Italians are notoriously — and understandably — protective of their cuisine, as regular arguments about the correct toppings for pizza or the appropriate pasta to use with a Bolognese doubt will attest.
So it was hardly surprising that, when a Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist weighed in with advice about how to cook pasta perfectly which seemed to up-end everything the countries’ cooks had been doing in the kitchen for centuries, it caused an almighty row .
Professor Giorgio Parisi — who won the 2021 physics Nobel for “the discovery of the interplay of disturbances and fluctuations in physical systems from