Pasta time away: New cookbook is black, white and read all over

London – Stark, smart black-and-white graphics make a new cookbook stand out among the legions of lushly illustrated titles on the shelves.

Renouncing colour-rich photographs of bursting sun-ripened tomatoes or billowing clouds of freshly whipped cream, The Geometry of Pasta, by designer Caz Hildebrand and chef Jacob Kenedy, appears more like a retro textbook for kitchen mechanics. Pure geometrics indicate the shape of each pasta type, demonstrating, for example, how the bowtie-shaped farfalle holds its sauce, or why the delicate angel-hair capelli d’angelo has to be dried and transported curled up in little nests. As a further treat for food geeks and designophiles, the book jacket unfolds to become a handsome poster of pasta shapes, recalling the aesthetics of Playshapes design.

A jaunty mix of recipes, food history and pasta engineering, the book will appeal to the amateur specialists of the Fire & Knives crowd. For these consumers, art and science combine like the perfect pasta and its partner sauce.

The Geometry of Pasta (Boxtree/Macmillan, 2010) is available now.