Pasta, in one form or another, is one of the most ancient foods on human’ table. Its

history, its use and its popularity run parallel to that of breads, not surprisingly since both use

wheat flour as the starting ingredient.

Pasta first appeared around 2500 years ago in China, though some scholars claim that

Arabs in the Middle East may have been the first to grow durum wheat (the basic material of

pasta) and may have also invented pasta. From there it was introduced to Spain when it was

conquered in the 800s. Scholars think that the Roman Empire had pasta around the time our

calendar started, 800 years before the Spanish. Whichever is true, it was the Italians who

developed pasta-making into culinary art.

Over the centuries each local Italian pasta-maker developed its own unique shape or size,

which is why we now have hundreds of kinds. By the 1700s they were able to mass produce

pasta, which reduced the cost and opened the door to even greater popularity. Small local pasta-

makers kept pasta production a cottage industry into the early 1900s.

You’d think they were the Italian immigrants who introduced pasta into North America.

Surprisingly, it was Thomas Jefferson who, thoroughly impressed, brought a spaghetti die back

with him from a visit to Italy in 1786.

TASTINGS Pasta in Central Europe

In Central Europe pasta-makers didn't mass produce pasta until recently. Pasta

was cheap, good and popular but Central Europeans ate it in a small number of

varieties, and less habitually than Italians. There were regular women pasta-

makers who went from household to households making an annual round to

prepare a yearly supply of pasta stock. The pasta-maker only requested flour, eggs

and plenty of clear space. She arrived to the house early morning laden with her

many strange tools and enormous wooden bowls, occupied a room or the

basement for a day and produced enough pasta to last a full year for the family.

People reserved her weeks or months in advance.

She mixed and hand-kneaded the dough in several of the wooden bowls, each

about a meter (three feet) in diameter. Then she rolled the dough out very thin on

flour-dusted table-top with a huge rolling pin and folded it over several times.

From the dough she cut the many shapes from wide egg noodles to fettuccine with

a knife. To produce the rice-shaped orzo pasta, for example, she rubbed the dough

through a coarse steel-meshed sieve. When she used up all the dough for whatever

shapes the housewife ordered, she spread the products on clean sheets to dry,

covering every available flat surface in the house, while she hung long pasta on

wooden laundry racks. Depending on the weather, it took the freshly-made pasta 1

to 3 days to dry. (The moisture content goes down from 25 to 10 percent). Today

a commercial pasta machine can do that full day's work in 4 or 5 minutes.

Today, pasta is in. Not that it wasn't popular in the past, but now it is highlighted and

even given center stage in culinary repertoires. That is fortunate for us, cooks because pasta is

nutritious, easily to prepare and suitable for many different types of diets. Like bread, you can

eat pasta with virtually any type of food, savory or sweet, bitter or sour. With the least of

cooking skill, you can prepare a passable or even good pasta dish literally in minutes. Pasta is

one of our most versatile and most economical foods.

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