In Praise of Pasta Secca. Part II. In The Beginning.
Possibilities for Spaghetti with a Simple Tomato Sauce.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely appreciate a silky yellow blanket of pasta sfloglia all’uovo rolled out by hand on a basic kitchen table. The sight itself is so inviting that you’d be tempted to get under it to take a nap. The break of the bright yolks into the middle of the snowy well, the dabbing and gentle circular motions of the hand, the pushes and pulls and the stretch, roll and snap that cuts the air. It’s an early morning kitchen dance that I’ve watched my mother-in-law perform hundreds of times with her long wooden mattarello, the sound of morning Mass in sottofondo, eyes nearly closed working with love, arms flexed with purpose and speed. Cut. Cut. Cut. Fingers tips pressed. The final ceremony around its rich consumption even more comforting.
But I find the world of pasta secca or pastasciutta (pa-sta-shoo-ta) and its origins, story, and the role that it plays in feeding today’s world to be particularly fascinating. A few years ago, Riccardo came in the door with the gift of a compact yellow book – ‘A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce’ written by Massimo Montanari, who teaches Medieval and Food History at the University of Bologna, where he founded the Master ‘History and Culture of Food’. I had come across his writings while earning a similar Master, and since Italian Food History is a much loved subject of mine, I dug right in. In this book, Montanari deconstructs stereotypes to show us how one of the most recognisable symbols of Italian cuisine and national identity is the product of centuries of encounters, dialogue, and exchange.
MASSIMO MONTANARI AND THE BIRTH OF PASTA SECCA
On this pasta journey, Montanari cancels out the Marco Polo myth which even managed to infiltrate my own American childhood. Like so many other culinary stories, he begins in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome where variants closer to bread were consumed and sometimes used as an ingredient for other recipes. Pasta secca took on a new shape in the Jewish culture where it was carried throughout the Western Mediterranean by Jewish merchants, but it was the Arabs who were responsible for its wider dispersion when they introduced it into their conquered territories which included medieval Arab Sicily. Montanari tells us that pasta culture, mostly relating to pasta secca, goes into a period of incubation where it becomes a sign of Sicilian identity before we head to Spanish ruled Naples in the 16th and 17th centuries.
NEAPOLITIANS FROM LEAVES TO MACCHERONI
Montanari sites Emilio Sereni who in 1958 wrote the classic masterpiece ‘Note di storia dell’alimentazione nel Mezzogiorno: i napoletani da <mangia foglia> a <mangiamaccheroni>’ , which loosely translates into ‘Notes on the History of Food in the South: The Neapolitans from <leaf eaters> to <maccheroni eaters>’. Here, Sereni teaches us that ‘the story of food is a complex area of study where economy and culture, technique and politics, material and imagination meet’. In 1630, a perfect crossroads of these disciplines was created in a moment of radical change when a population traditionally nourished on meat and cabbage, was forced to seek out a new diet due to a food shortage created by famines and poor Spanish rule. Pasta had previously existed as a luxury side dish in haute cuisine, but in the 17th century it descended from this status to become the new main staple of the masses. This transformation was assisted by the utilisation of two widespread machines used for textiles and pressing grapes and this first step towards industrialisation increased availability, while drastically reducing price. This is where maccheroni together with cheese became the new food base of Neapolitans. The tomato was also gaining acceptance during this time, after entering Italy with the Spanish in the mid-1500’s. The earliest recipe for tomato sauce was published in 1694, by Neapolitan chef Antonio Latini in his book ‘Lo Scalco alla Moderna’ or, ‘The Modern Steward’.
THE GROWTH OF PASTA SECCA IN THE 19th AND 20th CENTURIES
Agnese Portincasa, from her academic seat in Bologna, delivers her essay 'Pasta as a stereotype of Italian cuisine. Symbolic heritage and national identity in twentieth-century Italy’, which appeared in n. 3 of the year 2007 of the magazine 'Storicamente’. In her words, we see how 'the cuisine of a territory and of a nation is certainly an expression of its culture, of its economic evolution and of its history' as she takes us through an intricate but interesting timeline of natural sequences that prompt the rise of pasta secca through the 19th and 20th centuries.
She points out how mass immigration at the end of the 19th century, together with the war economy triggered in WWI, led to massive industry growth as companies like Barilla were logistically poised to feed millions of soldiers on the front allowing for external market growth while the internal market remained weak. ‘The emigrants, more significantly than the Italians living in their homeland, contribute to the growth and establishment of the semi-industrial activities linked to the transformation of typical products, which the internal market with little probability could have kept alive.’
During WWII all levels of Italian society suffered a miserable climate especially felt throughout the 1940’s and the economic boom that followed with its decadent consumption was a backlash to centuries of Italian hunger. During this time, ‘Pasta imposes itself as an identity food, also and above all because it lends itself well to satisfying a vast amount of advantages: it is a food with a high symbolic value since quite remote times and therefore the custodian of the value of continuity, but it is also economic, of excellent satiating and nutritional satisfaction, of easy domestic preparation of industrial production.’
In a Mad Men moment, the continued growth of the market in this mass dimension is fostered by a minestra of cross border imagery of visual culture in the form of cinema and television as well as branding, advertising and marketing where ‘food and pasta in particular, sometimes becomes the central protagonist of many scenes’. The internal migration of Italians from the South to the North of the country to fuel this economic fire and demand of the time, greatly contributed to how this typically Southern dish became the symbol of Italian unity and identity.
In the 1960’s the development of supermarkets allowed for continued mass distribution. ‘Starting from the 1960s, the revolution in the field of distribution begins, the first supermarket chains and women, less and less relegated to a purely domestic role, have the need for tasty food but also for simple and quick preparation.’
THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY AND POWER ON A PLATE
Both Montanari and Portincasa show us how pasta secca continues to conform to the needs of a historical time and of a changing society, and it continues to do so today. Historians have repeatedly highlighted, how ‘no food can survive for a long time in use if it is not adaptable to the life circumstances of the person who consumes it.’ I do hope that those of you who have further interest in this topic will independently visit these texts.
It can boggle the mind to think about how much history and power that one plate can hold. As Montanari points out this dish ‘is realised in hundreds of formats and thousands of recipes, with procedures linked to cities and rural territories, and in those preparations we get to know stories, traditions and different tastes, distributing throughout the country in a capillary way, a culture of food that cannot compare when it comes to variety and unpredictability’.
Regardless of one’s knowledge and experience of the Italian kitchen, this is, in fact, as I’m sure many will agree, a perfect entry point for gaining skill, especially because a simple tomato sauce as a base has the potential to become so many other things. Like any recipe, I really believe that, while always keeping authenticity in mind, it is important to embrace a version that works for you. Through the years I have paged through many classic Italian cookbooks where authors offer up various techniques for creating a simple tomato sauce, and then there are the techniques and ways that I have observed in kitchens that were not my own. Personally, I prepare different versions of a simple tomato sauce depending on my mood, what we have in the kitchen, what else we might be serving on the table and sometimes my decision even depends on the temperature outside. It’s a notion really.
In PART III we will examine a little history that focuses mostly on the ingredients used in both pasta fresca as well as pasta secca, looking at their nutritional makeup and how and why these products have varied from North to South. I will also talk about the different versions of the simple tomato sauce that I make in my kitchen for those of you who don’t already have your own to hand.
With this I will leave you Montanari’s recommendations for the creation of a simple tomato sauce to toss with your spaghetti and top with Parmesan cheese:
‘Let’s add olive oil…. Let’s add the garlic and/or the onion (choosing between one or the other, or keep them together, it will only be a matter of taste). We will not deny ourselves a basil leaf, now a commonplace of Italianity. Salt. We could stop here, but a handful of chili is recommended in most recipes.’