Lou Hughesele

NoodiMag Volume 6

Welcome to NoodiMag, the container for all my noodling on noodles, pastas, and all related topics. It has been over three weeks since the last one instead of the usual two, which I’m sure everyone noticed. Thank you for your patience. I think this one will be worth the wait.

Pasta Shapes Consumed: Penne Rigate; Chifferi Rigate; Miniature Shells; Macaroni; “No Yolks” Whole Wheat Egg Noodles Extra Broad;

Total Pasta Shapes To Date: 18

The Appetizer

Today I reveal accomplices in this journey. Firstly, LS is my main companion in eating lots of pastas. Wondering to each other if certain dishes count, getting pictures of her pasta hauls from the grocery, and updating our stats has been a delightful throughline of my year so far.
For NoodiMag, KD has been giving feedback, offering edits, and all around aiding and abetting what I’ve been up to here. I’m very grateful, and we all have her to thank for this issue’s issue.
Then there’s KL, who heard about this issue’s issue and immediately jumped in with more ideas and musings about this issue’s issue.
I also have to give credit to QH, who heard I was looking for a lesser known 14th Century Italian work of fiction and immediately pulled it off his shelf and found the passage I needed.
And at the eleventh hour, my dearest one, ML, contributed a fabulous idea that really pulls it all together.
If I may offer a bit of non-pasta advice for this issue’s appetizer: surround yourself with enthusiastic people. Everything you do will be better with them. 

The Entree:

At issue in this issue is the Nine Circles of Al Dente’s Inferno, otherwise known as Pasta Hell. KD, KL, QH, ML and I put our heads and hearts together and determined what pasta sins would land you in each circle. None of us believe in hell or sin in the Christian sense, but we do believe in thought experiments. We tried our best to follow Dante’s logic and apply pasta sins accordingly. I also have never actually read Dante’s Inferno; I have only seen the Mudde Show at the Ohio Renaissance Festival parody it, but I feel like I get the idea. 

Circle One: Rice Pastas and Noodles

The first circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno is Limbo. This is where the “virtuous non-Christians” go. These are the folks who didn’t do anything wrong except for not accepting Jesus into their hearts. In Dante’s mind, all the people who just sort of have their own thing going besides Christianity go here, which is most of us. At least we all still get to hang out. 🙂
We put rice pastas and noodles here as “virtuous non-pastas.” They haven’t done anything wrong except not accepting semolina into their hearts. Some of them are getting along well with pastas. Some can even be successful stand-ins for pasta! Many, many more are not even trying to be pasta. They’ve got their own thing going. They don’t need semolina to successfully move through their little existence. They’re not being tormented, but neither are they in heaven, which I don’t think they really care about anyways.

Circle Two: Over-Saucing

In the Second Circle, the lustful, those who let their desires sway their reason, are blown about by powerful winds, the way their wantonness metaphorically blew them about in life. It seems one of the defining features of lust versus the sins to come is that it is a mutual over-indulgence between two beings, and a lack of accountability or acknowledgement for it.
You over-saucers and your over-sauced noodles are going here. You who let your saucy desires overtake you and ruin a nice pasta dish will blow about for all eternity. Your noodles absolutely dripping in beautiful and wasted sauce will blow about with you, hopefully slapping you in the face. You’ve made a saucy mess in life and in Hell, and you can’t blame it on anyone else.

Circle Three: Harm Against the Stomach

Circle Three is for the gluttonous, those who engage in solitary over-indulgence. They thrash about in icy muck and mire, and are regularly clawed by Cerberus, the three-headed beast.
I will pass through here on my way to a worse part of Pasta Hell, for I have committed harm against the stomach. I have at times eaten way too much pasta in one go, or eaten it for too many meals in a row, to the point where I no longer enjoy it and, in fact, develop a tummy ache. This is sin against myself and against the pasta, for the point of it is enjoyment. I think perhaps the punishment in this circle does not fit the crime, but this is Dante’s Inferno and we’re just playing in it. 

Circle Four: 10 Pounds At Home, But Still You Buy More

Circle Four is inhabited by the greedy. It is guarded by the classical deity of wealth, who says an apparently very scary cryptic phrase to Dante, and is home to an eternally raging battle between those who hoard wealth and those who waste it. It sounds like they sort of just roll large boulders at each other and yell, “Why do you hoard?” and “Why do you waste?” They are experiencing for all eternity the mutual aggression they perceived in life, and the harm that comes of it. A key piece of this sin is the perception of peers and community as competition for resources, resulting in animosity against them. They lose themselves in the battle, seeing and doing and being nothing else.
This is where LS and I are going for all eternity. We are hoarders of pasta. I have been honest about how many pounds I have stashed away in my pantry, and about continuing to buy more in spite of this. Listen, if I encounter a shape you don’t see very often, I’m buying it. There’s only so much of it, and I have to be one of the people who has it. And I won’t touch it for months. I just gotta have it. My lack of remorse about this is why I’ll be shoving, I guess, giant meatballs (?) at those who wasted pasta for all eternity. 

