Nothing says Italy like its food, and nothing says Italian food like
pasta. Wherever Italians have immigrated they have brought their pasta
and so today it is basically an international staple. Unlike other
ubiquitous Italian foods like Pizza and tomato sauce, which have a
fairly recent history pasta may indeed have a much older pedigree going
back hundreds if not thousands of years. To begin to unravel the long an
often complex world of pasta we have to look at its origins and some of
the myths surrounding this now worldwide food.
Many schoolchildren were taught that the Venetian merchant Marco Polo
brought back pasta from his journeys in China. Another version states
that Polo discovery was actually a rediscovery of a foodstuff that was
once popular in Italy in Etruscan and Roman times. Well Marco Polo might
have done amazing things on his journey but bringing pasta to Italy was
not one of them, it was already there in Polo's time. There is some
evidence of an Etrusco-Roman noodle made from the same durum wheat as
modern pasta called "lagane" (origin of the modern word for lasagna).
However this food, first mentioned in the 1st century AD was not boiled
like pasta, it was cooked in an oven. Therefore ancient lagane had some
similarities, but cannot be considered pasta. The next culinary leap in
the history of pasta would take place a few centuries later.
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