Capellini : It was 99¢, so I bought it

Taken from somewhere in Wiki :
"Capellini (Italian: little hairs) is a thin variety of Italian pasta, with a diameter ranging from 0.85 to 0.92 mm (0.033 to 0.036 in). It's made in the form of long, thin strands, similar to spaghetti. Capelli d'angelo (Italian: angel hairs; hence angel hair pasta in English) is even thinner, with a diameter ranging from 0.78 to 088 mm (0.031 to 0.035 in). It's often sold in a nest-like shape."

Just so you know, I'm not Italian. But, I was raised with Italian-American cuisine somewhere on the east coast. We ate pizza, lasagna, all kinds of pasta, meatballs, and even had hard Italian cheese on hand for grating as well as soft Italian cheese for melting. Italians made grilled cheese sandwiches long before Americans started frying orange cheese between two slices of air-inflated white bread.

Pasta was one of the main starches of our supper table. Mom only made potatoes or rice with roast beef (flakes or Rice-a-Roni, respectively). Bread was also available; especially with meals that had red or brown gravy (Ragu or Franco-American, respectively). But pasta was one of the staples that was served up with meatballs and the shapes seemed to be endless. Thin spaghetti, thick spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine, wagon wheels, shells, bow ties, ziti, penne, rigatoni.

But the angel hair and capellini varieties never made it to our home. They looked like long versions of the noodles that the Eastern European grandmothers would put into their chicken soup. There was nothing wrong with the noodles... they were just noodles and not pasta. In addition, they didn't hold the sauces or gravies that we were accustomed to put on top of the pasta. We were not famous for drizzling light amounts of olive oil on cooked food or for putting butter on pasta.

So where did this ever appear? One day at work I was forced to take my meal later in the day. I was in the break room with one other person; a delivery-boy who worked in our office but for another company that our boss ran in the same office space. The delivery-boy covered the reception area during breaks. He was a pleasant, 20-something guy from somewhere in Canada (the middle part of the country, not from a far east or far west province).

I seldom spoke much to him. His name was Shane which was a rather uncommon name and--as a recall--the name of a western novel or television series. All I knew of him was that he wore glasses with substantial corrective lenses and that he had played hockey. Seems he came to this country on a hockey scholarship to one of the universities in one of the Dakotas (boy, doesn't that sound vague?). I think he lasted a year and a half there and dropped out claiming that he couldn't take the cold. "You couldn't take the Midwest cold even though you're from Canada?" I had asked. "It's different there," he said. "It's nothing but flat, wide, open planes with nothing to stop those winds. At least in Canada we have trees. The winds blew fast, and cold, and fierce."

I shrugged. I couldn't imagine anyone entering college on a scholarship that required participation in a sport. I couldn't imagine anyone playing a sport that required you to be on ice. And I don't remember when I last saw a person who looked so white who wasn't sick. It's not like he had anemia... he just was pale. He didn't look like the color of blackboard chalk, but if he were to get the slightest flush of pink, you'd see it immediately.

Shane said he was reheating pasta in the microwave. I was almost CERTAIN that he was going to pull out a plastic plate of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-Os with tiny hot dogs. To my surprise, he had capellini. The hairs had oil and visible diced garlic and diced tomato around them. Not surprisingly, however, the capellini was pasted together and was not going to be one of those twirl the pasta around the tines of the fork meals. He wound up breaking the capellini up with the side of the fork and then jabbing the postage stamp squares that he had created.

"Do you cook?" I had asked. He laughed. Seems he had a side gig at a restaurant and was able to bring home left overs. At one time in the 1990s there was a restaurant on the border of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles that had a menu that featured 100 pasta dishes. I never understood how a restaurant like that could have gone out of business. But, then again, few people could understand why someone like me would always order the liver and onions pasta!

I never learned the trick to make capellini flow like individual strands of spaghetti. It never seemed like a terribly inviting variety of pasta. But it was a nice memory of the late Mr Shane, a quiet meal in a break room with someone who wound up reading the SPORTS section of the TIMES, and an encounter with the consumption of capellini for lunch.