Marco Polo did not bring it home
A popular story says that the explorer Marco Polo brought pasta back to Italy from China in 1295. It is not true. In 1154, more than a century earlier, an Arab geographer working for the king of Sicily described a town near Palermo where dried pasta was made in such quantities that it was shipped all over the Mediterranean. The Marco Polo story seems to have spread in the twentieth century, helped by an American pasta trade magazine.
China had its own long history of the NOODLE, though. In 2005, archaeologists in north-west China found a bowl of thin noodles made from millet, preserved under a flood deposit for about 4,000 years. Our ancient China page covers the civilisation that made them.
A shape for every sauce
Italy has hundreds of pasta shapes, and many of their names are little descriptions. SPAGHETTI means little strings, LINGUINE little tongues and FARFALLE butterflies. FUSILLI are named after a spindle, because the pasta was once wound round a thin rod. ORZO means barley, which the grains look like. Stuffed pasta such as RAVIOLI and TORTELLINI have their own legends; in Bologna, tortellini are said to be modelled on the belly button of the goddess Venus. GNOCCHI are soft dumplings, often made with potato.
The shapes are not just for show. Long, thin pasta suits smooth sauces of oil or tomato that coat each strand, while ridged tubes like PENNE, RIGATONI and ZITI trap chunky sauces inside and in their grooves. ROTINI, with their tight twists, hold on to sauce the same way.
The dishes Italy argues about
In Bologna itself, ragù alla BOLOGNESE is served with flat ribbons of tagliatelle, never with spaghetti, and in 1982 an Italian cooking society even lodged an official recipe with the city's chamber of commerce. LASAGNE is the plural of lasagna, a single sheet. CARBONARA does not appear in any cookbook until after the Second World War; one theory links it to bacon and eggs brought by American soldiers.
PESTO comes from Genoa, and its name comes from the Italian for to pound, because basil, pine nuts, garlic and cheese were crushed in a marble mortar. MARINARA sauce is named after sailors. Real PARMESAN is aged for at least a year in wheels weighing around forty kilograms, and one Italian bank accepts the wheels as security for loans, storing thousands of them in its vaults.
Yankee Doodle's macaroni
In eighteenth-century Britain, fashionable young men who had toured Italy and come home with extravagant clothes and wigs were mocked as macaronis, after the pasta they had discovered there. That is the joke in the song Yankee Doodle, where the hero sticks a feather in his cap and calls it macaroni. In America, Thomas Jefferson served a macaroni pie at the President's House in 1802. Today Italians eat more pasta than anyone else, over twenty kilograms a person each year, cooked al dente, meaning to the tooth, with a little bite left in it. CANNELLONI, big tubes for stuffing, and MACARONI both end up in the oven with a SAUCE on top.