Spaghetti by any other name is still spaghetti

There was a time when pasta wasn't pasta - it was spaghetti, no matter what the shape (although the shape was usually, well, spaghetti-shaped). You ate spaghetti with a tomato-based sauce, not with truffle oil or rare mushrooms or squid. In some Italian-American families, spaghetti was called macaroni, and the sauce was called "gravy." And that's what you ate. Spaghetti with sauce; macaroni with gravy.

It seems like a long time ago, a time before even middle-schoolers knew a caffe macchiato from a double latte, and before the words "high end" and "Italian restaurant" were ever paired together. When that happened, it was out with the red-checked tablecloth and the cheap Chianti and in with the white linen and "Chianti riserva." It was goodbye spaghetti, hello pasta.

It's easy to be nostalgic for days of yore, but we really wouldn't want the clock turned back - at least not in the kitchen. In the decades since "spaghetti" became "pasta," we've been introduced to more noodle shapes than we dreamed existed; shapes like ears (orecchietti), bowties (farfalle), bells (campanelle) and Rastafarian hairdos (fusilli). We've slurped sauces made with once-exotic ingredients like basil and pine nuts, pancetta, prosciutto and porcini mushrooms. In short, we've dined well.

But every once in a while, I get a craving for old-school spaghetti. I want it cooked and tossed with butter and grated parmesan cheese, or dripping with olive oil and garlic - the classic combo called "aglio e olio." Or in a simple tomato sauce.

I looked where I always look for good Italian food - to the cookbooks of Lidia Matticchio Bastianich - and found the very dish to slake my craving in her newest book, "Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy" (2009 Knopf). This simple dish of spaghetti tossed with oil, garlic and baked tomatoes is lovely now, at the tail end of winter, but I can't wait for summer, when the tomatoes are garden fresh. It is from the region of Basilicata, which Bastianich locates "in the instep of the foot of Italy."

Iron the red-checked tablecloth, and cue the Sinatra vinyl. As Lidia says on her PBS show, "Tutti a tavola a mangiare" ("Everyone to the table to eat"). Buon appetito!

• Marialisa Calta is the author of "Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family" (2005 Perigee). More at marialisacalta.com.