THE LONG STORY OF PASTA

The main purpose of this story was to give spaghetti a more international character and thus improve the food’s reputation. The fact is that at the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States, spaghetti was associated exclusively with Italian communities, who were often perceived as poor and criminally inclined. Thus, Marco Polo’s cultural credibility was intended to help bring spaghetti out of the ghetto.

Marco Polo’s imaginary association with spaghetti was reinforced by the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo, which featured a scene of the Venetian traveler eating pasta in a Chinese home. After that, the story that it was Marco Polo who introduced spaghetti to the Italians spread far and wide and has often been used to advertise pasta products, especially in English-speaking countries.

However, this legend has little to do with reality.

The history of pasta along the Apennines dates back to a time before written records, and there is no doubt that Italians learned to make pasta at least 2,000 years before Marco Polo’s journey to Asia.

The first recorded form of pasta in the eastern Mediterranean was lasagna. The dish, made of sheet pasta layered with a filling and baked, was known in ancient Greece as laganon or lasanon. Greek immigrants brought the recipe to the area of Magna Graecia, the ancient Greek colonies in the Apennine Peninsula and Sicily in the sixth and seventh centuries BCE.

Evidence of pasta has also been found among the Etruscans, an indigenous people who lived in present-day Umbria, Lazio, and Tuscany before and during the rise of Rome. In Etruscan tombs in Cerveteri, dating back to the fourth century BCE, a bas-relief depicting lasagna cooking utensils, including a rolling pin and a board for rolling out the dough, was found.

The poet Horace, who lived in Rome but was educated in Athens, described the simple pleasure of returning home in the first century BCE: ‘I go home to leeks, peas, and lasagna’ (Inde domum me ad porri et ciceris refero laganique catinum).

In De re culinaria, the only surviving ancient Roman cookbook written at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, an entire chapter is devoted to the preparation of a vegetable casserole using sheets of dough. There are also recipes for a dish of dough strips with pepper and honey. This collection of ancient recipes has been mistakenly attributed to the legendary gourmet Caelius Apicius (or his probable descendant, Marcus Gavius Apicius of the first century CE), hence its name. However, history has forgotten who the actual author of the cookbook was. It is clear, however, that it refers to dishes that were only available to the highest echelons of Roman nobility. The expensive pepper and other spices, as well as the parrot meat in another recipe, are proof enough.

Many ancient sources mention dishes made from strips of dough seasoned with pepper and garum, a sauce made from small fish, spices, and salt. Much like some Americans today who cover everything with ketchup, the ancient Romans added this strong fermented sauce to everything.

By the time Marco Polo embarked on his travels, the spaghetti was already several centuries old, and it was the first type of long pasta to appear in the Apennines. However, it was the Arabs who brought the technology of making spaghetti to Italy. They had an ancient technique of drying the stringy dough in order to preserve a supply of food during long desert journeys.

In 827, led by North African peoples, the conquest of Sicily began. At that time, spaghetti had a different name. The Arabic word itriya, meaning ‘tubular pasta’, was simplified in Sicily to trii. Today, this word remains in the name of some local pasta dishes.

Sicily remained in the hands of the Arabs for 200 years, until the arrival of the Norman knights Robert Guiscard and Roger I from the noble house of Hauteville. They conquered Messina and other Sicilian cities in 1061–90. At that time, the Arabs had developed the production of ‘long pasta’ in Sicily. After the Arabs left, Sicily and the island, along with southern Italy and Malta, became part of the Kingdom of Sicily ruled by the Hauteville clan, and the production of spaghetti was maintained.

The production of spaghetti was particularly important in the Naples area, benefitting from ideal conditions for preparing and drying the dough, the light breeze coming from the Gulf of Naples contributing to the process.

The Kingdom of Sicily was already known as the main center of spaghetti production in Italy at the beginning of the twelfth century, a century and a half before Marco Polo ever set sail. It quickly became popular with Genoese sailors: it was easy to store and transport, and you could even use seawater to cook it. Since then, Italians have never stopped loving pasta. For example, there is a preserved inventory written by the Genoese notary Ugolino Scarpa on 2 February 1279. In it, he lists the goods and products that his client the soldier Ponzio Bastone left to his heirs. Among the list is a full sack of pasta, bariscella plena de macaronis. It is worthwhile to remember that in 1279, Marco Polo was sixteen years away from returning from China.

Spaghetti is the plural of the word spaghetto, which means ‘thin thread’ in Italian. The classic thickness of spaghetti is about 2 mm, just like a thin rope.

Pasta was usually eaten with cheese, honey, oil, and herbs. Tomatoes, brought from the New World, were not introduced to Europe until the mid-sixteenth century. But even then, ordinary Italians were initially suspicious of this strange, bright red fruit, giving it the nickname ‘the devil's fruit’. In Europe, the red color of berries or fruits was often a sign of poisonousness. It was not until the nineteenth century that tomatoes were widely used in Italy as a sauce for spaghetti.

