However the name came about, macaroni eventually, and happily, met its famous culinary match. For some Italians and many Italian-Americans, macaroni or its regional variant eventually became a catch-all term for any type of pasta. Sometime between then and Kraft’s blue box, the grain used to make the dish became durum wheat and the name became maccheroni. When the Greeks established the colony of Neapolis-present-day Naples-they encountered a barley-based dish made by the locals and called it makaria. If this explanation is to be believed, macaroni as we know it today evolved from makaria, a dish made of barley flour. Even today, the meal that’s served after a Greek Orthodox funeral is called a makaria. How does all this tie in to pasta? Greeks used the word makaria to describe food made from barley, perhaps because barley dishes were a common part of funerals in ancient Greece. This Makaria is said to be Hades’s daughter, and she is, interestingly, also connected to a blessed death. Macaria offers herself up as the noble-born maiden, thus winning herself a “glorious death.” Because Greek mythology is nothing if not messy, there’s an account of another Makaria in the Suda, an encyclopedia of sorts of the ancient world. Demophon, the king of Athens, announces that an oracle has told him the only way to save the city is to sacrifice a maiden from a noble father. In Euripides’s Heracleidae, which tells the story of Heracles’s children, one of Heracles’s daughters is Macaria. The name macaroni has a somewhat-disputed etymology, but here’s one interesting explanation that makes a good bit of sense. The other pasta shape mentioned in the title of Martino da Como’s cookbook is macaroni. A variety of regional names for long, skinny noodles are used instead. It isn’t used in these dishes’ countries of origin. The thin noodles are used in dishes like pho and bun bo hue-but don’t expect to see the word vermicelli on menus in Asia. Westerners decided to apply the name to any Asian noodle that looked similar. Vermicelli is a long, thin pasta, and its name literally translates to little worms. He’s regarded as one of the first celebrity chefs in Western culture, and in addition to pioneering the modern cookbook, he gave us incredible recipe titles like “How to Determine Whether a Cow’s Udder Is Good” and "How to Dress a Peacock With All Its Feathers, So That When Cooked, It Appears to Be Alive and Spews Fire From Its Beak." (For the record, you want to look for a reddish color in your not-too-fatty udder, and the trick to posthumous peacock fire is raw cotton doused in alcohol.) Martino cooked for the Duke of Milan and Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, who was a close advisor to the pope and whose opulent banquets helped raise Martino’s profile. One of the first mentions of vermicelli comes from The Art of Cooking Sicilian Macaroni and Vermicelli, a recipe book compiled by 15th-century culinary giant Martino da Como. If pasta is from Europe and noodles are from Asia, what does that make vermicelli? Depending on the recipe being used, you could fairly put it in either camp, but it first emerged as a pasta in Italy roughly six centuries ago. Noodles from Asia are traditionally made with rice flour, and even wheat noodles like those found in some Chinese dishes use a different variety of wheat than durum. Durum wheat also sets Italian pasta apart from Asian noodles. And when semolina pasta is dried, it has a long shelf life. Dough made with durum wheat flour, or semolina, has a high gluten content that allows it to be stretched into different shapes. The region’s climate makes it the perfect environment for growing durum wheat, the primary ingredient in pasta, along with eggs or water. Whatever the provenance, Italians embraced pasta, and not just because it tastes good. This early Arabian pasta found its way to Greece as well the ancient Greek word for ribbon is itrion, and some experts think this is related to the Arabic word for "noodle,” itriyya. Some historians credit pasta’s arrival in Italy to Arab groups, who likely also shared their technique for drying it-which they developed as a preservation method on long journeys. And while the Chinese may have been enjoying noodles for thousands of years before pasta first landed in Italy, that doesn’t necessarily mean the dish took a direct route from one country to the other. It’s a fun story, but it’s also inaccurate: Pasta was already popular in Italy by the time Marco Polo made his famous voyage to China at the end of the 13th century. Most people know the story of Venetian explorer Marco Polo bringing noodles back home from China.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |