Information provided by Joanne Magliocco and Shirley Cline. There are no hard and fast rules about which cuts match which sauces. If you are partial to a particular cut, you should toss it with whatever sauce you like. There are, however, some cuts that show off a sauce better than others.
Cheese sauces adhere best to small pastas cuts with lots of surface area.
Noodles just beg for butter. A little bit of sauce goes a long way to coat them evenly. They also coat noodles more evenly than they would smaller pasta with lots of crevices. In Northern Italy, wide, fresh egg noodles are traditionally paired with meat sauce, while in Southern Italy small cuts of dried pasta are used. Neither will steer you wrong.