Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food

By Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Oct 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231519441

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PASTA: THE STORY OF A UNIVERSAL FOOD

ARTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE TABLE

ARTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE TABLE: PERSPECTIVES ON CULINARY HISTORY

Albert Sonnenfeld, series editor

Salt: Grain of Life

Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader

The Civilization of the Fork

Giovanni Rebora, translated by Albert Sonnenfeld

French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion

Jean-Robert Pitte, translated by Jody Gladding

Pasta

THE STORY OF A UNIVERSAL FOOD

Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban

Translated by Antony Shugaar

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York    Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2000 Gius. Laterza and Figli SpA

Translation copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51944-1

This translation of La Pasta: Storia e cultura di un cibo universale is published by arrangement with Gius. Laterza and Figli SpA, Rome-Bari.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Serventi, Silvano.

[Pasta. English]

Pasta : the story of a universal food /

Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban;

translated by Antony Shugaar.

p. cm.—(Arts and traditions of the table)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-231-12442-2 (alk. paper)

1. Cookery (Pasta)

2. Pasta industry.

I. Sabban, Françoise. II. Title. III. Series.

TX809.M17 S4713 2002

641.8’22—dc21   2002073840

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface

Preface

Note Concerning a Definition of Pasta Products

Acknowledgments

Introduction: In the Beginning Was Wheat

THE KING OF CEREALS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

WHEAT IN CHINA, A LATTER-DAY USE

1. The Infancy of an Art

GOING BACK TO THE MYTHS

PASTA, AN UNTHINKABLE FOOD SOURCE

FIRST WORDS, FIRST HYPOTHESES

THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE

THE SACRED SPACE OF PASTA

THE PRIMORDIAL SHAPE

LASAGNE: THE ORIGINAL DOUGH SHEET

THE FAMILY OF VERMICELLI

DRY PASTA, FRESH PASTA

LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF TWO TRADITIONS

RECOGNITION OF A CULINARY CATEGORY

2. The Time of the Pioneers

SICILY, THE CRADLE OF DRY PASTA

SARDINIA AND OTHER CENTERS OF PRODUCTION

AN ARTICLE OF MASS TRADE

THE MARKET FOR DRY PASTA

THE FRESH PASTA SHOP

ROLLING PINS, BLADES, AND BRAKES

3. From the Hand to the Extrusion Press

THE ROUTES OF WHEAT

THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PASTA MAKERS

THE TRIUMPH OF THE BRAKE

THE REVOLUTION OF THE EXTRUSION PRESS

PORTRAIT OF THE MODERN PASTA MANUFACTURER

4. The Golden Age of the Pasta Manufactory

THE BIRTH OF MANUFACTURING

ARTISANAL MANUFACTURING

THE HAND THAT MAKES: THE ROLE OF WOMEN

NATURAL DRYING

A SHORT GUIDE TO ITALIAN MANUFACTURERS

MACARONI FROM NAPLES AND FINE PASTA FROM GENOA

5. The Industrial Age

THE MOMENTUM OF MODERNITY

THE MECHANICS OF PROGRESS

THE BRONZE MAN; OR, THE AUTOMATED DOUGH KNEADER

THE TRIUMPH OF THE MACHINE

DRYING WITHOUT SUNLIGHT

THE SPLENDOR AND MISERY OF A WORLD IN TRANSFORMATION

FROM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TO THE FOOD REVOLUTION

6. Pasta Without Borders

THE NEW HORIZONS OF PASTA

FROM GERMANY TO THE LAND OF THE COSSACKS

TRANSATLANTIC MIGRATIONS

FRENCH TRADITIONS

ALSACE AND THE PASSION FOR EGG PASTA

PASTA FROM THE NEW WORLD: THE EXAMPLE OF THE UNITED STATES

7. The Time of Plenty

THE WORLD OF PASTA

THE THWARTED AMBITIONS OF FRENCH INDUSTRIALISTS

THE ITALIAN RECONQUEST

AMERICAN LESSONS

VICTORIES AND DEFEATS IN THE REGULATION OF RAW MATERIALS

THE RETURN TO FAVOR OF ARTISANS

THE EMPIRE OF FRESH PASTA

8. The Taste for Pasta

A TRADITION THAT COMES FROM FARAWAY

THE GASTRONOMY OF FRESH PASTA

STUTTED PASTA: SHAPES, COLORS, AND FLAVORS

DRY PASTA AS AN ARCHITECTURE FOR THE MOUTH

FROM PASTA THAT MELTS IN YOUR MOUTH TO PASTA AL DENTE

PASTA AND ITS COMPANIONS

PASTA ON THE MENU

9. China: Pasta’s Other Homeland

OF PASTA, BREADS, AND FLATBREADS: THE BING PARADIGM

THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF A CIVILIZATION

FAVORITE FOOD OF SCHOLARLY SOCIETY

THE WORSHIPFUL BING

THE ALLURE OF PASTA AND THE ORIGINAL FORM

THE FIRST RECIPES

THE POPULARITY OF BING THROUGHOUT CHINA

PASTA PRODUCTS OF THE NORTH SPREAD TO THE SOUTH

EXOTIC FLAVORS, METHODS, AND PREPARATIONS

THE END OF A HISTORY, THE RICHNESS OF A HERITAGE

10. The Words of Pasta

PASTA: THE GLUTTONY OF THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE

PASTA AND TEMPERANCE

A WHIFF OF CINNAMON

IN SEARCH OF ITALIAN PASTA

SERVICE ITALIAN-STYLE

THE MACARONIC CADEMY

SPIKED MACARONI CASANOVA-STYLE

NEAPOLITAN FOLKLORE

CONVIVIALITY AROUND THE TAVERNA

THE DANDY AT THE MANUFACTORY

BEHIND THE SCENES IN THE PASTA INDUSTRY

THE DREAMS OF THE HAND

Notes

Bibliography

Index

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

And so we have

The broth seasoned with three meats,

The flour made of wheat of the fifth month.

