Scholarly investigation of the quintessentially Italian
carbohydrate. Quintessentially, but not originally. Food historian
Serventi and French social scientist Sabban cannot precisely
pinpoint the inventor(s) of pasta and take perhaps overmuch time at
the outset laying out reasons why. Shards of linguistic evidence
point to an Arabic origin, as does the fact that Sicily was a
center of Islamic culture and commerce in antiquity. The idea of
Marco Polo returning from China with a bowl of spaghetti is once
again debunked with finality, but the roots of bing (ancient
Chinese for wheat flour dough) in that part of the world are also
plumbed. The authors aim to reveal pasta as a cultural hallmark
that spawned a major industry, not to deliver new recipes; however,
an extensive section on gastronomy over the ages reveals much. For
instance, Italians spent nearly a millennium eating pasta, whether
in the form of capelli di pagliacci (clowns' hats) or strozzaprieti
(priest stranglers), cooked until it nearly fell apart and served
without any tomato sauce. Available since the 16th century, the
tomato was largely ignored in favor of sugar, cinnamon, and things
like rendered lard until Neapolitans perfected salsa di pomodoro
300 years later; the term al dente was unheard of until after WWI.
Emigration to America brought new phenomena: there were over 300
industrial-sized pasta factories in the States by the '20s, and
after WWII, bureaucrats knew the Marshall Plan was working when
pasta exports to war-torn Europe, boosted almost a hundredfold from
prewar levels, suddenly plummeted. In the 1960s, inhabitants of the
immigrant-founded town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, were found
strangely hale and hearty while vascular diseases ravaged the
surrounding countryside, causing doctors en masse to endorse the
"Mediterranean Diet" of olive oil, wine, and, of course, pasta.
Sometimes endlessly informative (for instance, on pasta-making
machinery) as it offers more in the way of pasta history than most
readers have even begun to imagine. (Kirkus Reviews)
Ranging from the imperial palaces of ancient China and the
bakeries of fourteenth-century Genoa and Naples all the way to the
restaurant kitchens of today, Pasta tells a story that will forever
change the way you look at your next plate of vermicelli. Pasta has
become a ubiquitous food, present in regional diets around the
world and available in a host of shapes, sizes, textures, and
tastes. Yet, although it has become a mass-produced commodity, it
remains uniquely adaptable to innumerable recipes and individual
creativity. "Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food" shows that this
enormously popular food has resulted from of a lengthy process of
cultural construction and widely diverse knowledge, skills, and
techniques.
Many myths are intertwined with the history of pasta,
particularly the idea that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China
and introduced it to Europe. That story, concocted in the early
twentieth century by the trade magazine "Macaroni Journal," is just
one of many fictions umasked here. The true homelands of pasta have
been China and Italy. Each gave rise to different but complementary
culinary traditions that have spread throughout the world. From
China has come pasta made with soft wheat flour, often served in
broth with fresh vegetables, finely sliced meat, or chunks of fish
or shellfish. "Pastasciutta," the Italian style of pasta, is
generally made with durum wheat semolina and presented in thick,
tomato-based sauces. The history of these traditions, told here in
fascinating detail, is interwoven with the legacies of expanding
and contracting empires, the growth of mercantilist guilds and mass
industrialization, and the rise of food as an art form.
Whether you are interested in the origins of lasagna, the
strange genesis of the Chinese pasta bing or the mystique of the
most magnificent pasta of all, the "timballo," this is the book for
you. So dig in
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