History of Italian Pasta (part 3)
plus a recipe for "mangiamaccheroni" (macaroni-eaters)
“Bills should be short and tagliatelle long”, the people of Bologna say
P. Artusi, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well
Thank you for reading and sharing. I’ll be eternally grateful for your support,
Monica
The history of Italian pasta is a journey that crosses centuries and cultures.
It begins in Mesopotamia, passes through Italy, makes its way to America, and then back to the Belpaese, where, from a food category without a definite identity, it becomes a national symbol during the twentieth century.
Pasta emigrates to America with Italians who leave their country looking for jobs and a better life. If the outward journey is in third class, the return sees her in first class, adorned with a beautiful hat where she shows off a green, white, and red feather. These are the colors of the Italian Tricolore flag.
Even though the Italian flag was born before the ending of this story in Reggio Emilia (Emilia-Romagna), those colors seem thought for her with that undeniable reminder of a tomato and basil spaghetti dish.
On the road!
In Italy, the 15th century means Renaissance, an era that perhaps has no predecessors or even successors. J. Hooper in The Italians (2015) quotes Harry Lime in The Third Man, 1949 (dir. Carol Reed)
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
The following century, the 16th, is similar, only more turbulent, in Italy and throughout Europe. Italy north of the State of the Church was a patchwork of semi-independent principalities, duchies, marquisates, counties, and tiny lordships. Wars among them and against foreign enemies were common, and political instability even.
South of the Papal State, all southern Italian regions formed part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ruled by the Spanish. The capital of that rein was Naples.
Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, knowledge of pasta, fresh and dry, is widespread even though it is not yet part of the everyday populace diet. And on the table of Lords and Princes, it retains an ancillary function despite the successful miniaturization of medieval pies into tortelli and tortellini.
Or it can serve as a side.
In the previous newsletter, my story concluded here, at the end of the sixteenth century.
What is the event that changes its status from food for élite to national-popular?
What about the historical moment when the appellation of mangiamaccheroni (macaroni eaters) passed from the Sicilians to the Neapolitans?
I will answer these questions, but there are some flavorful anecdotes before stopping in Naples in the 1600s.
The most famous Italian cookbooks from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, from the medieval Liber de Coquina to the sixteenth-century work of the cook Bartolomeo Scappi (1500-1577), recommend cooking pasta for a long time, even for hours. And they suggest serving it with meats or using it to cover roasts.
The custom still practiced in many European kitchens of accompanying a main course with pasta, a habit that emigrants spread to America, recalls a usage that was part of the oldest gastronomic traditions, including Italian ones, and sinks its roots in history.
Perhaps because of my somewhat Mitteleuropean disposition, it is a thing I like.
Between the 1600s and 1700s, the function of pasta as a side ceased, at least in Italy. And, although we are still a long way from the al dente cooking we practice today, in Naples, for the first time during the 17th century, the custom of quick cooking, even for dry pasta, became widespread.
I get it. It's time to tell when and how the Neapolitans stole the title of mangiamaccheroni.
The origin of spaghetti was not to be found in Campania but in Sicily; however, the stream that flowed from the island had obtained the breadth, the depth, of the impetus of a river only in Naples, a river that later flooded Italy and the world (Benedetto Croce, 1866-1952. He was an Italian philosopher, politician, writer).
What happened
Emilio Sereni (1907-1977), historian, intellectual, and one political leader of the Italian Communist Party, wrote research on this historical matter (I mentioned it in the bibliography you find below, The history of Italian pasta, part 1).
If Sicilians, since the 1200s, have had the nickname mangiamaccheroni, the conventional attribute designating Neapolitans is that of mangiafoglie (eater leaves, from the cabbage leaf that wrapped a nut of ground meat, typically eaten by poor people).
During the seventeenth century, two significant things happen
Spanish misrule and frequent famines cause a sudden increase of the meat price, which until then had been accessible even to the populace (albeit in small quantities and inferior quality).
Meanwhile, Neapolitan skilled artisans developed two fundamental instruments for the pasta-making industry: the mechanical kneading machine and the pasta press.
Sereni noted that technological innovations reduced the cost of pasta production and, consequently, the cost to the consumer. In Naples, during the seventeenth century, macaroni became a staple food. And Neapolitans became the new Italian macaroni-eaters (mangiamaccheroni). It happens when pasta and cheese replaced cabbage and meat.
Maccheronari (macaroni sellers) stalls, with the different pasta shapes hanging dry like cloths, crowd the streets and squares of the city. Pasta becomes a street food that Neapolitans consume hot and without a fork on the spot. Consumption is so widespread that it becomes an object of interest and amusement for foreigners visiting Naples on the Grand Tour, a journey of education and leisure for nobles and bourgeoisie from all over Europe.
Even the German poet Goethe (1749-1832), in his Journey to Italy (1787), describes the scene of the populace buying cheaply and consuming a steaming dish of pasta dusted with grated cheese on the street.
For understandable reasons, cooking time is significantly reduced. Lastly, pasta is accessible to everyone, even if it is not as widespread as we could suppose.