Suddenly [the dough] swims in the water where it is stretched out into long strings

That are lighter than a feather in the wind.

(Fu Xuan, 217–278)

In our age of undeniable globalization and world travel, I find it more than a little comforting to reiterate what turns out to be a fable. I earnestly want to lend credence to Marco Polo’s mission to Venice in 1296 as an emissary of pasta from a culinarily advanced China, importing that future staple of la cucina italiana to the peninsula and coinciding chronologically with the creation of the Italian language and literature by Dante’s Commedia.

A fable it is, alas. Nor, as is often suggested, did these cereal-based preparations migrate to Europe to accompany nutritively the westward wanderings of nomadic Arab tribes. To make pasta would have required access to a reliable supply of flour or semolina, to harvesters and millers—hardly the wherewithal of the nomad!

These legends are the stuff of which gastronomic dreams of simplicity and unity are made. The demonstrable truth is far more complex.

The two models of cereal-based dishes are (1) gruel or polenta (flour or crushed grains boiled in moist heat) and (2) breads (kneaded dough cooked in dry heat). Apparently, they held sway from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The newly prominent pasta products in the early Italian Renaissance formed the synthesis of this antinomy: pasta is kneaded dough, but cooked in moist heat. Thus, Serventi and Sabban inevitably offer as well a fascinating parallel history of bread and its essential ingredient relationship with pasta.

Meanwhile (dare I say meanwhile for we are in the Qin Dynasty (384–417 AD), some 900 years before Marco Polo?), the poet Cheng-Ji wrote

We are in the second month of autumn

The songs of the crickets will soon fall silent,

Dawn is stirred by a faint breeze

The nights are cool,

In these circumstances

I can say only one word: bing!

Bing were shaped cereal-based tidbits, anything but formal banquet fare, that inspired poems even several centuries before the available recipes (which date back only to the sixth century!). Bing were stretched out in water just as, the poet sang, strands of silk were teased from cocoons floating in boiling water. That malleability is the characteristic essence of fresh pasta. Without durum wheat, however, industrial pastasciutta (dry pasta), the most popular form in the West, is impossible.

Although the authors show themselves to be fully aware of the richness of pasta-associated vocabulary in the languages of Eastern Europe, Turkey, Arabia, and Persia, their focus is on the two greatest pasta civilizations: Italy and China.

In this monumental, always fascinating story of a universal food, Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban also demonstrate the universality of culinary history as a cultural interdiscipline. Their parallel studies of Italy and China draw on linguistics, economics, literature, philology, theology, anthropology, folklore, and political and religious history in a dazzling and immensely readable virtuoso display of genuine erudition.

Albert Sonnenfeld

PREFACE

The world of pasta is essentially a working-class place, an Italian writer pointed out almost half a century ago.¹ He was referring to Italian pasta, but the observation can safely be generalized to include all pasta, a food that originated in China and from there spread to Japan, Korea, most of Southeast Asia, and the rest of the world.

Pasta perhaps epitomizes food as daily fare. Its preparation, essentially a household activity, is both easy and quick, and this probably explains, at least in part, why pasta is one of the most widespread pleasures of the world’s table. Another reason for this simple food’s popularity is its versatility. An immense body of recipes can be found in every corner of the planet, from the simplest dishes to intricate and sophisticated preparations suitable for the most extraordinary occasions and the most elegant repasts. Pasta is always affordable, even for the tightest household budgets. A trickle of olive oil and a pinch of chopped garlic and parsley are enough to make a plate of spaghetti irresistible, and a few ladlesful of fish broth, a few drops of lemon juice, a handful of fresh julienned carrots, and a few slices of cucumber are all that is required to create a savory Vietnamese noodle salad. Pasta has also long been one of the ingredients of the most refined cuisine. The world’s great chefs have no misgivings about featuring ravioli or cannelloni—dressed formally, of course—on the menus of their five-star restaurants. Anyone at all can be inventive with pasta, and the creations of amateur chefs can be every bit as delectable as the most sophisticated culinary preparations. Whether they are fresh or dried, made of durum wheat semolina or wheat flour, bound with eggs or simply kneaded with water, Italian and Chinese noodles provide a remarkable platform for flavors of all sorts. Once you have mastered the art of cooking them properly, they come out the same every time, no matter how you prepare them.

Without a doubt, pasta is popular because it is so natural. Simple and neutral, it places no restrictions on the search for new combinations of textures and flavors. The Western world, influenced by Italian cooking, for the most part prefers pastasciutta, pasta made with durum wheat semolina, manufactured industrially and served with thick sauces. In Asia, on the other hand, people prefer pasta made with soft wheat flour, served in broth with fresh vegetables, finely sliced meat, chunks of fish or shellfish. In neither culinary tradition are there any ironclad rules or taboos, and the preparation of pasta around the world is infinitely varied, from the Far East to the Far West.

