THE SPAGHETTI CONE

"A MIRACLE OF PHYSICS"

All over the world, carnivals sell street foods that represent individual cultures. For Italians, it's the usual fare packaged in handheld form risotto transformed into portable balls (arancini) and gelato smooshed into sliced bread (brioche con gelato). Back in the 1950s, that custom included pasta in a cone. Was very common to see people in Romagna walking on the Adriatic lungomare [boardwalk] with a cone of wrapped paper in their hands. At that time, Italy was poor and most of the food was street food served in paper cones: fried food, fruit, candies…and pasta.

This is how the concept was born, brought from the past in the capital of the world. The trio Attala, Pardossi, and Gentile worked on developing a new cone 2.0. They went on a full-scale search, looking for the ideal non-spill material that could stand up to New Yorkers intent on eating pasta while walking around.

Eating spaghetti out of a cone is, oddly, easier than eating it from a plate. This is because of the well-known 'twirl method' that sophisticated humans have learned to use to eat pasta. The cone shape facilitates the trick by giving natural purchase to the tines of the fork as they twist. The curved sides of the cone help guide the strands of spaghetti into a ball around the fork. The twirl negates the need for spearing any bit of food with the fork.

The cone also provides advantages in manoeuvrability. The pointy end serves as a handle for a bowl. You can hold it right under your fork as you lift each bite to your lips, so as not to lose a single caper to the sidewalk. It makes for remarkably neat, spill-free eating: the spaghetti cone is a miracle of physics.