Fantastico!
Please send us photos of the final dish if you've time and are up to it!
I had never heard of Paccheri so naturaly I turned to the Oracle and found this story:
According to food legend, these pasta tubes were invented as a way to smuggle garlic cloves across the alps into what is Austria today. Apparently, Austrian garlic was rather small and not very pungent. In contrast, the Austrians and Hungarian arictocrats loved Southern Italian garlic, with its large pungent cloves.
In the early 1600s, the Austrians banned the importation of Italian garlic in order to protect their own garlic farmers. Southern Italian garlic farmers, whose livelihood depended heavily on the Austro-Hungarian garlic market, were more than upset.
The story goes that Southern Italian pasta makers secretly invented paccheri pasta tubes to be perfectly shaped to hide a ducat's worth of Italian garlic (approx.four cloves).
This garlic smuggling operation was so effective that the Austrian garlic industry finally collapsed. The government had not been able to find out how Italian garlic was being smuggled across the Alps so effectively or stop it!
Buon Appetito!
