5 Interesting Curiosities About Pasta
It is one of the basic ingredients of the Mediterranean diet and it’s consume in Italy is over 1 million and 600 thousand tons a year.
Pasta, loved and known throughout the world as a symbol of Italian culinary tradition, has a very ancient history, full of nice anecdotes.
Here are 5 of the most interesting curiosities about pasta that a lover of this food should absolutely know.
AT THE ROOTS OF PASTA
We begin this journey on pasta curiosities from the etymological origin of this term.It seems that the term pasta derives its origins from the Greek πάστα (pàsta), which can be translated with flour with sauce, and a substantive form of the verb pàssein, or knead.
THE BIRTH OF SPAGHETTI
It is said that the first spaghetti arrived in the West back in 1292, when Marco Polo returned from his trip to China. However, some studies confirm the presence of this type of pasta in Italy already around the year 1000. In a document dating back to 1154, in fact, the Arab geographer Al-Idrin, describes the tryha, a food produced in Palermo, as a particular food in the form of flour-based threads. It is therefore probable that the first spaghetti were introduced into Italy by the Arabs, more than two centuries before the journey undertaken by Marco Polo towards the East!
THE MOST FAMOUS PASTA IN THE WORLD
As we know, pasta is perhaps the best known Italian food abroad. And the clichés related to Italian culinary traditions are certainly not few. To confirm this, you should know that among the most popular pasta recipes beyond national borders there are the famous spaghetti with meatballs, made famous by the cartoon Lilly and the Wanderer, but in Italy this dish practically does not exist! Maybe, first eat the spaghetti with the sauce (perhaps prepared with meatballs) and then the meatballs as a second course. But in Italy you will never see a mixed plate of spaghetti and meatballs together!
THE ANTENATE OF THE LASAGNA
About Lasagna it has been spoken since the First Century BC. In some texts, Horace and Cicero weave the praises of a dish called Làgana, a term that used to indicate a crushed flour cooked in water. The link between the current lasagna and this ancient dish is underlined by the shape of the same: the cheeses were in fact characterized by small and thin strips of pasta, made with flour and water.
THE CULT OF “PASTAFARIANI“
In addition to being good to eat, pasta is also excellent to adore. This food is, in fact, at the base of Pastafarianism, a parodic religion created by Bobby Henderson as a sign of protest against the decision of the council for education in Kansas to replace, in science courses, the theories of evolution with those of creationism.
Seconds the followers of this cult the whole Universe would have been created by a rather particular entity: the Prodigious Spaghetto Volante, a monster with long tentacles of spaghetti and large eyes, made of meat balls.
And what curiosity about pasta do you know? Leave a comment below.
