Pasta is to Italians what rice and noodles are to the Chinese. It is Italy’s staple food, but is adored by people around the world.
Pasta comes in many shapes and sizes, from the noodle-like spaghetti, flat fettuccine to the butterfly-shaped farfalle and hollow penne.
In her hunt for the best pasta in Auckland, chowluckclub.com contributor Sophia Ling wrote: “I have always assumed that pasta originates from Italy. However, pasta apparently comes from China, and was brought to Italy by the explorer Marco Polo in the 1270s.”
She added that “this makes so much sense because pasta must have evolved from noodles and rice sheets”.
This month, October, is international pasta month, celebrating pasta’s role in our meals and encourages people across the globe to enjoy pasta in it’s many forms.
But was pasta really invented by the Chinese?
Some people believe spaghetti had descended from noodles imported to Italy in the late 13th century by Venetian merchant Marco Polo. It is thought that in the years that he spent in China, he learned many of the country’s traditions and culture and noodle-making was one of them.
But food historians disagree, saying pasta was already flourishing in the Mediterranean long before Marco Polo travelled East.
Pasta can be traced back to ancient Greek civilizations and later eaten also by the Romans.
Classical poets and historical texts date the first types of pasta to the time of ancient Greece.
Food historian Anna Maria Pellegrino, a member of the Italian Academy of Cuisine has been reported as saying: “Noodles are one thing, pasta another food altogether”.
She said the two reflected separate culinary cultures and identities that have “developed in parallel”.
“The way they are cooked, the pots, the types of cereals used, the preparations, ingredients and toppings are completely different and specific to each civilization,” Pellegrino said.
“There’s no direct link between the Asian and the Italian of Mediterranean ways of mixing cereals with water to create noodles or pasta.”
Food historian and Roman history scholar Giorgio Franchetti also dismissed the Marco Polo theory linking the origins of pasta to the Chinese as “pure nonsense”.
In a book he authored, Dining with Ancient Romans, he said: “The noodles that Marco Polo maybe brought back with him at the end of the 1200s from China was made with rice and based on a different oriental culinary tradition that has nothing to do with ours”.
Franchetti said between 1000BC and 800BC, the Greeks first mentioned the existence of laganon, a flat pasta sheet sliced into irregular strips.
This were the inspiration for what would become lasagne, usually cooked with meat and a tomato-based sauce.
The origins of dry pasta is linked to nomadic Arabian tribes to help them cope with long journeys across the desert. No links also to the instant noodles invented by Momofuku Ando of Nissin Foods in Japan.
These were launched in 1958 under the brand name Chikin Ramen. In 1971, Nissin introduced Cup Noodles, the first cup noodle product.