Many Eurasian countries have a long and rich culinary tradition of pasta. There is historical evidence from Germany to Iran, from Greece to Russia, from Turkey to Poland, not to mention the countries of Central and Eastern Asia or, for that matter, the Western Mediterranean and the Middle East (probably the source of the earliest recipes for dried pasta). But the true homelands of pasta have been Italy and China, which evolved two different and complementary culinary traditions that have spread throughout their respective worlds, gaining admiration and influence over the centuries.

This book will present the history of those two traditions, and we regret only that we are unable to offer a link between the two culinary universes. In fact, the turbulent and fascinating history of the middle land bounded by these two gastronomic territories has yet to be written. This area extends from Central Asia to the westernmost boundaries of China, stretching toward Turkey and right up to the gates of Europe. The vocabulary of a great many languages in Eastern Europe and in the Turkish, Arabic, and Persian spheres clearly indicates that pasta has traveled widely, leaving traces in some cases difficult to follow, hinting at complex events that, for now, remain enigmatic.

Dough, the raw material of both bread and noodles, is the first malleable material from which humans were able to make artificial foodstuffs, entirely distinct from the products of the natural environment. It was precisely this quality that so fascinated the Chinese. When the Chinese discovered wheat, several centuries before Christ, its potential quickly became apparent: when mixed with water, it produced a material that was as malleable as clay—and the Chinese had long been familiar with the properties of clay. The Chinese developed what became a full-fledged civilization of fresh pasta, the underlying model of which remained for many centuries the use of wheat flour in the preparation of products with a specific shape: pasta products, breads, and flatbreads. Observant from the earliest times of the specific physical and chemical nature of foodstuffs, especially cereal flours and starches, the Chinese became masters at transforming a great variety of starchy species of plants into pasta products. At the same time, they learned to make every possible use of soft wheat flour. They quickly understood that the component parts of soft wheat flour—starch and gluten—had sharply differing properties and could be put to exceedingly interesting uses. They were probably the only people in history to develop a cuisine based on gluten, an elastic and almost viscous substance that in the West was considered a useless by-product of the manufacture of starch until the end of the eighteenth century. Processing gluten by cooking or fermentation, the Chinese created a new artificial foodstuff, a raw material whose texture and flavor resembled those of meat. Gluten was used brilliantly in China’s vegetarian cuisine, which continues to be of great importance, in both Buddhist temples and the shrines of fine dining.

Chinese noodles derive from a tradition based equally in the home and in the artisan’s workshop, relying on hand processing of the pasta. Complex technical procedures for the manufacture of Chinese noodles have never come into common practice. They are fresh products, susceptible to the passage of time, and to ensure freshness they are often made, with great displays of skill, in full view of their consumers, much the way Italian pizzaioli prepare pizza to order, often with almost acrobatic dexterity. Originating in the north of China, the wheat pasta products that over the centuries have won the praise and admiration of princes and men of letters have spread throughout China and into every social class and level. Though they are eaten everywhere and by everyone, they are still considered primary and daily fare in the provinces of China, where they are thought to have originated, and the variety of formats, basic ingredients, and methods of preparation and cooking found in these regions is unrivaled elsewhere.

China is now fully in step with the pace of the modern world, at least in the big cities, and it is Asia’s leading manufacturer of instant noodles. This industrial product is the best artificial substitute for the fresh noodles that are impossible to manufacture industrially—hence its unprecedented success. Instead of the immense body of knowledge that was traditionally required for the production of fresh pasta, instant noodles require only the addition of hot water at the last moment. The entire long and complex process of the original culinary undertaking has been reduced to this isolated gesture.

In Italy, ancient land of wheat farming, the flour made from that grain held no secrets. All the same, awareness of pasta products as a distinct category of foodstuff developed slowly. For many years, in fact, pasta products were overshadowed by bread, a noble and sacred food, and consigned, because of how they are cooked, to the profane and humdrum world of gruel and mush. That is probably why Italian written sources make absolutely no mention of the existence of pasta products before the Middle Ages, even though there was a lexical connection with the Greek and Roman world and even though evidence from as far back as the fifth century in Palestine suggest that people ate what seem to have been pasta products. (Indeed, pasta was a subject of some concern for the Jewish community, as it constantly strived to obey divine commands in even the smallest arenas of everyday life. Thanks to this obsessive attention to culinary details, we find a mention of vermicelli [vermishelsh] in a Jewish context in northern France in the eleventh century. The term clearly indicates the Italian origin of the food in question.)

Once pasta was finally recognized as a distinct category, its growth knew no limits. Traded internationally in the Mediterranean basin from the twelfth century on—in the dry form—pasta also won a place in the finest kitchens, finding its way onto the dining tables of kings, princes, and high prelates, made by hand by their personal cooks. There evolved a high culinary art of fresh pasta, in all its forms, simple and stuffed. The cooks in princely and papal courts in those years created the cuisine of pasta products, most notably developing the concept of pastasciutta, creating a specific role for pasta products enjoyed for their own sake—for their texture and their taste, enhanced by the sauces with which they were served. Pasta was preferred soft, melting; indeed, in that period the practice was to cook pasta for relatively long periods of time, in contrast to modern practice. Cheese was a constant companion from the very beginning of pasta’s reign as a foodstuff, sometimes accompanied by a sprinkle of cinnamon.

