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Pasta, the most famous staple of Italian cuisine, was first recorded in Sicily back in the 12th century; a few centuries after Arab invaders brought a dried, noodle like dish to the island.
Mainly made from unleavened dough of wheat mixed with water or eggs, and formed into sheets or other shapes, pasta was for many centuries a food reserved for the rich and privileged. It was not until the 18th century that industrialized production made it a cheap staple food for large numbers of Italians. Soft and malleable pasta dough is shaped into hundreds of different forms, from the simple strands and sheets of spaghetti and lasagna, which are further taken by bowties, seashells, wagon wheels and bicycles and sold in the markets and streets. With massive Italian immigration to America at the beginning of the 20th century, pasta’s popularity grew and it became known as Italy’s national dish.
But even as late as 1957, many people outside of Italy had no clue how it was made. On April Fool’s Day of that year, the BBC aired a story on Italians enjoying a bumper harvest of spaghetti due to a decline in the “spaghetti weevil.” The program showed Italian and Swiss families cheerfully picking long strands of spaghetti from “spaghetti trees,” and led many viewers to call in, curious about how they could plant their own.
PASTA POETRY: GOETHE’S ITALIAN JOURNEY
The city of Naples and the surrounding region, including Sicily, saw a surge in the production of pasta in the 17th and 18th centuries. On a visit to the Kingdom of Naples in 1787, the German poet Goethe witnessed the pasta boom firsthand.
“It can be bought everywhere and in all the shops for very little money. As a rule it is simply cooked in water and seasoned with grated cheese.” One day he was visiting Agrigento in Sicily with some friends. They stayed in the home of a family who gave them a dish of macaroni, whose shape, texture, and color fascinated the German writer. As they sat at the table, their hosts explained that this type of pasta was made only from the highest quality hard wheat, and then formed by hand into a spiral shape like a snail’s shell. “This macaroni they served us was exquisite ... The pasta seemed unparalleled to me in its whiteness and fineness.”
FOOD FOR THE COMMON MAN
Three Neapolitan beggars, orlazzaroni,eating a dish of macaroni with their hands in the middle of a street. The detail is from the oil painting “Macaroni Eaters” by Domenico Gargiulo, a 17th-century native of the city where cheap wheat and rising meat prices were turning pasta into an affordable staple.
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