What Spaghetti with tomato sauce taught me about my identity

And the quick history of this dish.

When I moved to the United States seven years ago, I went through a phase of cooking Tuscan recipes. All the time. I was surprised, because when I actually lived in Tuscany, I spent most of my time exploring the cuisines of other cultures.

I recently read a very interesting book, “A short history of Spaghetti with tomato sauce“, by the food historian Massimo Montanari, and I realized that the history of spaghetti with tomato sauce is a bit like my own history.

Listen to the podcast episode to learn about the history of this dish.

Transcript

Welcome to My Tuscan Roots podcast with me, Giuditta. In this episode, I want to talk about what spaghetti with tomato sauce taught me about my identity.

So, when I moved to the United States seven years ago, I went through a phase of cooking Tuscan recipes, like all the time. And I was surprised because when I actually lived in Tuscany, I spent most of my time exploring the cuisines of other cultures. So in my kitchen in Oregon, I compulsively read Tuscan and Italian cookbooks, trying to probably hang on to an identity I never realized was important to me.

So at the time, I was going through a full-blown identity crisis. I’d given up my job, my friends, my language, and my culture, and I was searching for something from my past to hold on to.

So as the years have gone by, I’ve come to accept that I can be many things at once. So yes, I was born and raised in Tuscany, but I’m not a piece of Etruscan pottery. And also having lived in France, I like to make galette des rois every year on January 6th, because I love the conviviality of finding the bean. Or I have replaced umbrellas with Gore-Tex, and I no longer attribute every illness to changes in the weather. I now feel at home in olive groves as well as in rainforests.

So I recently read a very interesting book called The History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce by the food historian Massimo Montanari. And I realized that the history of spaghetti with tomato sauce is a bit like my own history. So everyone thinks of the dish as Italian, but its journey has been a lot more complicated. So let me explain what I mean.

The simplest version of spaghetti with tomato sauce is made by cooking dried spaghetti in salted boiling water and serving it with fresh or canned tomatoes with grated cheese on top. But behind this simple recipe, there are actually thousands of years of history and innovations from cultures across the globe.

So pasta isn’t even an Italian invention because pasta has its roots in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium before Christ as a kind of thin unleavened bread cooked in a pan. And from there it spread to the Romans and the Greeks who shaped it into kind of like lasagna sheets and deep fried. And they used to call it lagana.

The idea of drying pasta to preserve it came later from the Persians. The Muslim Arabs picked up the tradition from the Persians and brought it with them to Sicily. But they didn’t cook pasta in boiling water to serve it as a separate dish as we do now. They dropped their pasta into soups and stews to kind of thicken it.

So today, the idea that you cook pasta in boiling water seems obvious. But for the ancient Romans, pasta was a kind of bread and was always eaten fresh. So they divided grain dishes into two categories. It was either bread — leavened or unleavened, baked using the heat of an oven or ashes or in a pan — or else porridge or soup, cooked in a liquid. So the idea of cooking a flour mixture in boiling water wouldn’t have occurred to them.

The transition to cooking dried pasta in boiling water and then serving it as a separate dish happened in the 11th century. However, a new problem immediately arose because cooked pasta was gluey and sticky. The new field of dietetics advised tempering the qualities of food to balance opposites like hot and cold and dry and humid. So to restore the balance of moisture and make the pasta less yucky, wealthy people added dried pepper or other spices, but poor people added hard cheese. So pasta with cheese has been a staple dish since the Middle Ages, but tomato sauce wouldn’t come along for a few more centuries.

Tomatoes were domesticated in Mesoamerica thousands of years ago and brought to Italy by the Spanish after the invasions of the Americas, only in the 16th century. At first, they were prepared the same as eggplants — sliced, seasoned with salt, and cooked in a pan. But like eggplants, tomatoes had a really evil reputation because they were both considered harmful for the eyes and were thought to trigger headaches. So according to doctors at the time, only fools would eat them.

But their reputation improved in the 17th century when the aesthetics of dishes became more important, because everyone appreciated their bright red color, of course. So tomatoes also began to shift into the sauce category in cookbooks. And tomato sauce was called Spanish sauce.

Then in the 18th century, the Spanish sauce became more popular because Galenic medicine preached that the acidic sauce aided digestion. But still, nobody served the Spanish sauce with pasta. It accompanied only meat and fish dishes.

So spaghetti with tomato sauce finally appeared in 19th century Naples. It grew rapidly more popular over the following generations until it became the quintessentially Italian dish that we know today.

So it was quite a journey for spaghetti with tomato sauce to become a traditional Italian dish. And like me, it’s a product of people and cultures from all over the world. See you next time!