The Best Pasta Shapes, According to Italian Chefs

[Celerity]

4. the Chinese did not invent Roman/Italian pasta, that is a myth

Did pasta come from China? Absolutely not, historians say

https://www.todayonline.com/world/did-pasta-come-china-absolutely-not-historians-say



HONG KONG — Pasta is Italy’s staple food, but it’s not only Italians who indulge in platefuls of the doughy concoction every day. People all over the world adore it. It comes in more than 300 shapes: long, as in spaghetti; flat, as in fettuccine; hollow (bucatini); short, as in penne; the butterfly-shaped farfalle and ear-shaped orecchiette; tubular (rigatoni); and stuffed, in varieties such as tortellini and ravioli. It can be bought dry or freshly made from egg-based dough. World Pasta Day, held each October, celebrates the universal love of this staple of the Mediterranean diet.

But who invented pasta? Legend has it that spaghetti is descended from noodles, based on the premise that Venetian nobleman and merchant Marco Polo imported long, worm-like strands of the latter to Italy from China in the late 13th century. To many, though, the Chinese origins of Italian pasta are a myth. It is true that Marco Polo did spend several years in China, learning the country’s traditions and culture, and he may have brought Chinese noodles and other foods back from his journeys. But Italian food historians say pasta culture was already flourishing in the Mediterranean region centuries before he travelled east, among the ancient Greeks and later among the Romans.

“Noodles are one thing, pasta another food altogether,” says Ms Anna Maria Pellegrino, a food historian and a member of the Italian Academy of Cuisine. “They reflect two separate culinary cultures and identities that have developed in parallel, the only conjunction being the need for nourishment and, above all, to share around the same table feelings and everyday life events. “The way they are cooked, the pots, the types of cereals used, the preparation, ingredients and toppings are completely different and specific to each civilisation. There’s no direct link between the Asian and the Italian or Mediterranean ways of mixing cereals with water to create noodles or pasta,” she says.

Ms Pellegrino adds: “Ever since the birth of agriculture, man has learned to hone crop techniques and shape these to his needs, thus mixing grains with water was an automatic step which happened across all civilisations at some given point in time, probably simultaneously,” Historical texts and works by classical poets help to date the first type of primeval pasta to the time of the ancient Greeks. Mr Giorgio Franchetti, a food historian and scholar of ancient Roman history, is the author of a book, Dining With the Ancient Romans, which was recently translated into English. He roundly dismisses the Marco Polo theory about the origins of pasta. “It’s pure nonsense,” he says. “The noodles that Marco Polo maybe brought back with him at the end of the 1200s from China were essentially made with rice and based on a different, oriental culinary tradition that has nothing to do with ours.”

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