In parallel with this essentially private and to some degree aristocratic cuisine, there developed in certain regions—in Genoa, for instance, and along the Ligurian coast, as well as throughout southern Italy, all the way down to Sicily—a production of dried pasta made of durum wheat, at first artisanal and in time preindustrial. As the production of pasta became increasingly industrialized, especially in Naples and the surrounding region, the consumption of pasta extended to the lower classes of the population. The dried form of pasta became the basic staple of Naples by the eighteenth century. In this huge southern Italian city, however, pasta products were to become more than a basic subsistence food; in time they became a symbol of Naples, gobbled ostentatiously to impress the passing bumpkin. The Neapolitans became advocates of pasta, and in the end they imposed their love of it on the rest of the Italian peninsula. And in spreading this love, they encouraged their compatriots to cook their pasta for only a short time so that it was chewy. Pasta al dente is definitely a custom that comes from Naples, and its spread to the north constitutes a final triumph of dried pasta cooked in the Neapolitan style over the model that had dominated until the very end of the nineteenth century. This triumph marks the unusual adoption of a working-class model of consumption by all the classes of a larger population.

Thus pasta products, both in Italy and in China, are not merely an unassuming form of nourishment intended merely to satisfy a physiological need. And while we need not ponder its history each time we sit down to eat, the popularity of this food appears to be the result of a lengthy process of cultural construction. Unlike very few other manufactured food products that emerge from a time-honored tradition, today’s pasta is the culmination of a wide array of bodies of knowledge and the end product of a series of specific forms of know-how, skills, and techniques. Its very history is multiform. A historian must certainly account for the ways in which pasta products have been integrated into culinary practices and trace the development of their standing within the context of the various categories of foodstuffs and the various classes of consumers. That same historian, however, must also make clear the stages of development of the everyday and industrial techniques involved in the production of those foodstuffs and, to the same degree, explore the representations that have accrued in connection with the dominant cultural models proper to each era.

Nowadays, when the unbridled development of the free market bends to its iron law the production and consumption of food around the world, pasta represents the ubiquitous foodstuff par excellence. Pasta could not fail to attract universal admiration: even when mass–produced by the ton, it remains, in the privacy of the kitchens of the world, an unexpected resource and the ideal platform for individual creativity. The time has come to reject out of hand the idiotic slogan Basta la pastasciutta, invented by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement, impatient to be done with the old world and naively trusting that the power of incantations could create a new future.

NOTE CONCERNING A DEFINITION OF PASTA PRODUCTS

Although the category of pasta products forms part of a greater continuum between, on the one hand, preparations made of flour, semolina, or fragments of rolled grains, such as couscous, and, on the other hand, such soft preparations as Alsatian spätzle or certain Chinese pastas that are practically liquid, their shapes fixed only when they have been slipped into a broth, we must all the same select a definition for the object of our study. And so, within the boundaries of the present work, we have adopted the following definition for pasta products: Pasta products are understood to be the end product of a series of technical operations (on a domestic, artisanal, or industrial scale) applied to a mixture of soft wheat flour or durum wheat semolina with water or other substances, more or less liquid, making it possible to obtain a kneaded dough that is subsequently cut into small regular shapes, which are then cooked in a moist environment. This series of technical operations includes mixing of ingredients, kneading the resulting dough, cutting it into pieces, shaping them, possibly drying them, and possibly storing them. The pasta shapes are then boiled, poached, or steamed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could never have been published without the generous help of many friends and colleagues, and without the assistance of many experts on pasta who willingly supported our project. We would like to express our profound gratitude to Alberto Capatti, who allowed us access to his personal library, who provided a steady stream of invaluable information throughout the research process, who read a number of passages while we were writing the book, and who even kindly translated into Italian a version of the Ode to Bing by the Chinese poet Shu Xi, which opens chapter 9, devoted to the history of pasta in China. We are also deeply grateful to Schmuel Bunim for having brought to our attention—and translated—a number of passages of a text in Yiddish concerning the subject in question. Had it not been for him, we would have overlooked an unexplored chapter of the history of pasta in the Mediterranean and in France. We are also very grateful to Maurice Kriegel and Sylvie-Anne Goldberg, both scholars of Jewish history and culture, for having enlightened us concerning various matters about which we knew virtually nothing. To Maxime Rodinson, pioneer of historical research on pasta, we are grateful for a number of observations taken from his writings, and especially because, with a simple phone call, he provided us with bibliographic references concerning Syriac literature. We owe a debt of gratitude, which has been accumulating for years, to Philip and Mary Hyman, who have shown unfailing generosity in sharing with us their knowledge and bibliographic patrimony on the history of food. As always, we would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Charlotte von Verschuer for having checked on our behalf a few pieces of crucial information on Japan. We also offer our sincere appreciation to Bruno Larioux, Allen Grieco, Bernard Rosenberger, Martin Bruegel, Massimo Montanari, François Sigaut, and Alain Thote, who provided us with references, obtained and lent us documentation, and read some chapters of our volume as we were preparing it. The help and encouragement of Mary Louise Galloway and Jean-Luc Degonde have always been of vital assistance and have meant a great deal to us; the same goes for Solange, Alexandra, and Renato Cavaciuti, always willing to come to our help, especially when we had problems with our computers. Nor could we forget the loyal friendship of Paola Paderni and Giulio Machetti, who helped in our research in the sacred sites of pasta during each one of our trips to Naples, providing assistance in our investigations down to the tiniest details. They mobilized on our behalf their entire family, and especially Leonardo and Tali Del Giacomo, their friends and acquaintances, who had some ties to the world of the production of dried and fresh pasta. Thanks to Leonardo we were able to visit the little Rustichella factory of fresh pasta run by Antonietta De Cristoforo at Montemiletto (Avellino). Alessandro Pallari obtained a rare statistical document for us, which would have been impossible for us to obtain without his help. Giuseppe de Rinaldi helped us in every way possible at the Archivio di Stato of Naples. Our thanks go to Raimondo Di Maio, bookseller (Libreria Dante & Descartes, in Naples), who helped us to make very useful contacts with various people: Antonio Marchetti, chairman of the Società Cooperativa Pastai Gragnanesi, generously spoke with us at great length, showed us around the headquarters of the cooperative, and gave us a tour of the Valle dei Mulini of Gragnano, a legendary site in the history of pasta in southern Italy; Senator Angelo Abenante, who described for us the recent and complex history of the production of pasta at Torre Annunziata, a city of which he served as mayor for a number of years.

