Pasta : the story of a universal food / Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban ; translated by Antony Shugaar.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Ranging from the imperial palaces of ancient China and the bakeries of fourteenth-century Genoa and Naples all the way to the restaurant kitchens of today, Pasta tells a story that will forever change the way you look at your next plate of vermicelli. Pasta has become a ubiquitous food, present in regional diets around the world and available in a host of shapes, sizes, textures, and tastes. Yet, although it has become a mass-produced commodity, it remains uniquely adaptable to innumerable recipes and individual creativity. Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food shows that this enormously popular food has resulted from of a lengthy process of cultural construction and widely diverse knowledge, skills, and techniques.

Many myths are intertwined with the history of pasta, particularly the idea that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China and introduced it to Europe. That story, concocted in the early twentieth century by the trade magazine Macaroni Journal , is just one of many fictions umasked here. The true homelands of pasta have been China and Italy. Each gave rise to different but complementary culinary traditions that have spread throughout the world. From China has come pasta made with soft wheat flour, often served in broth with fresh vegetables, finely sliced meat, or chunks of fish or shellfish. Pastasciutta , the Italian style of pasta, is generally made with durum wheat semolina and presented in thick, tomato-based sauces. The history of these traditions, told here in fascinating detail, is interwoven with the legacies of expanding and contracting empires, the growth of mercantilist guilds and mass industrialization, and the rise of food as an art form.

Whether you are interested in the origins of lasagna, the strange genesis of the Chinese pasta bing or the mystique of the most magnificent pasta of all, the timballo , this is the book for you. So dig in!

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

The latest entry in Columbia's series, Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History, is stuffed as tight as cannelloni with facts, numbers and quotes. If at times it is a little dry-through no fault of a very competent translation-it still stands as one of the most thorough histories to date of this beloved food. From the stuffed pastas of the Middle Ages (known as tortelli, because they were considered bite-sized cakes) to the artisan-produced pastas that made a comeback in Italy in the 1990s, Serventi and Sabban touch all the necessary bases and then some. A section on pasta in China begins with a lengthy "Ode to Bing" (noodles) by the scholar Shu Xi (264?-304?) and leads up through the Ming Dynasty, which the authors describe as the peak of pasta production in China, to modern-day ramen noodles, invented in Japan in 1958. The treatment of pasta development in Italy is even more complete and includes overviews of early pasta-making equipment and the role of women in its manufacture. The chapter "Pasta Without Borders," about the spread of pasta from Italy to the rest of the world (laying to rest Marco Polo myth), is an excellent study not only of pasta but of the way a single product can mutate and influence various economies over time. Perhaps too encyclopedic to be taken in at a single sitting, this is no doubt the exhaustive new authority on its subject (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This scholarly treatise on pasta delves into the origins and uses of pasta and its manufacture first by hand and then commercially. The detailed and critical analysis of primary texts debunks the commonly held myth that pasta was transported between continents by Marco Polo. Further, these careful explorations trace pasta's beginnings and transport. Word derivations, ships' logs, tax exemption decrees, early Chinese odes, records of emperor poisonings, and woodcuts and machine drawings are just some of the documents used to ascertain the use and trade of this foodstuff in China and the Mediterranean region, from Arabic countries to Andalusia. How and when various pastas are eaten, and why certain shapes and uses are preferred in different areas, are all considered. Food historians will appreciate the bibliography. There are many tidbits of information to add spice to one's knowledge of food, just as a good sauce spices a pleasant pasta. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels. J. M. Jones College of St. Catherine

Booklist Review

In the last 50 years, pasta has risen from ethnic oddity to ubiquity. A bowl of well-sauced spaghetti is both dinner and comfort food. Although pasta is virtually synonymous with Italy, modern historians suspect pasta originated in China and came very early to the Mediterranean basin, thanks in part to Arab merchants. Once it reached up the Italian peninsula, pasta developed in a wholly different culinary direction than in the East. By the fifth century, Italian cooks were already producing a forebear of baked lasagna. Pasta's march to universality probably began about the fifteenth century in Sicily, where the technique of drying hard wheat pasta for export came into being on an industrial scale. Naples' climate proved ideal for drying pasta doughs, and it dominated world trade until technological breakthroughs led to artificial simulation of favorable Neapolitan weather. Serventi and Sabban's remarkable tracing of pasta's history and development makes this a central addition to the history of food. An extensive bibliography testifies to the rigor of their scholarship. --Mark Knoblauch

Kirkus Book Review

Scholarly investigation of the quintessentially Italian carbohydrate. Quintessentially, but not originally. Food historian Serventi and French social scientist Sabban cannot precisely pinpoint the inventor(s) of pasta and take perhaps overmuch time at the outset laying out reasons why. Shards of linguistic evidence point to an Arabic origin, as does the fact that Sicily was a center of Islamic culture and commerce in antiquity. The idea of Marco Polo returning from China with a bowl of spaghetti is once again debunked with finality, but the roots of bing (ancient Chinese for wheat flour dough) in that part of the world are also plumbed. The authors aim to reveal pasta as a cultural hallmark that spawned a major industry, not to deliver new recipes; however, an extensive section on gastronomy over the ages reveals much. For instance, Italians spent nearly a millennium eating pasta, whether in the form of capelli di pagliacci (clowns' hats) or strozzaprieti (priest stranglers), cooked until it nearly fell apart and served without any tomato sauce. Available since the 16th century, the tomato was largely ignored in favor of sugar, cinnamon, and things like rendered lard until Neapolitans perfected salsa di pomodoro 300 years later; the term al dente was unheard of until after WWI. Emigration to America brought new phenomena: there were over 300 industrial-sized pasta factories in the States by the '20s, and after WWII, bureaucrats knew the Marshall Plan was working when pasta exports to war-torn Europe, boosted almost a hundredfold from prewar levels, suddenly plummeted. In the 1960s, inhabitants of the immigrant-founded town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, were found strangely hale and hearty while vascular diseases ravaged the surrounding countryside, causing doctors en masse to endorse the "Mediterranean Diet" of olive oil, wine, and, of course, pasta. Sometimes endlessly informative (for instance, on pasta-making machinery) as it offers more in the way of pasta history than most readers have even begun to imagine.