“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” ~ Federico Fellini, Italian film producer
I love that quote. As an Anglo-Australian, pasta was never a significant part of my culinary upbringing – we were more of a meat and three veg family. Then I met my One & Only and Proper Pasta almost in the same week. Not the limp, overcooked spaghetti and grey Bolognese of my occasional childhood, but al dente spaghetti and simple tasty, red-rich sauces. I watched and learned from my father-in-law and eventually I would make it at least twice a week for the kids, my variations on traditional sauces the perfect disguise for any vegetable. My children grew up on it, and are all experts at twirling spaghetti on a fork, (a skill I still find as hit and miss as chopsticks). We even had a favourite holiday jigsaw of pasta!
Pasta is to Italy what rice is to Asia. It is the most well-known Italian food, and the most popular ingredient for any Italian dining experience. It is also the one unifying ingredient in a country long divided by regional culinary diversity. And it takes so many forms and has so many lilting names: sheets of lasagna and wide ribbons of papardelle; spaghetti shoelaces in different widths; the generic macaroni in a multitude of forms from rissoni to penne. To paraphrase Jamie Oliver: how amazing that three everyday ingredients – flour, water and eggs – can be mixed and kneaded, rolled, cut and squashed, flavoured and coloured into countless shapes and sizes.
The origins of this popular ingredient are murky. Popular legend suggest that pasta was derived from the noodles Marco Polo brought back from the East, while others claim the Romans were eating a version of it hundreds of years before that illustrious, thirteenth century merchant went a-wandering. There are tales of merchant Arabs introducing wheat cultivation and dried pasta to Sicilian shores. The first written reference to pasta, however, came from Sicily in the Middle Ages, and the recipe gradually moved north.
Originally a dish only for the wealthy, by the late 18th century pasta had become a popular street food in Naples, eaten simply with cheese and pepper, and the Neapolitans had been nicknamed “mangiamaccheroni” or maccheroni eaters. Here the weather provided the perfect conditions for growing wheat and drying the pasta, and the streets were soon lined withspaghetti stalls.
Pasta took on a variety of forms, and its popularity spread across Italy as economics, modern agricultural practices and Garibaldi colluded to make it a cheap dish for the masses. Twentieth century Italian emigrants took the habit with them, so much so that, in whatever corner of the Mediterranean pasta was born, there is no doubt that it journeyed all over the globe with every Italian migrant since, until it became synonymous with Italian cuisine.
Pasta, as a staple, is enormously versatile. It can be served as a prima piatte or a main
course. It doubles as a cold salad for a barbecue, or it can be tossed into soup as pasta in brodo. It can even be baked into puddings and cakes or stuffed with sweet fillings for dessert. Pasta simply goes into wherever your imagination and ingredients can unite to invent. Some cooks still choose to make their pasta from scratch (pasta fresca), and I have tried, but I have neither the patience nor the knack, and must resort to the shop-bought variety, pasta secca, which are perfectly good, although obviously some brands are better than others.
Also note that some pastas work better with particular dishes than others. While the rules are not set in stone, decades of experimentation have led to the following generalizations: fresh pasta is best suited to creamy sauces, as are pasta ribbons like fettucine or tagliatelle. Rigatoni, farfalle (butterflies), penne (quills) and fusilli with their ridges and edges, capture chunky meat sauces, while long, thin pasta like linguine or spaghetti (from ‘spago’ meaning cord) are best eaten with fine sauces like pestos or ragus. For broth, use the tiny pasta shapes such as orzo (‘barley’), alfabeti, and nelli. And stuffed pastas like ravioli or tortellini are best with simple sauces such as butter and sage or a plain tomato passata.
I have also discovered some stray orchietta of trivia I would like to share with you:
Apparently Parmesan is not traditionally sprinkled on a fresh tomato sauce, and is never added to a fish sauce. Oops! We, sacrilegious souls that we are, love to throw it on everything.
Sophia Loren famously stated of her curvaceous figure: “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”
When Elizabeth David, British culinary expert, discovered Italian cuisine in the early fifties and introduced it to the ration-bound post-war England of powdered egg and grey bread, it was a revelation of simplicity and quality ingredients.
Those famous tomato based pasta sauces came into existence less than 200 year ago, only after the tomato arrived in Italy from South America.
Chef Giorgio Locatelli, of Locanda Locatelli in London, claims every Italian is two-thirds pasta.
Yet some Italians tried to quash the tradition: Mussolini planned to convert the Italians to rice, saying “A nation of spaghetti eaters cannot restore Roman civilization!” And a now infamous – and probably fascist – poet in the 1930s denounced pasta for making the nation sluggish, and called for its abolition. Tradition and popular opinion was outraged. Pasta remains undefeated on every Italian menu in the world.
So there you have it. Love it or hate it, pasta looks like it’s here to stay. But as a grande finale, do any of you remember the tale of that infamous BBC April Fool that convinced half the British nation (at least!) that spaghetti grows on trees in Switzerland, with its spoof documentary on the harvesting of pasta? We, in our internet wisdom, may feel supercilious, but in 1957 spaghetti was almost unheard of in Britain, and the hoax was a huge success. Apparently many even wrote in to the BBC to discover where to buy a spaghetti tree!
*Adapted from a piece written for Newsflash magazine, April 2014. With thanks to Google for the photos.