Roll Cuisine Corner
Pass the Pasta
by Pierre-Luc Moeys, Owner/Chef Oriole 9
The definition of pasta: Shaped and dried dough made from flour and
water and sometimes egg.
Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so great, does
it? Thankfully, the Italians have given it a delicious sounding name
(sharing an origin with “paste” and “pastry”)
and thus inspired, consume 62 pounds a year of pasta per capita (the
U.S. ranks fourth on the list with 24). Even with the recent popularity
of low–carb diets, nobody is going to say no to Mama’s
pasta.
Marco Polo is known in school history books for bringing pasta back
from his great travels to China, but this has generally been dismissed
as mythology. Even if true, this could have been more of a rediscovery.
Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans already knew of the existence of pasta,
both boiling and baking it. In the first and second centuries B.C.,
leading poets Horace and Athenaeus of Naucratis mentioned lagane, fine
sheets of fried dough that were a precursor to today’s lasagna.
Around the eighth century when Sicily and southern Italy were conquered
by the Arabs, dried pasta was introduced and became a hit as it was
easily stored, reasonably nutritious and had a long shelf life during
voyages. The Sicilians started calling it “macaroni,” derived
from the Sicilian term “making dough forcefully.” And then,
sometime around the nineteenth century, pasta again made a huge leap
forward when it met the tomato, long considered dangerous due to the
toxicity of its leaves, but finally accepted and cultivated. Things
just haven’t been the same since.
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