tagliatelle

Tagliatelle takes its name from tagliare, the Italian verb meaning to cut, which descends from the Vulgar Latin taliare. The word is structural: tagliatelle are the cut ones, pasta defined not by its finished appearance but by the action that produced it. A cook rolls egg dough into a thin sheet, folds it loosely, and cuts across the folded layers to produce the characteristic flat, slightly wavy ribbons.

Bologna has claimed tagliatelle as its own since at least the Renaissance. A persistent legend, first recorded in the eighteenth century, holds that a court cook named Zefirano invented the pasta in 1487 for the wedding feast of Annibale II Bentivoglio, shaping the noodles after Lucrezia d'Este's blond hair. Historians dispute the story, but the Accademia Italiana della Cucina took the pasta seriously enough to register its official dimensions with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce in 1972: each cooked noodle must be exactly 8 millimeters wide.

Tagliatelle al ragù is what Bolognesi call their signature dish. Outside Bologna the sauce is known as Bolognese; inside the city, that name is considered imprecise, because the meat sauce has its own name, ragù. The pasta and the sauce developed together over centuries in the same kitchens, and Bolognese cooks tend to regard other pasta shapes as inferior vehicles for their Sunday preparation.

The verb tagliare produced a large family in Italian: tagliatelle, tagliolini (a thinner cut), taglierini, and pappardelle, sliced wide. In English the cognate appears in tailor, a person who cuts cloth, entering through the Old French tailleur. The cutting word traveled as far as its product.