파스타

Throughout the Middle Ages, as European scholars translated Arabic texts, they encountered these and many other books on dietetics and cuisine. one such work was the exhaustiveTaqwim al-Sihha (Maintenance of Health) by Ibn Butlan, an 11th-century Christian physician from Baghdad. The book was translated into Latin in Palermo, at the court of Manfred, king of Sicily from 1258 to 1266. Later, in the 14th century, under its Latin title Tacuinum Sanitatis, a lavishly illustrated edition was published in Lombardy. Among the recipes was one for trij, or pasta, accompanied by a detailed image of two women making pasta—rolling dough and draping the long strands on a rack to dry, a method that remained largely unchanged into the early 20th century. (Click here to see illustration.)

Arab cuisine also added distinctive flavor to the earliest European text devoted specifically to Italian cuisine, the late 13th century Liber de Coquina (Book of Cooking). In addition to lasagna, the inclusion of several dishes with names and recipes derived from Arabic indicate that the book’s anonymous author may well have been transcribing recipes from an earlier Arabic text. These include romania (from rummaniya, or chicken with pomegranates); sumachia (from summaqiya, chicken with sumac and almond); andlimonia (from laymuniya, meat with lemon).

In the 15th century, detailed recipes for pasta and pasta preparation appeared in Il Libro de Arte Coquinaria (Book on the Art of Cookery) by Maestro Martino of Como, dubbed Italy’s “prince of cooks” by Vatican librarian and fellow Renaissance humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi. Yet even here, in what is generally considered to be the first modern Italian cookbook, the author indirectly acknowledged the Arab roots of pasta by referring to sheets of pasta cut lengthwise into strings as triti (i.e., tria). The book also included a recipe for “Sicilian macaroni” made with flour, egg whites and rose water, an ingredient found rarely in the West but used commonly in high-end Arab and Persian cuisine. The inclusion of this costly, perfumed ingredient was further evidence of pasta secca’s value: Rose water was more likely found in a royal kitchen than a village one. Martino goes on to instruct the reader to cut the dough into long strips “the size of your palm and as thin as hay” and let them cure “under an August moon” when the air is warm and dry.

As delightful as this homemade pasta may sound, however, the common Renaissance manner of cooking it was almost abusive: Martino’s recipe concludes that “these macaroni should be simmered for two hours.”(Bartolomeo Sacchi disagreed on that point: In his own wildly popular De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine [Respectable Pleasure and Good Health], the world’s first printed cookbook, published in 1475, he recommended that some pasta need only be cooked as long as it takes to say three Our Fathers, demonstrating the early Italian taste for pasta cooked al dente, a term which means, literally, “to the teeth.”)

“So the English and German way of overcooking pasta is not a mistake, but really the old way, according to Martino,” chuckles Andrea Gagnesi, cooking-school chef at Tuscany’s Badia a Coltibuono, founded by Italian cookbook author and instructor Lorenza de’ Medici. Another of Martino’s innovations, says Gagnesi, was eating boiled pasta with a fork, as it was too hot to handle with bare hands.

ROBERT LANDAU / ALAMY

A 1970’s roadside advertisement in Los Angeles shows pasta in its most common modern form: the family-sized, cellophane-wrapped bundle of spaghetti.

Whether they prefer it well done or al dente, modern Italian food fans may find their beloved pasta easier to swallow than the idea of its possible Middle Eastern origins. Still, there is considerable evidence to indicate that the peoples of the Arab world played an essential role in the dissemination of pasta and pasta-making techniques in the West. This evidence also offers compelling answers to the three questions posed earlier: Durum wheat, pasta’s essential grain, was a common crop throughout the Arab world, from Mesopotamia to Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Muslim Sicily. Arab cookbooks were the first to mention forming semolina dough into dried, preserved shapes. And it was scholars writing in Jerusalem who provided the earliest known reference to cooking those shapes in water.

How is it that pasta, today so deeply identified with Italy, may have origins so far from Italian soil? Some food historians have suggested that the earliest pasta was an innovation of desert-dwelling nomadic Arabs, who relied on it as a handily portable food source. Others have questioned this hypothesis, pointing out that a regular supply of durum wheat, and the apparatus required to mill it, was beyond the capacities of nomads. Food writer Clifford Wright poses a compromise: Pasta secca may have made its way west with medieval Arab armies on the march across North Africa. It was, after all, a convenient and filling foodstuff and one easily transported, whether on camelback or, no less plausibly, in the holds of ships—some of which dropped anchor along the coast of Sicily some 12 centuries ago.