World pasta day: history and curiosity about a symbol of the Mediterranean diet

Every year on 25 October we celebrate World Pasta Day, an event organised by the Italian Food Union. The first celebration took place in Naples, Italy, in 1998 and since then this event has been held every year in different cities around the world.

The aim of this celebration has always been to draw attention to the global and unifying role of this food, with its many nutritional qualities and multifaceted organoleptic characteristics.

World Pasta Day is a celebration born with the intention of showing how pasta is a healthy, sustainable food, spread across all continents and able to satisfy all types of cuisine, both the high end and the simpler, home-cooked. Besides being a pillar of the Mediterranean diet, pasta has been recognised as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco.

No, it wasn't Marco Polo to introduce pasta in Italy for the first time. This legend has been circulating since the first half of the 1900s: the Macaroni Journal (a magazine of the National Pasta Association in the USA) drew it up and published it for the first time in 1929.

Although far-fetched, the story (a marketing stunt?) successfully inspired a scene in the 1938 movie The Adventures of Marco Polo starring Gary Cooper. The facts told in the newspaper are about a sailor from the Venetian merchant's crew—a certain Spaghetti—who is said to have learned in China how to make long, thin strips of dough to cook. In all likelihood, the myth is based on a passage in Polo's Travels, where the author mentions a tree - probably the sago palm - which produce fruits similar to pasta. 

Precisely on the subject of trees and pasta, in 1957, the BBC Panorama aired a joke so well thought out that many in the audience believed it to be true. Set in Switzerland, it showed spaghetti growing on trees and picked by a happy farming family.

Due to a lack of knowledge about the still-new Italian dish, the station's switchboard was swamped with calls from viewers curious about the surprising "spaghetti tree". 

It has to be said that the last-century foreign literature has been a lot of fun teasing the imagination of readers and pasta consumers with improbable and sometimes hilarious stories and advice. For instance, the 1946 book You Can Cook if You Can Read even suggested throwing a spaghetti noodle against the wall to check if it's cooked: when it sticks, it's done.

After dispelling the myth of Marco Polo, the question remains: where and when is pasta born? What is certain is that it was consumed in Italy long before the legendary explorer returned from China.

Bas-reliefs on an Etruscan tomb dating back to the 4th century B.C. seem to depict tools for preparing fresh pasta. Also, the Romans used to eat lagana, an ancestor of lasagna, which usually served as a side dish with meat, fish or eggs. 

However, it was the Arabs who started to use dry pasta, a product particularly suited to remaining intact during desert crossings.

This type of processing first took hold in Sicily in the 12th century (the geographer Al-Idrisi wrote in 1154 about the large production of triyah in the region). Then, it became increasingly widespread as Mediterranean trade routes strengthened. 

Regarding the term 'pasta' as a product category, the word appeared for the first time in a text by Viceroy Juan de Aragón in the 16th century.

The first written evidence of the diffusion of the dish in Italy dates back to around the 13th century. One of the earliest - a notarial deed from 1279 - mentions a basket of macaroni.

Also from the same period is the Cronica by Salimbene da Parma, where the Franciscan monk talks about the traditional ravioli he used to eat as a boy.

As pasta became more and more popular during the Middle Age, it gradually began to be considered an actual course. Several literary references witness its growing popularity.

In The Decameron, Boccaccio recounts the fancy town of Bengodi, with its mountain of Parmesan where people prepared macaroni and ravioli. Indeed, cheese has long been the main seasoning for pasta, although there was no shortage of more daring and imaginative combinations on wealthy tables.

Back then, a pasta dish looked and tasted very different from the ones we are used to nowadays. First of all, cooking times were much longer (about an hour!): the concept of 'al dente' would only become popular from the 19th century onwards. The combinations were also definitely surprising and often involving a mix of flavours, from sweet to spicy. 

It was undoubtedly considered food suitable for the lavish banquets of the nobility. The recipes created in the 1500s by Bartolomeo Scappi, a cook in the Vatican kitchens, were renowned for their richness and originality.

His macaroni alla romanesca were prepared from a unique mixture of flour, breadcrumbs, goat's milk and egg yolk. The dough thus obtained was cut, boiled (for half an hour), covered with grated cheese, butter, sugar, cinnamon and provatura (a Roman cheese) and lastly, baked in the oven with rose water.

As can be seen, the range of flavours and ingredients was extraordinarily varied and unusual. Over the centuries, sugar has been abandoned, and the Italian “national dish” gradually took on the look and taste recognisable to a contemporary diner.

In the 19th century, the perfect marriage between pasta and its most famous condiment was finally celebrated: spaghetti in tomato sauce had the first recipe in 1837.