A highly important and satisfying category of food which presents two paradoxical aspects. One is that it overlaps very extensively with the category of noodles. The other is that until very recently there was no adequate name for it. In Italy, where pasta had previously just meant ‘dough’, it was necessary to say paste alimentari to indicate what everyone now knows as pasta. In the English language it had been necessary to use the word ‘noodles’ or adopt circumlocutions such as ‘macaroni products’ (or even the offputting ‘alimentary pastes’, in direct translation from the Italian). It was only after the Second World War that ‘pasta’ started to establish itself in its present wide meaning. However, although the name in its present sense has but a short history, the range of products to which it refers has a long one.
In fact, no one knows how long a history pasta has. The origins of pasta (and equally those of noodles) are hard to establish, for two principal reasons. First, pasta is a product of such simple ingredients—essentially flour and water—that it is difficult to distinguish it from primitive, unleavened, flat griddle cakes which are made from the same ingredients. Second, pasta is largely a food of the common people of any nation where it is used, and is therefore less well documented than more luxurious foods.
Uncertainties and difficulties persist, but they have been greatly diminished by the recent publication of Les Pâtes by Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban (2000), a work which covers both noodles of the Orient and pasta and kindred products in the western world, and sheds much light on the history of both. It contains a wealth of information about the evidence for production of and trade in pasta in the early medieval period, as well as comprehensive coverage of developments since then.
There were, in the classical world, products which can be viewed as forerunners, e.g. the Greek laganon and itria, both of them terms which subsequently developed into pasta terms. But it is not clear that in Greece they were anything more than flat cakes. And although the Romans had lagani (plural, apparently laganon cut into strips) there is nothing to show that these were prepared like pasta.
An early piece of pictorial evidence, much debated, comes from an Etruscan relief of about the 4th century bc at Caere. This shows a set of tradesman's equipment which would be so well fitted for making hand-cut pasta that it is tempting to assume that it was for that. There is a rolling board with a raised edge to retain the ingredients, and a slim rolling pin to fit it. Both closely resemble types used today. There is also a small bag which might be a flour sprinkler; a jug; a ladle, perhaps for water; and an unmistakable wavy-rimmed pastry cutting wheel such as is used for making deckle-edged lasagne. Elsewhere, ancient slim metal rods have been found which closely resemble the ‘ferri’ around which medieval macaroni was moulded (see below), but these might have had a different use.
However, the question remains: what was done with the products of this equipment? There is no evidence that it was boiled, like pasta. The same question can be asked about classical lagani and itria in strip form.
The first hint that lagani or itria were being boiled comes from further east. The Jerusalem Talmud, a work of the late 5th century ad, contains a discussion on whether boiled dough can be allowed as unleavened bread under Jewish food law. Whether or not this reference bears directly on the pasta question, it is certainly probable that the boiling of pasta was an innovation made well to the east of Rome. In old Persian literature there are several references to lakhshah (see laksa). Details are not given, but from a 10th-century Arab recipe we know that at that time it meant a product like tagliatelle; strips cut from a thin sheet of dough. These were certainly boiled. Lakhshah means ‘slippery’. The word entered medieval Hebrew and has emerged from it in Yiddish as lokshen. It also turned up as laksa in the Indonesian language in about the 13th century.
There was also a kind of stuffed pasta like ravioli (more precisely, tortellini, for the packages were made as triangles with two of their corners curled around and joined). The name was joshparah, meaning ‘boiled ? piece’, a word which on linguistic evidence seems to date from the 9th century or before. Arabic texts of the 10th century mention itriyah (Greek itria), which was by now a strip-shaped, dried pasta bought from shops. (From the 13th century, the name reshteh, meaning ‘string’, was used for fresh tagliatelle, as it still is. Reshteh were made by rolling up the flat sheet of dough and cutting it into slices. From that time on, the name lakhshah was reserved for one dish only, wild ass meat broth with pasta.)
Evidence of the use of pasta in Europe during this period is almost totally lacking. The 9th-century Emir Abdurrahman II of Arab-occupied Spain employed a minstrel, Ziryab, some of whose songs mention foods which might be pasta. The first definite sighting in Europe is also by an Arab, the geographer al-Idrisi, who reported in the early 12th century that in Palermo, Sicily, people made strings of dough which they called trii. Al-Idrisi assumed that the name was from the Arabic itriyah, but it may equally well have come direct from the Greek itria. Sicily had been occupied by both Greeks and Arabs.
On the mainland of Europe, the first reference comes from the city archives of Genoa, and is dated 1279. It is a list of the estate of a dead man, Ponzio Bastone, including a ‘bariscella piena de macaronis’ (a basket full of macaroni). Clearly this was a durable item, or it would not have been listed. This means that it must have been dry pasta, professionally made, indicating in turn that macaroni was well established as a food.