Circle Five: Failure to Stir

In Circle Five, the wrathful are punished in the yucky waters of the River Styx. I see that the waters are supposed to be swampy, but I will not have any swamp slander on my blog so… for our purposes it’s just a gross, polluted river, okay? Anyways, the actively wrathful wrastle each other forever on the surface of the water. The passively wrathful wallow beneath the surface, choking on their unexpressed rage. Yeesh.
This state of affairs makes me think of what happens when one fails to mind their pot of boiling pasta. That “stir occasionally” direction is actually so fucking important. When you don’t, your actively rageful salted, starchy water bubbles over the top and makes a whole mess of your stove! And your sullen little pastas sink, sticking to the bottom of the pot! You’ve ruined it! You’re angry. I’m angry. We deserve our fate. We’ve wasted perfectly good pasta.
If I seem a little worked up about this, it’s because I did a minor version of exactly this earlier this week, and have not come to terms with it yet. I don’t know how the Inferno works when you’ve racked up multiple sins, but I know I gotta visit Circle Five for a time-out from slinging meatballs.

Circle Six: Legume Pastas

The throughline of Circles Two through Five is over-indulgence in passion, letting our good sense be overcome by desire, fear, and anger. They’re bad, but not, like, so bad compared to what’s to come.
In Circle Six we move to sins of betrayal, of intentional wrongdoing. Circle Six punishes heretics by trapping them in flaming tombs. Heresy is when one knows and understands the doctrine of the Church, the conventions of their community, and still consciously goes against them. Dante seems to really hate the Epicurans in particular, but it seems the main issue he has with Epicurus and his followers is that they do not believe in the immortality of the soul. The other issue he takes with heretics is that they create division in the community. I am holding my tongue about how sometimes a community needs to be divided because the doctrine sucks!! Anyways, I think it’s cute that he just fucking hates this philosopher and these Florentine politicians who didn’t believe in the immortality of the soul, so he’s like, “I’m gonna write a story where their immortal souls are tortured, hehehe.”
Okay, anyways, fuck legume pastas. They know pasta and noodle doctrine. They understand it. And yet they actively go against it. They stand there in the pasta aisle, bragging about protein content, having terrible texture, having the fucking gall to call themselves both legume and pasta when they are an embarrassment to both. They exist only as a mockery. They deserve what they get. Let them burn forever.

Circle Seven: Bad Microwave Pasta

To visit the Seventh Circle, you have to outrun the Minotaur!! Ahh!! Shit gets so Metal from here on out. Here there are three rings, and depending on who or what you did violence against, you get to do one of the following: be submersed in boiling blood forever, the depth of which depends on the level of violence, and be shot by centaurs if you try to rise out of it; be transformed into a gnarled, withered tree and attacked by Harpies for all time; or be cast out to a scorched desert where fire rains down and you must lie supine, run in circles, or stand crouched and weeping, depending on your crime. It feels significant that Dante runs into some guys he admires in this Circle.
And so this is where Bad Microwave Pastas are doomed to spend eternity. They are a sin against neighbors, the self, and G-d, Art, and Nature all rolled into one. I like some of them!! But I know they are sin. I wrote in the last issue about microwave pasta and how it is evidence of how far we have strayed from G-d. I summed it up like this:
“We have fed the masses, but they have not been enriched. Not like the macaroni products they are sold for profit. My microwave pasta meal comes to me through imperialism and capitalism. It comes to me at no small expense to the earth, the workers, and our full experience of the fullness of the world. It is convenient. It is fast. It is tasty enough. But is that worth the true cost?”
There is, of course, a gradient to just how sinful they are. Store-brand knockoffs of Chef Boyardee deserve the Plain of Burning Sand, for instance. Lean Cuisine pastas ought to be attacked by Harpies, while your Amy’s and your Rao’s can just boil in blood. 