Among the people of the poorer classes, from the north to the south of Italy, soups, polenta, and stale bread are still the base of the daily diet.
The Risorgimento of Pasta
The eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century passed without any relevant changes.
Incredibly, to take another step forward, we have to wait for the unification of Italy (1861) when macaroni, a symbol of Naples and, by extension, of the Kingdom of the Due Sicilie, started to become an emblem of the new Italian nation from being a dish.
Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810-1861), was president of the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom of Sardinia, from which the new Kingdom of Italy was born, when the fruits of the Risorgimento uprisings that had spanned the first part of the century became ripe. Within a few years, after a quick succession of revolutions, Italians petitioned for annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia under Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy (1820-1878).
On September 7, 1860, on the eve of his army's entry into Naples, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) wrote to Cavour to inform him that "the macaroni is cooked and we will eat it."
Such gastronomical expression declined in a military context contains an implicit recognition of a regional diversity that necessarily had to find accommodation in the new national context.
On March 17, 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was born. But, using a phrase attributed to the Italian politician Massimo D'Azeglio (1798-1866), "Having made Italy, we must now make Italians."
Simplifying, but not oversimplifying either, the Savoy family created the new nation-state in this way:
they extend military service and transfer their bureaucracy and laws to the entire territory of the new Kingdom of Italy. Sic et simpliciter.
Conversely, they allow deep penetration of the civil service by officials and clerks from the newly annexed southern regions. And they use food in an unifying perspective. And writing food, I mean, especially pasta.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was finally a product whose use was becoming popular and a significant element in building the new national identity.
A substantial contribution to this process comes from the Romagna-born Pellegrino Artusi (1820-1911). The first edition of his manual, Science in the Kitchen and The Art of Eating Well, published in 1891, 30 years after the creation of the Kingdom of Italy, aims to unify the country's gastronomic customs. Exactly, as Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) had tried to do linguistically with The Betrothed (1827).
The contribution of the mangiamaccheroni Artusi
The publication of his manual marks the birth of modern Italian cuisine.
Recipes, tips, and stories collected by Artusi photograph late 19th-century Italy.
The book is written in Italian and has the merit of moving out of the regional sphere to compose a national overview, welcoming dishes from urban and countryside cucina povera, bourgeois, and noble traditions.
He is the first to introduce a significant number of pasta recipes, helping to bring it to the table of Italians and definitively spread correct and unifying cooking.
Speaking of pasta, there is a juicy anecdote Artusi himself told. It concerns the mangiamaccheroni nickname (the cookbook offers many historical tales).
In the foreword to recipe No. 235 Macaroni with bread crumbs, Artusi writes that, in 1850, he was lunching at the trattoria Tre Re in Bologna in the company of some university students, and among them was Felice Orsini (1819-1858), a young intellectual and revolutionary from Romagna who, in 1858, would make an attempt on the life of Napoleon III (1808-1873).
At that time, Bologna was still part of the Church-State.
Orsini, on that occasion, speaks too liberally about revolution and attacks.
Artusi, more shrewd, knows that inns are full of spies and, in order not to have any problems, prefers to concentrate on his plate of macaroni. The other Romagnolo was offended by the gastronome's behavior and, later, when talking to mutual friends, referring to Artusi, asked, "How is mangiamaccheroni?"
I end by recalling that the last step of the history of Italian pasta, which ends with pasta becoming a symbol of Italian-ness, is imbued with the strength of the men and women who, since the last decades of the 19th century, have been migrating to Europe and overseas in search of work and a better life.
This will be the topic of the upcoming and last newsletter devoted to the History of Italian Pasta!
Artusi’s Recipe.
235. Macaroni with bread crumbs
4 servings
Ingredients
320 g of macaroni
30 g of olive oil
1/2 liter of béchamel sauce (see the recipe below)
100 g of Gruyère cheese, cut in small cubes
60 g of butter
50 g of grated Parmesan + 10 g
50 g of breadcrumbs + 10 g
1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
butter or olive oil to taste for the baking dish
salt to taste
béchamel sauce
500 ml of milk
50 g of 00 flour
50 g of butter
5 g of fine salt
1/2 of teaspoon nutmeg
Method
Cook the macaroni al dente in salted boiling water. Drain in a colander and season with 30 g of olive oil. Set aside.
Make the béchamel sauce: melt the butter on the fire. Remove the pan from the stove. Quickly add a pinch of salt and nutmeg and all the flour. Stir vigorously to dissolve any lumps. Put back on the heat for a minute to toast the flour, and then add the milk, a little at a time, still stirring. Continue until the spoon meets resistance, then turn off the heat.
Preheat the oven to 200C degrees (392F).
In a bowl pour the macaroni, gruyere cubes, and béchamel and mix.
Then add butter, Parmesan, bread crumbs, nutmeg, and a pinch of salt. Stir again.
Grease a baking dish and place the macaroni.
Mix 10 g Parmesan and 10 g breadcrumbs and sprinkle the surface evenly. If you like, add a few flakes of butter.
Bake au gratin in the preheated oven at 190C degrees (374F) for 10 to 15 minutes.
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il mio nipote mangiate pasta ogni.