Where It Came From and How It Got Here

The idea that Marco Polo brought pasta from China to Italy is as congenial to Italians as the idea that the hamburger came from Germany is to Americans. No one disputes that the Chinese have made pasta, from many more kinds of flour than Europeans have, since at least 1100 B.C. Italians insist as a point of national pride that they invented pasta in their part of the world, despite considerable evidence that they did not. They cite as proof a set of reliefs on an Etruscan tomb dating from the fourth century BC, which depict a knife, a board with a raised edge that resembles a modern pasta board, a flour sack, and a pin that they say was made of iron and used for shaping tubular pasta. The Museum of the History of Spaghetti, owned by Agnesi, a pasta manufacturer near Turin, makes much of these reliefs, as do most histories of pasta—including the standard one, Anna del Conte’s Portrait of Pasta. The reliefs do not persuade the American historian Charles Perry, who has written several articles on the origins of pasta. “There are plenty of things to do with a pin besides shape pasta,” he says. In fact, Perry says, no sure Roman reference to a noodle of any kind, tubular or flat, has turned up, and that makes the Etruscan theory even more unlikely, given that the Romans dominated Italy soon after the Etruscans did.

The first clear Western reference to boiled noodles, Perry says, is in the Jerusalem Talmud of the fifth century A.D., written in Aramaic. The authors debated whether or not noodles violated Jewish dietary laws. (Today only noodles made of matzoh meal are kosher for Passover.) They used the word itriyah, thought by some scholars to derive from the Greek itrion, which referred to a kind of flatbread used in religious ceremonies. By the tenth century, it appears, itriyah in many Arabic sources referred to dried noodles bought from a vendor, as opposed to fresh ones made at home. Other Arabic sources of the time refer to fresh noodles as lakhsha, a Persian word that was the basis for words in Russian, Hungarian, and Yiddish. (By comparison with these words, noodle, which dates from sixteenth-century German, originated yesterday.) In the twelfth century an Arab geographer, commissioned by the Norman king of Sicily to write a sort of travel book about the island, reported seeing pasta being made. The geographer called it itriyah, from which seems to have come trii, which is still the word for spaghetti in some parts of Sicily and is also current in the name for a dish made all over Italy—ciceri e trii, pasta and chick-pea soup. The soup reflects the original use for pasta, which was as an extender in soups and sometimes desserts. Serving pasta as a dish in itself with a bit of sauce does seem to be an Italian rather than a Greek, Persian, or Arab invention. (Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, a wonderful book by Edda Servi Machlin, has delicious pasta recipes that show some of the many influences that the Arab world had on Italian food.)

Even if pasta is not quite as old as the Italians would like, it has been securely documented in Italy before 1295, when Marco Polo returned from China. In 1279 a basket of dried pasta was recorded in the estate inventory of a Genoese soldier, indicating that it was considered valuable. The word used was macaronis, a word whose derivation historians fight over. The one usually given is makar, the Greek for “blessed,” as in sacramental food. In Italy today maccheroni refers to tubular dried pasta; in America macaroni is synonymous with “elbows” to the public but not to many manufacturers, who use it to refer to any dried pasta made of just flour and water. Manufacturers use noodle to refer to a dough with egg, which can be sold fresh or dried. Spaghetti, which means “little strings,” is often used generically, for dried pasta without egg. Marco Polo spoke of lasagne, which then meant “noodles,” to describe what he saw, which indicates that he was already familiar with the food anyway.

The Marco Polo myth has refused to die. Italians accuse Americans of promulgating it, beginning with an influential article in a 1929 issue of Macaroni Journal (now Pasta Journal), an American trade magazine, which has inspired countless advertisements, restaurant placemats, cookbooks, and even movies. (From 1919 on, Macaroni Journal occasionally published articles purporting to give the history of pasta, usually—though not always—labeling the less plausible ones as lore. The 1929 story began, “Legend has it …”) In the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo, Gary Cooper points to a bowl of noodles and asks a Chinese man what he calls them. “In our language,” the man replies, “we call them spa get.”

