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Ciao, Monica
Since my work at the university, I have understood that a laugh can make a difference if you want to leave a good memory of yourself and some concept of what you explained in one or two hours.
And so, when during a training course it happens that someone asks which communicator from the past or present I take inspiration from, I answer:
The pasta.
A brief silence and a burst of laughter follow. And there, all eyes are on me again.
I really think so. Pasta is a great communicator.
From its beginnings "before Christ," to the first pasta-making industry, to the supermarket shelves of the twentieth century, to the social media of the two-thousandth century, pasta has spanned the centuries, evolving.
It is an example of a living food.
Its story fills books and museums, but it never risks becoming a relic from the past. Its voice is always fresh and current.
So my answer is a provocation to offer a different point of view and to remind you that you can make, touch, cook, eat, photograph, and tell about it, but even pasta has a voice.
In 1977, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a plate of spaghetti topped with a P38: Pasta = Italy = Mafia. The term is an impressive synonym for Italy.
In 2022, The Economist devotes its cover story to resigning premier Liz Truss as she wears a shield that looks like a pizza and wields a spaghetti fork spear. The headline? Welcome to Britaly. Again, pasta is an unflattering reference to Italy.
A product is as evocative as pasta gives voice to many stories: those of families separated by the Ocean, women's lives confined to the kitchen, the best memories, and the worst stereotypes.
Some numbers about pasta
16,9 million tons of pasta produced in the world in 2021.
(source: International Pasta Organization, 2022).
The Top 5 countries where pasta is more consumed in the world are:
Italy, 23, 5 kg (per capita)
Tunisia, 17 kg
Venezuela,15 kg
Greece, 12,2
Perù, 9,9
How is a fake news story born?
At some point, someone says something.
A person invents news to harm/help/manipulate. Sometimes repeats something heard around without verifying. The purpose?
To harm/help/manipulate/why not.
There are also historical cases of fake news that do not originate from precise manipulative intent but from simple human error.
Think of how many historical mistakes were unintentionally created by medieval amanuensis and miniaturist monks working by candlelight with hands frozen by the cold that infiltrated monastery corridors and libraries.
For instance, the one about Marco Polo discovering pasta in China stems from a misunderstanding. In the original manuscripts of The Million (The travels of Marco Polo), our traveler writes about sago flour, a starch extracted from palm trees that the inhabitants of the island of Sumatra used to make lasagna.
Although many consider the Venetian Marco Polo to be the discoverer of spaghetti, the truth is that the text contains no mention of any pasta.
By the way, this story of noodles and Marco Polo leads straight to the ladder of a steamship leaving for the United States. And since I don't know if you have the suitcase packed, we'll talk about that soon, but not today.
When and how does it happen that the Venetian traveler becomes the man who imported the pasta discovered in China?
Blame of a monk? No, that of a Renaissance humanist.
Two centuries after the voyage narrated in Il Milione, the humanist, diplomat, and geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio, editing a series of texts related to voyages of discovery for the Republic of Venice manipulates that of the Venetian traveler by conveying to the reader the idea that sago flour, of which Polo had brought a sample to Venice, was pasta in general. From this, someone later attributed the origins of Italian pasta to China.
This fake news led us away from the real story, and in writing Fertile Crescent, I am giving you the historical and geographical coordinates of our next move.
No steamer, wooden galley, and get ready to row.
Speaking of spaghetti.
Spaghetti Bolognese exists
There are two recipes for spaghetti Bolognese. Yes, two.
One belongs to the local tradition and is one of the best-kept secrets of the Bolognese home cooks; the other originated overseas.
Spaghetti alla Bolognese from Bologna is seasoned with a tuna sauce, while its American cousin with meat sauce and meatballs.
Both recipes originated in the place I love most, the home kitchen.
And from here, with different fortunes, their story begins.
The first is known to the Bolognese, perhaps not to everyone, and often not known in the rest of Italy.
The second is more famous but angers Italians who claim the recipe does not exist.
When everywhere around the world people cook and eat spaghetti Bolognese, how can you say that recipe does not exist? Especially considering you find it also in Italy, for instance on tourist or border (Italian South-Tyrol) restaurants menù.
Italian-American Spaghetti Bolognese
It is a recipe linked to the context of Italian emigrants who cooked with the ingredients available to them, mixing and overlaying memories that time and distance had made somewhat blurred.
In the case of spaghetti Bolognese, I guess an Italian family that perhaps had nothing to do with the city of Bologna. And neither the ragù was truly Bolognese, considering the presence of meatballs. That tradition leads toward southern Italy, certainly not to Bologna. A new recipe is emerging
Anyway, I feel sympathy, even tenderness, for a dish created in a HOME kitchen geographically and sentimentally distant "FROM HOME" (understood as homeland and place of family affection).
The only reason I would never cook this dish is that it contains a technical error. The long durum wheat pasta does not pick up the meat sauce, which slides off without sticking to the spaghetti. If you are in the right mood for it, it's better to use a short pasta format like macaroni.
Did you ever cook Italian-American spaghetti Bolognese?
Spaghetti Bolognese from Bologna
The dish is known in Bologna and surrounding areas. In the past, the low cost of the ingredients, the habit of cooking tuna and other fish, and the need to follow the Catholic precept of abstinence from meat on the days prescribed by the liturgy contributed to its popularity.
Among the recipes of Bolognese cooking, lean and otherwise, you find ingredients such as cod or tuna that you might not expect from a non-seafood city. Of course, this is not the only example I can give you.
The typical dish of Vicenza, far from the sea, is baccalà (cod) a la Vicentina.
Over the centuries, things have changed.
Bologna looked like Venice; it had canals and was navigable. From Bologna, you traveled by boat to Ferrara and beyond to Venice. Even today, there is a district called Porto since that is where the ancient port was.
I want to add a note related to the marketing of tuna since it was central to the spread of the dish.
In the late nineteenth century, Frenchman Appert invented airtight cans that supported the storage and distribution of canned tuna.
By the early twentieth century, the recipe took hold in home kitchens.
And there it remains, in the sense that the city's restaurants have never welcomed this too-simple homemade dish on the menu and, in this way, have limited the knowledge outside the territorial boundaries.
Yet the decision of the Accademia della Cucina Italiana to register the recipe at the city's Chamber of Commerce is an accreditation of its popularity. The registered recipe is with passata, but the version without tomato was and is just as popular.
Did you know of the existence of spaghetti Bolognese from Bologna?
My home recipe
The strength of this recipe? It is an easy and affordable dish that every family, over time, has interpreted.
This sauce is made with tomato but also without.
Some people start with a garlic base, others with onion.
The ingredient that is never missing is tuna.
I remember it was the dish for Christmas Eve and the Lenten season.
My family's version is without tomato, and so is my husband's.
Grandma would slowly cook a sauté of chopped onion and capers before adding the tuna drained from the olive oil and then crumbled with a fork. The sauce was ready after cooking for a few minutes. Then, it would become creamy with one generous ladleful of pasta cooking water before embracing the spaghetti.
Today, I also add a few knife-chopped olives.
Now it's your turn to add your personal touch to a recipe full of family variations.
Ciao
Next week, you will receive the special edition of the newsletter dedicated to the Via Emilia.
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Grazie, Monica