We are of course grateful as well to the professionals of the pasta industry who lent their assistance, especially those who allowed us to visit their production facilities: Lucio Garofalo and Alessandro Parisi, of the Pastificio Lucio Garofalo in Gragnano, and Francesca Tauriello, for the Buitoni Company in Sansepolcro (Nestlé Italiana S.p.A., Export and Buitoni Pasta Division), where we had an expert guide in the person of Roberto Radi. Also in Sansepolcro, moreover, Chiara Bertelli opened the doors of Casa Buitoni to us, where Signora Zanelli showed us the workshops and equipment. Without the assistance of Armando Marchi, who was then in charge of Public Affairs at Barilla Alimentare S.p.A., we would not have been allowed access to the Archivio Storico Barilla in Parma, where we were permitted to work freely and to enjoy the invaluable advice of Giancarlo Gonizzi. Moreover, it was only through the intercession of Raffaello Ragaglini and Giuseppe Menconi—at the time, respectively, Director and Chairman of the Unione Industriale Pastai Italiani—that we were able to contact the various Italian pasta manufacturers; they also supplied us with an up-to-date documentation on the statistical data of production. Likewise, Justo Bonetto, Secretary of the Associazione Nazionale Produttori di Pasta Fresca, was extremely helpful in responding to our questions, as were Carla Latini of the Azienda Agraria Latini, Cristiano Cieri of the Rustichella d’Abruzzo, Antonio Morelli of the Antico Pastificio Morelli, and Roberto Caponi of the Pastificio Caponi. Serge André Mouzay, Délégué Général du Comité Français de la Semoulerie Industrielle Française, provided us with information about the French pasta industry, as did Philippe Braun of the Institut Technique des Céréales et des Fourrages in Nîmes, and Jean Claude Nabet of the Office National Interprofessionel des Céréales, who all sent us essential technical information concerning durum wheat, semolina, and pasta products.

Lastly, we are grateful to Antony Shugaar, our translator, who successfully gave the lie to the old Italian adage traduttore/traditore. His skill and the understanding and determination of our copyeditor, Sarah St. Onge, greatly improved our original text. Our heartfelt appreciation goes to them both.

INTRODUCTION

In the Beginning Was Wheat

Without wheat, there would have been no pasta. Nor could there have been bread, much less cakes or other pastries. While it is true that most of the leading cereals can be used to make a dough that can to a greater or lesser degree be shaped in various ways, wheat, of all these edible plants, is the one that best lends itself to this type of preparation. Ground kernels of wheat, in fact, produce a powdered substance that, when mixed in certain proportions with water, creates an exceedingly malleable dough, perfect for forming into any shape imaginable. This interesting property, the result of the presence of gluten, was not lost on enterprising humans. This edible raw material made it possible not only to create new foodstuffs but also to indulge the more playful side of human imagination.

THE KING OF CEREALS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

To speak of wheat, in any case, is reductive, because the genus Triticum, which includes all plants that can be described as wheat in everyday language, is exceedingly rich, the product of a long history. The specific characteristics of the plants are the result of a complex development over the years, largely guided by humans, and involving a long process of domestication of wild species with subsequent selection and hybridization.

The progressive development of agriculture—thought to have originated about 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, an area that extends from eastern Palestine to the westernmost slopes of the Persian highlands—coincided with the domestication of such cereals as barley and wheat and of legumes such as peas, lentils, and beans. Modern genetics confirms what was long suspected: Certain strains of wild wheat found in the mountains in the far southeastern section of Turkey are indeed ancestral to the species of wheat now commonly cultivated. Some of these strains spread slowly westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.¹ Wheat is one of the earliest cereals to have been domesticated, harvested, and consumed by humans. The genus Triticum, represented by the various species and varieties now under cultivation, truly constitutes the cereal of civilization in this geographic area.

