Recipe: Spaghetti al Pomodoro

Italian recipes have a grammatical signature you can spot from across the room: every step begins with a bare infinitive. Mettere, tagliare, soffriggere, aggiungere, cuocere, scolare, servire. No subject, no person endings, no overt commands — just the dictionary form of the verb, used as if it were an instruction beamed at no one in particular. This is the infinitive as impersonal imperative, and Italian recipes are its native habitat.

This page walks through a complete recipe for spaghetti al pomodoro — the most basic, most beloved, most argued-about Italian pasta dish — and uses it to explore that grammatical convention along with the kitchen vocabulary, quantity expressions, and prepositions that make recipes their own little dialect of Italian.

The text

Spaghetti al pomodoro

Ingredienti (per 4 persone): 400 g di spaghetti, 500 g di pomodori pelati, 2 spicchi d'aglio, qualche foglia di basilico fresco, 4 cucchiai di olio extravergine d'oliva, sale q.b., pepe q.b.

Procedimento:

1. Mettere l'acqua a bollire in una pentola grande. Salare l'acqua appena bolle.
2. Tagliare i pomodori a pezzi grossolani.
3. Soffriggere l'aglio nell'olio in una padella, a fuoco basso, finché diventa dorato.
4. Aggiungere i pomodori e cuocere per circa 15 minuti, mescolando di tanto in tanto.
5. Cuocere la pasta al dente, secondo le indicazioni sulla confezione.
6. Scolare la pasta e mescolarla con il sugo nella padella per un minuto.
7. Servire subito con qualche foglia di basilico fresco e, a piacere, una spolverata di parmigiano.

A complete A2-level Italian text, all the verbs in the infinitive, and a real recipe an Italian home cook would actually use. Now to the grammar.

The infinitive as impersonal imperative

The first thing an English speaker notices is that none of the verbs are conjugated. Mettere is just "to put," tagliare is just "to cut" — they look like dictionary entries, not instructions. And yet Italians read them as commands without hesitation. Why does this work?

The answer is that the bare infinitive carries a built-in impersonal-instructional reading in Italian, particularly in three written genres: recipes, instruction manuals, and pharmaceutical leaflets. The reader supplies the implicit "you" — but more than that, the implicit "anyone reading this." It's not aimed at tu, not at voi, not at Lei. It addresses the role of cook rather than any particular cook.

Why the infinitive and not the imperative?

Italian has perfectly good imperative forms: metti (informal singular), mettete (plural), metta (formal singular). It could write the recipe with any of them. So why doesn't it?

Mostly because the infinitive is register-neutral and reader-neutral. The moment you write Metti l'acqua, you've decided the cook is one person you're on familiar terms with. Mettete assumes a group. Metta assumes a stranger. Mettere assumes only that someone is following the recipe — and that's exactly the relationship a printed cookbook has with its reader. The infinitive is the form of writing that doesn't presume to know who's listening.

There's also a tradition. Italian cookbooks since at least the late nineteenth century — Pellegrino Artusi's foundational La scienza in cucina (1891) — have used the infinitive. It's so entrenched that an Italian opening a recipe with metti feels almost colloquial, more like a chatty blog post than a serious recipe.

The voi-form alternative

You will, however, encounter recipes written with the second-person plural imperative (voi form). This is the second most common option, and it has a specific feel: friendlier, more conversational, often used in TV cooking shows, Instagram captions, or recipes addressed to "all of you watching at home." The grammar is borrowed from the regular voi present-indicative, used as imperative.

A recipe is internally consistent: if it starts with infinitives, it stays in infinitives; if it starts with voi imperatives, it stays in voi. Mixing them mid-recipe (Mettere l'acqua... poi tagliate i pomodori...) is a sure sign of an amateur or auto-translated text.

Kitchen vocabulary

Recipes are vocabulary mines. Spaghetti al pomodoro alone teaches you most of an Italian kitchen.

And the cooking-action verbs that show up across hundreds of recipes:

The verbs soffriggere (sauté), bollire (boil), cuocere (cook), friggere (fry), arrostire (roast), grigliare (grill), mescolare (mix), amalgamare (incorporate), scolare (drain), tritare (chop fine), affettare (slice thin), tagliare (cut), condire (season), aggiungere (add), and versare (pour) form the working vocabulary of Italian cooking. Memorize them as a set.

Quantity expressions

Italian recipes have their own conventions for quantities — some metric, some idiomatic, and one famous abbreviation.

The abbreviation q.b. stands for quanto basta — literally "as much as is enough" — and it's the Italian equivalent of "to taste." It appears next to salt, pepper, oil, or any seasoning where the amount depends on the cook's judgment rather than precise measurement. You will see it on virtually every Italian recipe card.

Other quantity expressions worth knowing:

• un cucchiaio di — a tablespoon of
• un cucchiaino di — a teaspoon of (note the diminutive -ino)
• una manciata di — a handful of
• un pizzico di — a pinch of
• qualche
  • singular noun — a few (qualche foglia di basilico, "a few leaves of basil" — note that qualche takes the singular even when meaning "several")
• un po' di — a bit of (very common in informal recipes)

"Al dente" and other cooking idioms

The phrase al dente (literally "to the tooth") is the gold standard of pasta cooking — pasta that still has a slight resistance when bitten. It's been adopted directly into English without translation. Italian uses an entire family of similar prepositional cooking-idioms:

• al dente — firm to the bite (pasta, rice)
• a fuoco basso / medio / alto — over low / medium / high heat
• a bagnomaria — in a double boiler
• al forno — in the oven (oven-baked)
• a vapore — steamed (literally "to/at steam")
• a piacere — to taste / as preferred
• al sangue / poco cotto / ben cotto — rare / medium / well-done (for meat)

These prepositional phrases are fixed and idiomatic — you don't have to figure out from first principles why "to the tooth" means "firm." They're learned as units, like English "well-done" or "over easy."

Prepositions of cooking time

Time expressions in recipes follow predictable preposition patterns that are worth seeing in one place.

per + duration — "for" a length of time:

finché + clause — "until" something happens:

a + temperature — "at" a temperature, or "over" a heat level:

con + accompaniment — "with":

di tanto in tanto — "from time to time," "occasionally":

These patterns are stable enough that once you've read three or four Italian recipes, you'll predict the prepositions without thinking.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• The bare infinitive is the standard Italian recipe form: mettere, tagliare, cuocere. It's impersonal, register-neutral, and addresses "the cook" rather than any specific person.
• The voi imperative (mettete, tagliate, cuocete) is a friendlier alternative used in TV cooking, food blogs, and conversational recipes. Pick one and stay consistent.
• q.b. = quanto basta = "to taste." Memorize the abbreviation; it's everywhere.
• al dente, a fuoco basso, a piacere, and a bagnomaria are fixed prepositional cooking idioms. Learn them as units.
• per + duration, finché + clause, a + temperature, con + accompaniment are the four core preposition patterns of recipe time and method language.
• The kitchen vocabulary set (pentola, padella, scolapasta, fornello, fuoco, mestolo, tagliere) is small enough to memorize in an afternoon and pays off across hundreds of recipes.

For the grammar behind the impersonal infinitive, see the infinitive in instructions. For the voi imperative form, see voi imperatives. For more annotated texts, return to the Annotated Texts overview.