why rhombuses? First, because this shape is easy to create quickly with just a series of straight cuts. But more practically, it had to do with cooking: In Cato’s recipe as well as modern versions, each mostacciolo is baked on top of a laurel leaf, which imparts a distinctive flavor. If you look at the image of the laurel leaf above, you’ll see that a rhombus is the perfect shape to cover that leaf.
Mostacciolo cookies were so identified with that shape that mostacciolo became synonymous with “rhombus,” in the same way English-speakers refer to a rhombus as a diamond. This is likely how the modern mostaccioli pasta got its name — like so many other pastas, simply from a description of its shape. As I said earlier, mostaccioli is a tube pasta cut at angles; in profile, it resembles a rhombus.
(Though, to be fair, the outline of a modern mostacciolo is a parallelogram, not a true equal-sided rhombus.)
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