The first wheats were einkorn (Triticum monococcum, L.), emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum, L. dicoccum), and spelt (Triticum aestivum, L. spelta).² At first, people roasted ears of wheat and ate the kernels without further preparation, probably because these early wheats, known as dressed wheats, produced kernels whose pericarp, made up of various layers much like the naked wheats, were also surrounded by sticky husks that could not be eliminated by mere threshing during harvest. The easiest and quickest way of reaching the edible core of the kernel was to rid it of at least some of its thick covering by the application of flame. Quite soon, however, according to the scholars of prehistoric times, these dressed wheats were also ground into more or less imperfect flours and kneaded into flatbreads and rough loaves, which were baked on hot stones. Occasionally we find remains of these early breads, dating from 4000 to 3000 B.C.—for example, at Twann, in Switzerland.³

This was the first appearance of kneaded dough, an invention that was soon followed or else coincided with that of gruel, made out of whole grains or either crushed or ground. And so even before historic times we find evidence of the two fundamental preparations of the most important cereals of the Triticum genus: kneaded dough baked in dry heat, and whole grain or crushed grain cooked in a boiling liquid to obtain a gruel or mush, fluid, thick, or pasty.

In the Greco-Roman classical world, these two methods of preparing Triticum products were well documented by a vast terminology for the different species cultivated, the various products derived from their grains in accordance with their use, and even the dishes that were prepared. It is difficult to identify these foodstuffs in the various texts, but specialists believe that ancient Roman alica was a relatively fine semolina, derived from emmer wheat,⁴ according to Pliny the Elder; alica was used to prepare the renowned puls, a mush eaten by the ancient Romans, long considered the staple of the Roman diet; and farina, a word that indicated the entire product of milling, was what we now know as flour, a powder of greater or lesser whiteness depending on how finely it was sifted, that was used in the preparation of gruel, loaves, or flatbreads; finally, amylum⁵ was a starch (fecula) obtained through a technique invented by the Greeks and transformed into refined pastries. Amylum was the universal binding agent in the fine cuisine described in the first ancient Roman culinary treatise, a collection attributed to Apicius dating from the fifth century A.D.⁶

From the end of the fifth century B.C., naked wheat grew progressively more popular. It was easier to process and therefore used almost exclusively to make flour for use in kneaded doughs, elbowing aside the dressed grains, which were thereafter used only in the preparation of gruels.⁷ Rotating millstones also began to become common throughout the Mediterranean basin, tools used specifically for the grinding of naked grains.⁸ Among the limited number of species of wheat that became important, two were of particular note: Triticum aestivum, L. aestivum, known in Latin as siligo and to modern English-speaking consumers as common wheat or soft wheat, which yields a fine flour perfectly suited for making bread; and Triticum (turgidum), L. durum, generally known in Latin simply as triticum and now widely known as durum wheat, the raw material used in the modern pasta industry. In ancient times, triticum was prized for its semolina, and in the first century A.D. it was imported to Italy from North Africa and Sicily.⁹ The ancient Romans understood what distinguished hard wheat, or triticum, from the softer siligo that yielded white flour, and they knew that these two wheats flourished in different climates, triticum thriving in dry, sunny conditions and siligo under the humid skies of central and northern Italy.¹⁰

These two wheats dealt a tremendous blow to the cultivation of the ancient far, the emmer wheat of the ancient Romans, which had been the source of the flour used in making bread. The culinary practices documented in the treatise by Apicius as well as in other Latin texts attest to how well the Romans knew specific uses that would best exploit the respective properties of soft wheat flour and durum wheat semolina.¹¹

Given the resources and technical possibilities available, there is no reason that pasta products should not have been invented at this time: both fine flour and excellent semolina were available, produced in considerable quantities thanks to rotary millstones, even though enormous labor was required to operate them. And yet, although certain specialists claim to have identified pasta colanders in archaeological digs of ancient sites,¹² it does not appear that the pasta products we know today existed in the ancient world. A careful analysis of the recipes of Apicius reveals not a trace of pasta.¹³

WHEAT IN CHINA, A LATTER-DAY USE

Europeans invented pasta late, even though conditions favored them. The Chinese, in contrast, found themselves in a totally opposite situation. Despite an agricultural environment that was anything but favorable to the manufacture of wheat-based pasta, they were familiar with wheat-based pasta long before the Europeans.

Many Westerners believe that Chinese pasta products are for the most part based on rice or the starch of the mung bean—often mistaken for the soybean—and that the bright white color of rice-flour noodles and the transparent appearance of bean-starch vermicelli represent the full extent of Chinese accomplishment in this area. But they have been deceived by the limited menus, heavily adapted to Western tastes, they find in Chinese restaurants. In truth, in China, just as around the Mediterranean, the history of pasta products begins with wheat and therefore with wheat pasta. Pasta made from other grains comes only much later. The similarities between China and the Mediterranean basin end there, however. In terms of grains, the two civilizations of food are virtual opposites in every way, even if the great Han Empire (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) and ancient Rome were not entirely unaware of each other and were linked by indirect relations. (Didn’t Seneca lash out at the excessive love of luxury that drove wealthy Roman patricians to dress in silk, the threads of which—he believed—had been harvested from certain trees in the far-off land of the Seres by inhabitants of Thinae, also known as China?)¹⁴ The Chinese, or at least the more well-to-do Chinese, already enjoyed dining on laowan, ravioli—descriptions of the making of which, dating back to the third century A.D., still make our mouths water—when their contemporaries on the far end of the Eurasian continent were as yet unacquainted with stuffed pasta.

