Spaghetti Does Not Grow on Vines and Marco Polo Did Not Discover It
The staid British Broadcasting Corp. once put on a somber, hourlong television documentary that showed Italian farmers tending spaghetti vines, harvesting the golden strands by hand and carefully hanging them in the sun to ripen, then popping them into boiling water.
It was, of course, an April Fool spoof, but the producers reckoned that about half the people who saw the program took it seriously and were enraged upon being told, at the end, that pasta does not grow on vines. It grows like bread, only easier, from flour and water and sometimes eggs in the hands of a good pasta cook.
The distraught British television viewers who thought they were seeing an agricultural miracle fell into a pattern of misunderstanding about pasta that stretches beyond written history, according to Eva Agnesi, 51, a no-nonsense pasta manufacturer and keeper of the world’s only scholarly center on the subject.
“So many people believe things about pasta that simply are not true,” she said not long ago in an interview, “like that nonsense about Marco Polo bringing it to Italy from China.”
Spaghetti Historical Museum
Agnesi, president of Italy’s second-largest pasta producer, the Agnesi company, which her family has run for six generations, also directs the Spaghetti Historical Museum, located in the medieval house of her ancestors in Pontedassio, a small town in the foothills that rise from the nearby Mediterranean coast to the Alps near the Italian-French border.
For more than half a century, her late father, Vicenzo, gathered the rare documents, artworks, cookbooks and artifacts that represent the only concentrated study center on the strings, tubes and ingeniously shaped lumps of dough that are called pasta.
Among other documents are those that show both the beginning and the end of the Marco Polo legend.
The origin of the legend was surprisingly recent, said Agnesi, whose father traced it to an American trade publication called the “Macaroni Journal,” still publishing after almost 71 years in Minneapolis. She said the Journal’s issue for October, 1929, included a story recounting how the famous Venetian traveler, accompanied by an Italian sailor named Spaghetti, observed Chinese cooks making their favorite noodles. Spaghetti learned the process and Polo brought a recipe named after his companion back to Venice, thereby opening the pasta era in Italy. The legend spread, and it still shows up in news articles and cookbooks.
A Doctor’s Prescription
“It’s nonsense,” Agnesi said. “Marco Polo’s book simply mentions that he saw the Chinese eating pasta-like noodles, demonstrating that he already knew pasta before he went to China.
“Also, we have a doctor’s prescription, written in 1244, instructing an ill worker to eat ‘smooth pasta’ 10 years before Marco Polo was born. In 1279, a soldier named Ponzio Bastone dictated his will to a scribe named Ugolino Scarpa and left ‘a basket of macaroni’ to one of his heirs, and we have that document, too. Marco Polo didn’t even return from China until 1295, and it was three years later that he dictated his ‘Book of Marco Polo’ while spending a year in prison.”
Whatever the Chinese and many other cultures, including the ancient Egyptians, did with flour, water and a boiling pot--most of them made noodles and dumplings--there is even older evidence that pasta as Italians know it was invented in Italy.
The oldest evidence of Italian pasta is carved in the stone of the Tomb of the Reliefs, an Etruscan burial site of 400 B.C. in the town of Cerveteri, northwest of Rome. Reliefs on the tomb’s supporting stone pillars show implements for making pasta, including a rolling pin, remarkably similar to some of those used by Agnesi’s more recent ancestors when they began making pasta in Pontedassio in 1814.
“Both Cicero and Horace mentioned lasagna in their writings, and the chief cook of the Emperor Tiberius cooked a noodle that sounds like spaghetti,” she said.
Food for the Poor
But for centuries Italian pasta remained largely a dish for domestic consumption, mostly by the poor, who found that a plate of spaghetti and a little sauce of vegetables, herbs, oil and sometimes meat went a long way at low cost--and tasted even better after Christopher Columbus brought the tomato home from the new world.
According to Agnesi, pasta probably did not reach North America until 1786, when Thomas Jefferson took a macaroni mold and a list of recipes home to Virginia after serving a stint as ambassador to France. Her father once said of Jefferson, “He fell in love with our national dish.”
Even so, she said, pasta did not catch on in the United States until the great wave of Italian emigration in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But since then pasta consumption by Americans and other nationalities around the world has taken off. An idle mathematician calculated for the museum that a year’s supply of spaghetti in the United States would circle the globe more than 215 times. Worldwide, the spaghetti consumed in the last century, if launched in a single strand, would stretch easily to the planet Jupiter.
Much of it, however, would be overcooked to the point of mushiness, not fit for a true Italian table.
“The Americans must learn not to overcook their pasta, because the good qualities get lost,” Agnesi said with a sigh. “It must be al dente, as we say in Italy, just to the right point and firm but not undercooked. Most people find this hard to believe, but pasta is more easily digested if it is al dente than if it is overcooked to softness. That’s why we give it in broth to the sick.”
‘Leave a Little Water’
Equally important, she said, is that it must be eaten immediately after boiling and should not be overdrained. “Leave a little water, it helps to prevent sticking,” she said.
She said she eats pasta at least twice a day, once for quality control at the huge Agnesi factory on the Italian Riviera, in nearby Imperia, and once for pleasure at home.
Another misconception, she said, is that pasta is fattening.
“Actually,” she said, “it is a wonderful diet food. The carbohydrates of pasta generate far fewer calories than equal measures of meat and are fat-free. Pasta also generates less blood sugar by half than sugar and considerably less than other carbohydrates such as bread, rice and potatoes. It provides energy for longer periods, too, because of its relatively slow absorption by the body. And there is no cholesterol.”
But it can be made as fattening as a cook wants to make it, depending upon which of the uncounted thousands of sauces are served with it.
“No one knows how many sauces there are,” Agnesi said, “but a recent cookbook listed 1,001. You can make up your own. In the summer, I like a sauce of tomato pulp blended with olive oil and lots of herbs--marjoram, oregano, garlic, rosemary, onion--you can add what you like. Then I add grated cheese. Some people say the cheese should be put on the hot pasta before the sauce, but personally I prefer to add it after the sauce.
Simple Pasta with Tomatoes
“In the winter, I like a simple pasta with tomatoes, or with mushrooms--with or without tomatoes. I also like it with vegetables, especially artichokes, or with stewed onions and olive oil, or the juice of roasted meat and Parmesan cheese, or with cooked zucchini or eggplant.”
As with sauces, there is a bewildering variety of pasta shapes, ranging from the classic spaghetti and fat macaroni to noodles with names like Wolf’s Eyes and Little Mustaches. The museum lists about 300 shapes currently made in Italy, although the Agnesi factory produces only about 100.
“Most of the producers make about 100 to 150,” she said.
A few years ago, one of the pasta manufacturers sponsored a competition among Italian designers to create a new shape. The winning design looked both beautiful and practical, an intricately double-folded tube which was grooved on the inside to catch more sauce. Unfortunately, the double fold meant a double thickness in the center of each piece of pasta.
“I don’t think it is sold anymore because it is not possible to cook it properly,” Agnesi said.
But the search for new and pleasing shapes goes on, she said, and added:
“There’s room for fantasy. Something new can still be found.”
