Pastasciutta

When I was a child one of the dishes I liked the most was pasta with tomato sauce. There was not Sunday lunch without a nice plate of pasta and I still remember when Daddy would enthusiastically say, “Let’s throw the pasta down!”

The history of pasta is ancient and controversial. Thanks to the Americans and the movie starring Gary Cooper it was believed for years that pasta was copied from the Chinese—but nothing could be further from the truth. Pasta was a brilliant idea that came to mind by two distant peoples with similar but distinct raw materials.

Already with the Etruscans there are testimonies of the daily production of pasta. In the Grotta Bella in Cerveteri, from the 10th century BC, the images of everyday tools used to make pasta are painted. The Romans themselves were fond of it and there are various written testimonies on the “laganum,” from Horace to Apicius, who in his “De re coquinaria” describes its condiments minutely.

The only people we have to thank instead are the Arabs, who taught us how to dry pasta in the 12th century, and the Peruvians who “gave us” the tomatoes.

Italian dry pasta is made with durum wheat semolina or semolina.

The most common type of durum wheat is Senatore Cappelli, which has a fascinating history because it is the result of a “hybridization” of grains of various origins, some autochthonous of southern Italy and others of the countries of the Mediterranean basin such as Tunisia.

The wheat is named after Senator Raffaele Cappelli who financed the discovery, and it was invented by one of the greatest Italian agrarian geneticists, Nazareno Strampelli, who did not want to patent it. He discovered and hybridized many species of wheat, but he is not remembered at all.

The list of recipes contains typical recipes and family recipes. I have also added a modern practice: creaming. When I was small the sauce was poured on the top of the pasta; the condiments were always added on the plate immediately before serving. Today, however, the pasta is “sautéed” in the pan to finish the cooking so as to mix the sauce with the pasta.