Yet, in an interesting paradox, while northern China was the birthplace and site of the early cultivation of the two leading species of millet, Panicum and Setaria, which constituted the subsistence staple of the entire population through prehistory, antiquity, and for a long time thereafter, wheat was a little-known foreign plant. It was so unfamiliar, in fact, that the earliest sources do not distinguish between wheat and barley; both grains were described with the same term, mai. Furthermore, it is difficult to reconstruct the various phases of the acclimatization of wheat along the middle and lower course of the Yellow River, a region long considered as the cradle of Chinese civilization. We do know that around 3000 B.C. wheat was certainly grown in the far northwestern part of Gansu, since fragments of Triticum aestivum were found in 1985 in a Neolithic cave in the district of Minle.¹⁵ The earliest written documentation—turtle plastron and oracle-bone inscriptions, dating to around 1300 B.C.—provide further evidence of its presence. These remains constitute the earliest evidence of human use of common soft, naked-grain wheat in an outlying region of the Chinese world, though there is almost no indication of its use as a foodstuff. The wheat is hexaploid—that is, already the product of previous domestication and a long series of selections and hybrids—proving that it was not native to northern China. It was a newcomer, especially in comparison with millet, a grain clearly of Chinese origin. Indeed, when wheat arrived from the West, it crossed paths with various types of millet, which were in their turn spreading westward.

All indications tell us that the acclimatization of the new grain occurred with considerable difficulty in the Chinese region, as practically no factors favored its adaptation, in terms of both the ancient Chinese agricultural system and dietary customs. At the very beginning of the second century B.C., when the plant had long been familiar, Dong Zhongshu, loyal adviser to Emperor Wu of the early Han, urged his sovereign to issue a decree encouraging the cultivation of this cereal in the region of the capital, Chang’an.¹⁶ The peasants seemed reluctant to obey the decree, not knowing how to cultivate, harvest, and use the grain. During the same period, Fan Shengzhi, author of a treatise on agriculture, explained in great detail how and when to sow the cereals mai in order to obtain a good harvest.¹⁷ These instructions were probably useful, since the growing season of barley and wheat was not compatible with the climate of northern China. The grains had to be sown in fall or winter, the driest seasons in China’s continental climate, since they germinated best with only a moderate amount of water. Millets, on the other hand, were perfectly suited to the climatic cycles of the region, since the sowing season was much more flexible, extending from spring to the beginning of summer, in the heart of the rainy season.¹⁸ This agricultural disadvantage, which obliged the peasants to lavish great care on their crops of wheat, at times irrigating them, was counterbalanced by a felicitous circumstance: the ears of wheat would ripen and be ready to harvest at the same time that the stores of millet were beginning to run out (if they had not already done so).

But there was one more problem with using wheat as a food. Not only were the environmental and weather conditions of northern China ill suited to wheat as a crop, the technical context suitable for the processing of millet was equally inhospitable. We know relatively little about the earliest uses of wheat as a foodstuff in China. Naked wheat, Triticum aestivum, did not need to be hulled the way millet did, but its kernels did have to be treated, in one way or another, to eliminate, at least in part, the pericarp (or bran), made up of numerous layers of coating, adhering tightly to the grain itself. Throughout antiquity, the Chinese had only one tool available for the processing of cereals: the mortar and pestle, an instrument that was perfectly suited to milling rice and shelling millet. (Once millet has been shelled, it can be consumed immediately, as it emerges from its hull after steaming.) When wheat and barley became more familiar in the Central Basin of the Yellow River, around 1300 B.C., they could only be processed with the tools developed for millet. It is likely that at first wheat was more or less completely husked, then crushed in a mortar—a long process that could only be used to prepare small quantities at a time, given the nature of the tool—and finally steamed like millet and made into gruels or mushes of varying thickness. In any case, the rare notations concerning the consumption of wheat suggest that this was the procedure (wheat dishes do not appear to have been very highly regarded).¹⁹ This might account for the minimal enthusiasm among Chinese peasants for the cultivation of wheat around the second century B.C., since the production of flour for use in preparations that were considered to be more refined was certainly beyond their abilities.

With the appearance of the rotary mill around the fifth or sixth century B.C.,²⁰ about the same time as in the Mediterranean basin,²¹ it became possible to produce flour more quickly and in greater quantities, and the situation rapidly began to change, even though sources document those changes only with considerable delay. Over a period of several centuries, before and after the turn of the Christian Era, this population of farmers—previously entirely unaware of the advantages of wheat, a cereal that had none of the prestige of millet, which was deified as the Lord of the Harvests with the name of Prince Millet—grasped the remarkable potential of the elastic and malleable dough that could be created by mixing wheat flour and water.

From consumers of boiled whole grains, the Chinese also became eaters of pasta, flatbreads, and bread. But unlike their Western counterparts, who long remained in thrall to the system of contrasting structures in their food references—leavened dough versus unleavened dough, gruel cooked in moist heat versus flatbread or bread baked in dry heat—the Chinese developed an overall concept of bing, kneaded wheat dough, a category that could cover not only all the edible products derived from this dough or paste but also the means for processing this malleable material. For more than ten centuries, the term bing served not only to describe all the foodstuffs made from kneaded wheat-flour–based dough but also other cereal-based dishes that resembled their wheat-flour counterparts in appearance, as well as the technical operations involved in agglomerating certain malleable substances into specific shapes (usually round and flat).²²

Comparison of these two civilizations of pasta is instructive, because it shows that there is no single path of development, based on this or that necessary factor. In radically different environments, rather hostile in China’s case and quite favorable in the Mediterranean, each civilization developed its own culture of pasta according to quite distinct concepts and at its own pace. China was far ahead of Italy, but since it never had durum wheat, it remained a civilization of fresh pasta, made by artisanal methods, expanding the repertory by transforming other cereals into pasta products. Italy, in contrast, having reached the production of pasta products only after a series of breakthroughs, over the course of time perfected its mastery and understanding of wheat, developing at the same time a highly diversified production of fresh pasta and a civilization of dry pasta based on durum wheat, culminating in a highly specialized industry.