Dishes made from various types of dough, including boiled dough, were common to almost all peoples who lived where grains could grow and ripen. But why did the Italians become so attached to their pasta?

The fact is that the Middle Ages hit the Italians with immense force. For several centuries, people lived under conditions of war, plague, or both. Bandits roamed the streets. Pirates lurked on the sea. Epidemics followed one another—the Black Death of the fourteenth century alone hit Italy harder than other regions of Eurasia, probably killing 50 to 80 per cent of the population. Evidence of the impact of these events can be found in the arts—in religious and secular texts, in the constant reminders to ‘remember death’ (memento mori), in church murals, and in archival records of the early deaths of artists and their models. It was only after the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century that Italy reached the level of prosperity enjoyed by the citizens of ancient Rome at the beginning of the second century CE.

During these dangerous and often hungry centuries, Italians finally became ‘spags’, or pasta eaters, making variously shaped pieces of dry dough their national food. This was not so much because pasta is delicious as it was about the climate of southern Italy. The weather conditions in this region proved ideal for growing durum wheat and producing semolina (coarsely ground durum wheat), the main ingredient of pasta, along with water. Spaghetti was cheap to produce and very nutritious.

Semolina dough is rich in gluten, which allows it to be formed into various shapes. After drying, this dough can be stored for a very long time, at least several years, which made it possible to store it at home for the hungry years.

It should also be remembered that Italians were, for a long time, devout Catholics who strictly observed Lent, which consisted of more than 100 days a year, and pasta with vegetables or fish was a traditional Lenten dish. Without pasta, Italians would have had a much harder time surviving the Middle Ages.

As far as pasta trends are concerned, the Italians were really late to the game. In fact, it wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that mass media finally provided the opportunity to promote Italian cuisine on a whole new level.

Many classic pasta recipes date from the first half of the twentieth century at the earliest. For example, the recipe for spaghetti carbonara was first recorded in 1951, and the dish appears to have been unknown before the early twentieth century. Its name translates as ‘miner’s pasta’, but it has nothing to do with medieval miners—this type of pasta is sprinkled with ground black pepper, which does indeed resemble coal dust.

The recipe for the famous fettuccine Alfredo (also known as fettuccine al burro), created by Chef Alfredo Di Lelio in Rome in 1908, is based on an authentic ancient method of cooking pasta with butter and cheese. According to a fifteenth-century recipe, the pasta was cooked in broth and then mixed with cheese, butter, and spices.

For several centuries, pasta with butter was considered a humble, common dish, not worthy of the attention of restaurateurs. Alfredo was able to overcome this prejudice, but not without the help of the star couple of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. During their honeymoon in Rome in the summer of 1920, the actors visited Alfredo’s restaurant, tasted the fettuccine, which had already become famous in Roman circles, and presented the chef with a golden fork and spoon bearing the words ‘To Alfredo, the king of noodles’.

From that moment on, every American tourist in Rome considered it their duty to eat a plate of pasta with cheese and butter at Alfredo’s. Since Alfredo only used fettuccine for this dish, the classic recipe for pasta al burro is the one that includes this type of pasta.

Spaghetti and other types of pasta were brought to Germany, the United States, Great Britain, and France by Italian immigrants. This led to the creation of various culinary bastards, the fruits of a passionate connection between Italian and local culinary traditions. For example, the American favorite spaghetti and meatballs is considered sacrilegious in Italy. According to Italians, pasta is the first course and meatballs are the second, and putting them on the same plate is like putting steak in soup.

A pasta whose name ends in ‘-ini’ may be a smaller version of a standard pasta of a certain shape. If the name ends in ‘-oni’, it is a larger size. Thus, the smaller version of standard spaghetti is spaghettini, and the larger version is spaghettoni.

The shape of the pasta is designed to hold the sauce. Many regions have developed special shapes of pasta. In Veneto, it’s the thick, long, hollow bigoli; in Liguria, the trofie; in Emilia-Romagna, the strozzapreti (which literally means ‘priest choker’); and in Apulia, the ‘little ears’ or orecchiette.

In the early 1930s, under Benito Mussolini, a movement of militant futurism centered around the Fascist Party emerged in Italy. The idea was one that finds resonance in our time as well—make Italy great again! Throw archaic habits overboard from the ship of modernity! Reduce Italy's dependence on imported wheat by weaning Italians from eating wheat dough for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

Pasta was declared the enemy of the nation. The leaders of the movement claimed that pasta makes people heavy, coarse, deceives them, makes them think it is nutritious, makes them skeptical, slow, and pessimistic (as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Luigi Colombo claimed in the then-popular Manifesto of Futurist Cooking).

However, the Second World War soon broke out, and it was no longer a battle with pasta. The Nazis and Fascists, as we remember, lost the war, and nothing threatened pasta anymore.