ossobuco wrote:I should give a link to this thread to Raphillon - he lives in Rome and is very knowledgeable and helpful. I'll do that..
Beth, even though I haven't actually read the travels of Marco Polo yet, I like the edition of the book, very pretty little thing..
Thanks, ossobuco, I'm still not able to send Pms so I can not answer, but I did appreciate both your advices :wink:
About pasta.... well China first developed pasta, this is a fact. Anyway chinese pasta is different from Italian one. Chineses make pasta with soy or rice, which are most common there. Although the tradition do say it was Marco Polo to bring it here, There are documents speaking of pasta a little before his voyage. One of them, written by an arab guy named "Al-Idrin" in 1154 speaks of "food of floor cut in small lines". This doesn't mean that it didn't come from China, naturally, just that come in Italy before Marco Polo.... once it come in Italy, anyway, my ancestors had the idea to make it with floor... So I think we can say Italians developed their own version of pasta, but the original was chinese. It would be interesting to know what kind of pasta is the one they found.... rice, soy?
And.... obviously, if it is a fact that pasta is a chinese invention, it is also a fact that Italian pasta is the best in the world, don't you agree? :wink:
As for pizza.... Well, this is a different story. Actually ancient Romans used to eat food in a kind of "focaccia", a sort of ancestor of pizza itself, they used like a plate, some says the original idea was etruscan. They also used to eat the "plate" at the end of lunch it was called "Laganum" in latin and "Laganòs" in greek (The plural, lagana was the same thing, but cut in the form of long strips, the actual "Lasagne"...) ... I think the idea to make it directly the main course is also an Italian one, for certain I can say around XI century AD it was called "lagano", ad a little later it was already called "picea", quite close to "pizza", isn't it? The idea to use tomato to mix the ingredients (obviously after America was discovered....) was also Italian and surely it was very common in southern Italy. I don't know if it was done at Napoli first, anyway.
The only kind of pizza that was surely born at napoli is margherita: it was prepared first for queen Margherita, the wife of Umberto I king of Italy by Raffaele Esposito, a Napoletan pizza-maker in 1889: tomato, mozzarella and basilico.
That's about all I know about pasta and pizza.... Well actually there IS another thing: I find very tasty both of them :wink:
) addiction. XVIII century, actually. it took more then 150 years to spread trough europe enough to be a common food.