Bolognese sauce tagliatelle made with eggs and northern Italy’s soft wheat flour. Acceptable alternatives to fresh tagliatelle include other broad flat pasta shapes, such as pappardelle or fettuccine, and tube shapes, such as rigatoni and penne. While the main complaint of traditionalists is against the use of spaghetti rather than fresh tagliatelle for the pasta, native Bolognese Piero Valdiserra has argued that "spaghetti could be considered traditional in Bologna", even though tagliatelle is the "most suitable" pasta. "Ragù alla bolognese" along with "béchamel" is also used by many Italian chefs to prepare traditional baked lasagna in Bolognese style. Gruppo Virtuale Cuochi Italiani
Pasta (plural "lagana"), which in Latin refers to a thin sheet of dough, and gives rise to Italian "lasagna". In North Africa, a food similar to pasta, known as couscous, has been eaten for centuries. However, it lacks the distinguishing malleable nature of pasta, couscous being more akin to droplets of dough. At first, dry pasta was a luxury item in Italy because of high labor costs; durum wheat semolina had to be kneaded for a long time. There is a legend of Marco Polo importing pasta from China which originated with the "Macaroni Journal", published by an association of food