CHAPTER ONE

The Infancy of an Art

Despite the simplicity of its composition and fabrication, pasta has not always existed. In contrast with bread—certain forms of which are documented in Neolithic archaeological digs, especially in Switzerland—pasta products have left no traces. Their origin therefore remains the subject of speculation. This odd gap in the ancient historical record of cereal-based preparations in Europe has encouraged the spread of gastronomical legends but also led to the development of more serious hypotheses by some scholars. These scholars surmised that, if the Greeks and Romans had no familiarity with these dishes, nowadays so fundamental, they must have come from elsewhere. From China, thanks to Marco Polo, according to some; from the East, according to others, brought by the Arabs who originally invented them, driven by the need to develop foods that would keep during their nomadic wanderings. In reality, the situation is far more complex, and it cannot be explained by the simple movement of objects or people.

GOING BACK TO THE MYTHS

The first concrete information concerning pasta products in Italy dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The question of their origin continues to evoke speculation. Following in the footsteps of many authors, beginning with Giuseppe Prezzolini,¹ who in the 1950s questioned the legend of Marco Polo’s importation of pasta from China, let us repeat that the Venetian merchant could not have had anything to do with the birth of this culinary tradition in Italy. Well before his return from his great voyage, in 1296, the Mediterranean basin was the setting for a prosperous trade in obra de pasta, as pasta products were at that time known in Cagliari, Sardinia. This indicates that pasta had long formed part of the diet of certain Mediterranean peoples. The time has come to debunk once and for all this promotional invention, sprung fully formed from the fertile imagination of the editors of the Macaroni Journal, the newsletter of the National Macaroni Manufacturers Association, an association of American pasta makers.²

Let us also discard the idea that an inventor might have been responsible for cooking up pasta, so to speak, creating vermicelli, macaroni, lasagne, and ravioli in a sudden stroke of genius. Even so, we are grateful to the ingenious and imaginative Ortensio Lando, friend and admirer of Pietro Aretino, for having credited women with the invention of pasta, thus displaying his gratitude to the other half of humanity, too often overlooked where great inventions are concerned. To our great regret, then, we must say that it is unlikely that the Lombard peasant woman Libista was the inventor of ravioli or that lasagne, lasagnuole e altri pinzocheri (terms for types of pasta) were the felicitous creations of Meluzza Comasca, another great inventor according to Lando, who was given a celebrity’s funeral after she died of pleurisy.³ Sadly, there is no answer to the question, Who invented spaghetti? which already smacked of irony when the historian Roberto Lopez used it as the title for a short essay in which he refuted the fable of Marco Polo after an American colleague tried to convince him that it was true.⁴ Pasta products are undoubtedly the result of human intelligence, but Libista, Meluzza, and Marco have nothing to do with it.

Still, the fact that no single individual can claim to have contributed to this fine invention does not force us to search for its origins outside Europe. Roberto Lopez was right to lighten the cultural baggage of Marco Polo, removing a weight that was admittedly symbolic, representing the collective ingenuity of the Chinese people in a single foodstuff. But Lopez refused to follow certain of his colleagues who limited the imaginative dimension of their explanations, simply replacing the Chinese with the Arabs. These scholars, arguing that nomadic peoples need to provide themselves with a supply of preserved foods, put forth the hypothesis that the Arabs had invented dry pasta made of durum wheat semolina,⁵ subsequently introducing it to Italy. All studies of the consumption of cereals by nomadic or pastoral populations show, however, that when they travel they generally reduce their intake to whole grains or toasted flours, materials far less perishable than pasta products and far easier to use; they generally eat flatbreads or simple breads as their daily fare when traveling.⁶ Ease of use is a relative notion, of course. The large, very fine flatbreads made by bedouins in Jordan⁷ or by the peasants of the Lebanese hinterland are anything but easy to make, requiring remarkable manual dexterity, especially considering that they are made in exceedingly primitive conditions. But the situation appears restrictive to us only because of cultural norms, which vary from one society to another.

Nowadays it seems difficult to attribute full credit for the invention of pasta to the Arabs, but this does not mean that they played no role in the spread of certain types of pasta products, especially beginning in the High Middle Ages, when the Arabs began their westward expansion. All the same, making pasta products requires access to a reliable supply of flour or fine semolina, which entails the existence of regular harvests of wheat and milling equipment. Thus the theory that a nomadic lifestyle might have driven the Arabs to invent pasta, seductive though it may seem at first, does not withstand a cold analysis. We would have to suppose, then, that the Arabs at some point lived near cereal farmers—and millers as well, unless they were able to devote much of their energy to milling, whether with little hand mills or with larger mills.

In contrast, the fact that the Greeks and later the Romans, well known as great farmers of wheat and refined consumers of its products, should have failed to invent pasta products is even more surprising and deserves close examination. Is it possible that these two peoples bequeathed nothing in this context to the medieval and modern cultures of the West? What reasons might