In the centuries after Marco Polo’s voyage pasta continued to be a luxury in Italy. By 1400 it was being produced commercially, in shops that retained night watchmen to protect the goods. The vermicelli, as dried pasta was known, was kneaded by foot: men trod on dough to make it malleable enough to roll out. The treading could last for a day. The dough then had to be extruded through pierced dies under great pressure, a task accomplished by a large screw press powered by two men or one horse.

This somewhat gamy procedure was not used for other kinds of dough, but commercial pasta dough has never been normal dough. The flour used to make it—semolina—is granular, like sugar, and has a warm golden color. Semolina makes a straw-colored dough that must be kneaded for a long time, which is why it has always been far more common in commercial than in homemade pasta. Semolina is milled from durum wheat (Triticum durum; durum means “hard”), a much harder grain than common wheat (Triticum vulgarum), which is used to make ordinary flour. (The harder the grain, the more energy required to mill it.) All durum makes firmer cooked pasta than common flour does, but not all durum is alike in hardness or quality. The kind of durum milled into semolina and how a manufacturer makes and dries the dough determine the firmness of the pasta when it is cooked.

Durum wheat was suited to the soil and weather of Sicily and Campania, the region around Naples, and so the pasta industry developed there, in the eighteenth century, and led Italian production into this century. Naples had a perfect climate for drying pasta. The alternation of mild sea breezes and hot winds from Mount Vesuvius ensured that the pasta would not dry too slowly, and thus become moldy, or too fast, and thus crack or break. The number of pasta shops in Naples went from sixty to 280 between the years 1700 and 1785. Young English aristocrats making the grand tour in the eighteenth century were shown the city where pasta hung everywhere to dry—in the streets, on balconies, on roofs. Neapolitan street vendors sold cooked spaghetti from stalls with charcoal-fired stoves, working with bowls of grated Romano cheese beside them. Customers would follow the example of the barkers, who lifted the long strands high and dropped them into their mouths. The grand tourists assumed that the fork hadn’t yet caught on in Italy, whereas it was the Venetians who in the sixteenth century had introduced the fork to Europe.

Englishmen went home full of Italy, and became known as macaronis for their foreign affectations. In the mid-eighteenth century macaroni referred to an overblown hairstyle as well as to the dandy wearing it, which may be why Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called the effect macaroni. (A species of penguin with an orange-colored crest is called the macaroni penguin.) Doodle comes from a German word meaning “simpleton”—the same definition that noodle had at the time (honest, starchy foods like dumplings have long had bad reputations). The song “Yankee Doodle” was used by the British to ridicule the American colonists, who adopted it in self-defense.

Macaroni came to America with the English, who served it baked with cheese and cream, as was also popular in the north of Italy, and in rich sweet baked custards. Thomas Jefferson is credited with introducing dried pasta without egg to America, but, like the Marco Polo legend, this is a romantic fiction. He did take notes on the manufacturing process during a trip to Naples and even commissioned a friend in Italy to buy him a “maccarony machine.” He shipped himself two cases of pasta in 1789. By 1798 a Frenchman had opened what may have been the first American pasta factory, in Philadelphia, and it was a success. Upper-class Americans also bought pasta imported from Sicily, which had snob appeal.

Other factories opened, the price went down, and by the Civil War macaroni was available to the working classes. Books of the period indicate that the common way to serve it was cooked until soft—usually at least half an hour—and baked with cheese and cream. Macaroni and cheese, then, like many other dishes that the English brought to the Colonies, can be considered an old American dish. In the mid-1880s, according to Karen Hess, the food historian, cookbooks published as far from the East as Kansas included recipes for macaroni, some involving a tomato and meat sauce. One writer in Philadelphia advocated macaroni as a food item “more valuable” than bread. Americans did not take it up in large numbers, however. It lost its cachet once the masses could afford it, and the fashionable restaurants of New York did not serve it—or any other Italian dish—even though many of them were run by Italians.

The huge wave of Italian immigration that began toward the end of the century was ultimately responsible for pasta’s becoming a staple of the American middle class, but at first the immigrants put the rest of America off the very idea of pasta.