WHY should pasta have a season? Well in our climate, trying to get freshly rolled pasta to dry properly, so that you can then cut it into the desired shapes, is easier when the sun shines a bit, and the temperature climbs.
In the depths of winter, the lovely swathes of pasta hanging over the backs of chairs and over a pasta rack can take an eternity to get to the correct, tactile, dryness, before you slice them into spaghetti or angel hair or tagliatelle, or whatever.
Also, fresh pasta suits the early summer ingredients which now begin to roll into our shops, the asparagus, the peas, the fresh broad beans. It is difficult to justify the effort involved in making fresh pasta if you are going to cloak it in a meaty ragu, especially when some widely available varieties of dried pasta, such as De Cecco, are so excellent.
But, the justification for making fresh pasta is not just its suitability with early summer foods. The real reason to make it is simply that it is fun. Fun to splash the eggs in to the centre of your pool of flour, fun to bring the dough together, fun to wing it through the rollers of the machine, narrower and narrower each time. Fun, then, to decide on the shape you want, and fun, finally, to eat it with simple ingredients which speak of the richness of the season: crisp peppers diced and fried with onion, then given a light coating of cream and a dusting of Parmesan; with lemon zest and podded broad beans; with little florets of broccoli and cauliflower and a richly mustardy sauce.
So, here are the essential directions for making pasta, adapted and abridged from the instructions given in Marcella Hazan's various books on Italian cookery.