Lumache

Lumache (Italian for "snails") is a short, thick, ridged pasta shape cut to resemble a small spiral snail shell, with a hollow centre and a generous outer groove that traps thick, oily sauces. The dough is a classic semolina-and-wheat-flour pasta, sometimes coloured green with spinach or deep red with tomato, drawn through a bronze die and cut to roughly four centimetres. Like other short-cut formats such as rigatoni and paccheri, the ridges and the spiral interior exist to give sauce something to grip, which is why lumache appear most often in recipes that call for chunky ragù, bean stews or thick vegetable purées.

The shape is most strongly associated with central Italy — Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Lazio and Umbria — and is a fixture of rustic weeknight cooking. In Siena and Arezzo it is dressed with a slow-cooked wild-boar ragù, in Bologna with sausage and tomato, and in Rome with a dense carbonara of guanciale, egg and pecorino. On the coast of Liguria it is paired with pesto, walnut sauce and chopped green beans, and in poorer country kitchens the same shape is used in pasta e fagioli. The green-coloured version, lumache verdi, is filled or topped with a ricotta and spinach mixture in Sicilian and southern Italian baking.