History of the Italian food

Rise of the Macaroni and its mating with the scandalous Love Apple

No section on history of the Italian food can do without a section on pasta and tomatoes and how they influenced the Italian cuisine.

However, the meeting of these soul mates did not come easy and many hurdles of ignorance and puritanism had to be crossed before they became forever united in Italian cuisine...

There has been a variety of speculations regarding the origin of pasta, including it was imported by Marco Polo from China to Italy. Popular story that Marco Polo found it in China and brought the idea home comes from misreading of his text. When Marco said he had ‘discovered’ pasta in China, it was taken to mean that he discovered something new. However, he discovered that the Chinese had pasta ‘just like ours’. He was probably referring to the Chinese noodles made from millet, which are known to exist in Chinese diet since 2000 BC.

Another theory is that pasta was already part of the ancient Italian civilization of Etruscan times. There is some evidence of knitting-needle-shaped objects found in Etruscan tombs that were meant to have dough rolled around them. The early Apician cookbook about early history of the Italian food suggests that there were Etrusco-Roman noodles was made from durum wheat called lagane. However this food was not boiled like pasta, it was cooked in the oven. The ancient lagane has some similarities but it was not pasta known today.

The most probable origin of dry pasta as known today was through the Arabs during their conquest of Sicily in 8th century. The Arabs were eating dried, thin noodle pasta, called ittriya, which the Italians adopted as the spaghetti, spago meaning ‘thread’. A dictionary by the 9th century Syrian physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali defines itriyya as string-like shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking, which shows Arab influence on the ancestor to modern-day dried pasta.

The dried noodle-like product Arabs introduced began to be produced in great quantities in Palermo at this time. The Arab geographer, Al Idrisi wrote that a flour-based product in the shape of strings was produced in Palermo, then an Arab colony.The modern word "macaroni" derives from the Sicilian term for making dough forcefully. In the ancient methods of making pasta, force meant kneading the dough with the feet, often a laborious full day process.

History of the Italian food in southern Italy indicates that ancient Sicilian lasagna dishes, some still eaten in Sicily today, included raisins and spices brought by the Arabs, another indication that the Arabs introduced pasta.

This early pasta thrived and eventually spread to the mainland since durum wheat thrives in the Italy’s climate.

Despite the many varieties, the most common name for pasta became macaroni, although this now means the round type as opposed to the flat pasta. The fourteenth century English cookbook Forme of Cury gives a recipe for ‘macrows’ that produces a flat result.

In its native land macaroni does not seem to have been regarded as a high-class food. This is not surprising as the southern Italy lacked in timbre and often adopted simpler, rustic foods as opposed to more extravagant cooking styles of nobility in the North. It must be added that due to the breakdown of international spice trade in the history of the Italian food, it was the cuisine of southern Italy that suffered the most from lack of asafoetida and spices. Hence, southern cooking was not always considered to be high-class cuisine.

To present an amusing anecdote about macaroni and pasta, Teofilo Folengo, in the sixteenth century, said that the artificial language known as Macaronic Latin – a mixture of Latin and Italian – was so called because it reminded student of Venetian macaroni, “a kind of coarse, rough, rustic pudding made of flour, cheese and butter”. However, despite this taunting tone, macaroni was eventually being lauded in poems prompting all breeds of pasta to be called ‘macaroni’.

History of the Italian food shows that by the 1300's dried pasta was very popular for its nutrition and long shelf life, making it ideal for long ship voyages. It served the Italian explorers well in their journeys across the globe. Eventually different shapes of pasta have appeared and new technology made pasta easier to make. Pasta truly became a part of Italian life.

However the next big advancement in the history of the Italian food and pasta came in the 19th century when pasta met tomatoes, notoriously known as “love apples”, albeit with great difficulty.

History of Italian food - The scandalous tomato

The discovery of the lascivious and immoral love apples, presently known as tomatoes, is intricately tied with pasta in the history of the Italian food. This is because the advent of tomato changed the history of pasta forever.

For one thing, pasta began to be served with the purees and flavourful sauces, making them more delicious than the dry pasta noodles. The pasta used to be eaten dry with fingers until the tomato liquid sauce demanded the use fork. As a result, the common man began use of forks thus changing the manners of eating, another important event in the history of the Italian food.

But it is not an exaggeration to say that the tomato was initially outrightly rejected by the Europeans. The history of tomato is an alluring one and here it goes:

The apple, at some point in the Christian history, was became to be known as the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge. No doubt that the story of Adam and Eve had some role to play in this story.

Despite the humble apple getting this name, people did think that so sinful a fruit should be a voluptuous pearl glistening in greenery among a far , far, far off land that was the Garden of Eden. It was a well-known fact that Eden was somewhere close to India.

So, when Christopher Columbus took to the oceans to find India, he brought two crew members who could speak Chaldee and Hebrew, the language thought to be most likely spoken by the Garden’s inhabitants. When he reached South America, he mistakenly identified that Orinoco River in Venezuela as gateway to Eden.

When he brought back this luscious new fruit back to Europe, people reached the obvious conclusion. The Europeans originally called it poma amoris, or the love apple. The Hungarians unapologetically named it Paradice Appfel, meaning the Apple of Paradise.

The tomato basically looked like what a Forbidden Fruit should look like – a slutty red fruit oozing juices with electric flavours, making it the sensual aphrodisiac. This love apple dripping juices, soft and delicious, inviting one to suckle its harlot-red flesh – clearly the fruit was immoral, lascivious, and utterly un-Christian.

It certainly did not help this immoral one to closely resemble another fruit, of which the Europeans were terrified. This was the plant called mandrake, also known as Satan’s Apple or Love Apple. It’s basically the fruit from Hell and has the distinction of being the aphrodisiac with which Lean seduces Jacob in the Bible, saying, “Thou must come in unto me, for surely I have hired thee with thy son’s mandrakes.”

When the tomato came to Europe in the 1600s, people imagination had firmly located the Eden in South America. Hence the Italian name for the tomato pomodoro (literally meaning golden apple), referred to the golden apples that grew in the Pagan Greek Garden of the Hesperides. The Christian scholars had decided that the Garden of Hesperides was actually Eden.

For this reason, the tomato items were on the list of “disapproved dishes” for at least 150 years until the early 1700s, when it began to gain some acceptance in Italy as a decorative puree or garnish. The rest of Europe still snubbed it as it was rumoured that it makes your teeth fall out and its smell can make people insane.

In the 1880s, the daughter of well-known British botanist named Montague Alwood wrote that the highlight of an afternoon tea at her father’s house had been the “introduction of this wonderful new fruit – or is it vegetable?”

As the tomato began to gain acceptance in Italy at least, tomato sauces became popular within the history of the Italian food. I should note that there was also a time when zesty sauces were considered evil and leading to gluttony. You can read more about it here.

The first recipe for tomatoes with pasta in the history of the Italian food was written 1839, when Ippolito Cavalcanti, Duke of Buonvicino, offered a recipe for 'vermicelli co le pommodoro.' About thirty years later, La Cuciniera Genovese offered recipes for purées, soups, distinctly different sauces for meats, chicken, veal and pasta.

Hence the macaroni and love apple finally mated and the rest became history....

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