Pasta selection scheme

The purpose of pasta is to carry upon itself an abundance of sauce, preferably in such a quantity that the taste of the substrate itself cannot actually be resolved by the tongue. Over the years many have experimented with pasta topologies in order to optimise it's sauce-carrying properties yielding a vast array of designs. Now I am firmly of the opinion that this diversity is a beautiful thing and, much like a kangaroo and a sheep can be equally effective at grazing, wholly different pasta forms can be equally good at fulfilling their primary function. But some pastas are just better than others and we need a way of deselecting those that are not fit for purpose.

It is surprising therefore that no-one has ever compiled a database of how the myriad pasta species perform in this most important sauce-carrying regard. This property can and should be quantified as the mass ratio of adhered sauce to pasta, a dimensionless number henceforth known as the Sauciness Index. Some normalisation will probably be required in order to account for the wetting properties of the chosen sauce. This will provide a correction from, say, a British standard bolognaise to any old foreign muck you care to mention. With the correction correctly applied it's just a matter of allometry.

I'd also like to see the compendium grouped by taxon such that the full gamut of glorious variation can be indexed in an orderly way.