Even if there were no earlier evidence for European pasta, this document would dispose of the theory that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy, having brought it back from China. See culinary mythology. Marco Polo did not arrive back in Venice until 1298.
The name ‘macaroni’, used in the Genoa document, was a general one, not indicating merely the tubular kind of pasta. Tubes were a S. Italian speciality, and were called macaroni siciliani to distinguish them. (The modern Italian spelling maccheroni is a later N. Italian idea.) Thus macaroni could then be any of the sheet or strip forms of pasta made in the early Middle Ages. In the later Middle Ages the general term vermicelli (‘little worms’) was introduced for strip forms alone. It was only in the 18th century that this came to mean the very thin strands now so described.
So when, in 1351, Boccaccio was writing in the Decameron of a fantastic, mythical land, Bengodi, whose inhabitants rolled macaroni down a mountain of grated cheese, he may well have been referring to a form of pasta which would not nowadays be called macaroni; it has been suggested that he actually meant gnocchi, which would have rolled better.
Ravioli are mentioned in some of the 140,000 preserved letters of Francesco di Marco, a merchant of Prato in the 14th century. They were stuffed with pounded pork, eggs, cheese, parsley, and sugar. In Lent a filling of herbs, cheese, and spices was used.
Platina's De Honesta Voluptate (1475) gives various pasta recipes, including the instruction that a type of pasta should be cooked for the time it takes to say three Paternosters. This is a remarkably short time, even for fresh pasta, and shows how early the Italians came to appreciate the al dente (chewy) texture still considered correct.
When in 1533 Catherine de' Medici went to France to marry the future King Henri II, and took her cooks with her, the wedding banquet included one dish of pasta dressed with the juice from roast meat and cheese, and one with butter, sugar, honey, saffron, and cinnamon; one savoury and one sweet.
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance the commercial making of pasta was controlled by guilds, and standards and prices fixed by law. The largest producers were Sicily, Sardinia, and Genoa. For an account of the successive devices which the Italians invented for processing the dough and shaping the pasta, see pasta manufacture.
As the pasta industry grew, increasing amounts were exported to other European countries. Home-grown durum wheat was no longer sufficient and in the 19th century much was imported from the Ukraine. This was shipped through Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov which communicates through a narrow strait with the Black Sea. For years the best pasta was often marked pasta di Taganrog to show that it was not made from inferior types of wheat.
Russia continued to be the chief supplier well into the 20th century. However, in 1898, an American agronomist had brought back seeds of a superior Russian variety, which he began to grow in N. Dakota. The interruption of pasta exports from Italy to the USA during the First World War meant that pasta had to be made on a large scale in America. Because of this and of the collapse of Russian wheat-growing in the Revolution, America took the lead in durum wheat production; and even Italian pasta is now mostly made from wheat grown in N. and S. Dakota.
During Mussolini's rise to power between the World Wars, rumours circulated that he proposed to ban consumption of pasta and that he considered pasta responsible for the low state of the Italian people at the time. In fact, these were scare stories put about by his opponents. The only real opposition to pasta came from the Futurists, who denounced it as ‘a symbol of oppressive dullness, plodding deliberation, and fat bellied conceit’, but this was ineffective; see futurist meals. Rather than oppose the food, Mussolini actually tried to make Italy self-sufficient in wheat by a grandiose agricultural programme, which was none too successful. Nevertheless, a large acreage of wheat was and still is grown in N. Italy, especially on the Lombardy plain. The chief sufferer was the Naples pasta industry. Pasta manufacture shifted north.
It seems safe to predict that Italians will continue to be the leading consumers of pasta. Elsewhere in Europe the Swiss (partly due to the Italian element in their population) and French have, per capita, the highest consumption.
This is a technical but interesting subject which includes both the choice of ingredients and the equipment needed in order to shape the results (see also the section on pasta shapes below).
Pasta at its simplest is made from durum wheat and water. This special type of wheat is suitable only for pasta and semolina products, not for bread. Conversely, ‘hard’ bread wheat and ‘soft’ cake flour wheat do not make good ordinary pasta (although they are used for home-made fresh pasta, reinforced and enriched with egg, which overcomes what would otherwise be a weak, fragile texture).
Commercial egg pasta is made with durum wheat and about half the proportion of eggs to wheat of the richest home-made pasta (which can have ten eggs to a kilo of flour, i.e. four to a pound). Other possible additions are a little spinach for green pasta and, less commonly, tomato paste or beetroot juice for red pasta.
