Quadrucci
kwah-DROO-chee
Also known as quadretti, quadrettini.
What it is
Treccani defines quadrucci as small egg-pasta squares for broth, quadrucci all'uovo. The sticky detail: they began as thrift, cut like maltagliati from the leftover trimmings of the egg sheet rolled for the festival-day tagliatelle, so nothing of the sfoglia went to waste.
From Italian quadro, square, from Latin quadrum, plus the diminutive suffix -uccio, so literally little squares. The singular is quadruccio. Treccani and Wiktionary record the plural quadrucci as a small egg pasta cut for broth.
What sauce it wants, and why
Quadrucci are built for broth, not for a clinging sauce. The squares are small and thin, so they cook in a couple of minutes and stay suspended in the liquid, giving a spoonful that carries pasta and brodo together. Their flat faces hold just enough body to read as pasta without thickening the soup into a stew.
Classic plates: quadrucci in brodo.
No quadrucci? Use these
Closest swaps by sauce behavior, not by looks. The ones most easily confused with quadrucci, and how they read.
Easy to confuse with
Flat cut pieces of sheet pasta. Maltagliati are irregular offcuts, quadrucci little squares for broth, tacconi larger squares or diamonds, and sagnarelli rectangles with fluted crimped edges.
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From the Almanac
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