Circle Eight: Macaroni Product, Legally Speaking

I simply cannot get into all the details of what is going on in these Evil Ditches in Circle Eight. There is so much happening here and so many specific sins mentioned and so many specific punishments described. We’ve got ten layers of evil ditches descending downward into a central well. We’ve got people steeping in excrement, people with their heads turned around backwards, farting demons, really mean lizards, people carrying their own severed heads, lots of fire and disease, and much more. It’s pretty gross in there, but that’s what you get for doing one of the many kinds of fraud and corruption and taking advantage of other peoples’ sins that get them into the upper half of Hell for your own advantage!! (I am reserving my commentary about Muhammad and Ali being here! One of many things I’ll need to speak to Dante about in Hell!)
Anyways, the worst kind of sinful pasta fraud we can imagine is those purveyors of macaroni products that only fit that description in a legal sense. What I mean is, there is a minimum amount of semolina flour that must be present in order for a food to be legally considered a macaroni product, and some companies will just barely meet that requirement, and mix in other cheaper, subpar flours in order to save themselves a buck. It’s blasphemous and it’s deceitful. At least with the legume pastas, they’re forward about giving you a subpar product. These people, they take advantage of your need to live frugally, they lie to you, and they take your money in exchange for GARBAGE. Fuck these guys. Give them to the shit and the farting demons. Let the snakes snap at their necks. I don’t care which evil ditch you put them in, just GET ‘EM!! 

Circle Nine: Capitalists

Ah, the deepest layer of hell. The frozen lake to which traitors to G-d and humanity are doomed to spend eternity, far from reaches of the sun’s loving rays. And this is where we place the capitalists who commercialized, mechanized,  industrialized, and automatized pasta production. All the fuckers I read about in Macaroni Journal, the defunct trade magazine for the National Pasta Association, formerly known as the National Macaroni Manufacturer’s Association? Yeah, they’re all there frozen up to their necks, either able or unable to bow their heads to avoid the howling winds, depending, or frozen in supine position with their tear ducts frozen, preventing them even the comfort of tears, or frozen completely, contorted into horrible shapes, just like their souls. The guys who started the pasta-maker guilds in medieval Italy and didn’t let women in, despite them being the original experts in the craft? Oh, yeah, they’re there. The guy who owned the Torre Annunziata factory and called out the military on his rioting workers? You bet he’s there! The people who invented the machines that allowed for hands-free continuous production? Oh boy!! It’s crowded down here, and they all deserve it for their betrayal of kin, community, and all those who trusted and relied upon them.

In the Center of Hell, the Devil stands, three-headed, with one of the worst traitors of all (to Dante) dangling from each mouth: The two guys who betrayed Ceasar and, of course, that classic worst guy ever… Judas!!!
Please enjoy this illustration of which pasta sinners I would put in each of the Devil’s mouths.

Irrelevant to pasta, it just feels so important that at the end of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil arrive at the Devil’s genitals and pass through the Center of the Universe (!!!) before reemerging in the Southern Hemisphere, saying some really incorrect geography stuff, and then arriving home just in time for Easter morning. 🙂 Wow. What a journey. 

If you need help keeping track of your pasta sins and where you’ll end up as a result, please enjoy this handy diagram:

The Dessert:

If I were to believe in a heaven, it would be a paradise described in another 14th Century work of fiction. It is but a miniscule fraction of the larger text, but it is perhaps the best known passage of the Decameron:

“Maso replied that they occurred in Nomansland, a country of the Baschi, in a district which is called Bengodi, where they tie the vines with sausages and you can buy a goose for a cent and have the gosling with it. Moreover, in that country there was a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese, inhabited by people who did nothing but make macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked in chicken broth and then threw on the ground, and those who can pick up most get most. Nearby there was a stream of white wine, the best ever drunk, without a drop of water in it.
‘Oh,’ said Calandrino, ‘that sounds a great country. But what do they do with all the chickens they cook?’
‘All the Baschi eat them,’ replied Maso.
‘Were you ever there?’ asked Calandrino.
‘Was I ever there?’ said Maso. ‘I’ve been there thousands of times.’
‘How many miles away is it?’ asked Calandrino.
‘More than a thousand, going night and day,’ replied Maso.
‘It must be further off than the Abruzzi,’ said Calandrino.
‘Ah! indeed,’ replied Maso, “that it is.”
The simple-minded Calandrino, observing that Maso made these remarks with a sober face and without laughing, believed them as the most manifest truth…” 

Maso belongs in some circle of Hell for taking advantage of the gullible, “simple-minded” Calandrino for his own amusement, but we have got to give him credit for creativity. I’ll shake his hand when I see him, right before I slap him.

Thank you for reading! Maybe next time will be better.