As for the instruments used to shape pasta, the oldest of these, scarcely a labour-saving device for it was very slow to operate, was the ferro, or iron rod, of Sicily, Calabria, and Apulia, used for making tubular macaroni. A flat strip of pasta was simply wrapped around the rod, pressed to seal it, and slid off. Sometimes a straight birch twig was used instead. In the Abruzzi a chitarra (‘guitar’) was and is still used to cut narrow strips (maccheroni alla chitarra). The device has many closely spaced wires, more like a zither than a guitar. A flat sheet of dough is placed on these and pressed through with a roller. In Romagna, a sharp comblike device is used to cut the sheet; the result is called garganelli. In Genoa a combined mould and cutter is stamped down on to a sheet of dough to form small, embossed corzetti.
The most important device of all is the extrusion press, without which it would have been impossible for round spaghetti to be made, while tubular macaroni would have remained a minor southern curiosity. This machine at its simplest is a piston and cylinder with holes at the far end of the cylinder. The piston pushes dough out through the holes. Enormous pressure is required, for the dough must be stiff enough to hold its shape when it emerges. The piston must therefore be moved by a screw.
Early machines had clumsy wooden screws, for the technical difficulties of making long metal threaded rods accurately made these uneconomically expensive until the 18th century. Extruded pasta was therefore rather a slow starter on the market. A small, primitive extruder, the torchio (‘screw press’), which has a barrel about 30 cm (12.5″) long and 7 cm (3″) wide, survives in the Veneto region, where it is used for making bigoli, a thick (and therefore easy to extrude) kind of spaghetti made from wholemeal flour; it now has a mass-produced metal screw. The most recently introduced hand-operated device is the combined roller and cutter for homemade tagliatelle, now commonly available and quite unlike any traditional machine. Small, electrically powered extruders are also made for home use.
During the 18th century Naples gained the lead in the commercial manufacture of pasta. In 1700 it had 60 pasta shops; in 1785 there were 280. Part of this success came from the large-scale adoption of an improved screw press, which was known as L'ingegno (‘the gadget’). The perforated die plate through which the pasta emerged could be changed to make spaghetti—at first a novelty—or macaroni, or any other simple shape. L'ingegno had a screw travel of almost 1.5 m (62″) and could thus make spaghetti of that length, which was draped and folded in half on long racks in the street. It was broken at the bend when removed, giving the traditional long spaghetti with curved tips. Kneading was still done with the simplest of machinery, as was rolling. Fancy types of pasta continued to be hand made for many years. Cooked pasta was sold in the streets from mobile cookers, and eaten at its full length by hand, which involved raising the strands at arm's length and gradually lowering it into one's mouth.
In 1878 in Naples, production began to be mechanized. The first machinery—merely a set of semolina sieves—caused riots, but the trend was unstoppable. In 1882 British-made kneaders, extruders, and cutters were installed. In Toulouse in 1917, Féreol Sandragné invented the first extruder which worked continuously, due to an Archimedean screw feed like that of a modern mincing machine. It became very hot in operation, and required a cooling system. The device was adopted in one factory after another. The continuously emerging pasta was cut to length with a rotating knife whose speed could be varied. Thus, for example, macaroni could be made full length with a slow knife speed; short with a fast speed; and with a very fast speed the result was little rings.
In 1933, the firm of Braibanti installed the first completely mechanized continuous production line; it was during this same decade that Mussolini's agricultural policies caused the main spaghetti manufacturing industry to be transferred to the north of the country.
Manufacture of pasta is by no means confined to Italy. It was begun in the USA during the First World War, when supplies from Italy were interrupted. And it is practised in a number of other countries, including Spain, Greece, and Israel.
Pasta shapes, very numerous and still proliferating, include:
A general point which aids comprehension of the diversity of forms of pasta has been well brought out by Stobart (1980), who explains that the ‘surface-to-volume ratio is important’, i.e. ‘it takes less sauce to cover a piece of dough shaped into a ball than to cover the same piece rolled out into a large sheet, which has the same volume, but a bigger surface area. Even more sauce would be necessary if the sheet were cut into strips. Ribbed forms of pasta (rigati) trap more sauce than smooth ones (lisci).’ Marrying a particular form of pasta to a particular sauce is indeed an art, instinctively acquired by Italians from an early age but needing to be learned by others.
See also farfel.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Chenciner, Robert (1994), ‘The Noodles of Samarkhand: Engineering Pasta’, in Look and Feel, Oxford Symposium on Food History 1993, Totnes: Prospect Books.
della Croce, Julia (1989), Pasta Classica, London: John Murray.
Serventi, Silvano and Sabban, Françoise (2000), Les Pâtes, Rome: Actes Sud.
Stobart, Tom (1980), The Cook's Encyclopaedia, London: B. T. Batsford. Also repr 1999, London: Grub Street.
