Okay, I can't keep quiet.
Pasta was created when Marco Pollo went to China and discovered noodles. He brought the idea back, and tried to reproduce it with local grain. Those efforts led to pasta, a more or less new type of noodle.
No way! That's just a legend.
And to prove it I looked for dates (and found many other interesting things).
Marco Polo came back from China in 1292, but there's document dated 1244 written by a doctor from Bergamo (a town near Milan) where he tells one of his patients that in order to get well he doesn't have to eat pasta (
Non debes comedare aliquo frutamine neque de carne, bovina nec de sicca neque de pasta lissa nec de caulis ).
This alone shows you that if in 1244 people were eating pasta in Italy, Marco Polo can't be considered the person who introduced it if he came back from China almost fifty years later.
As for pasta itself, its name comes from ancient greek (paste, I think...but Anna can correct me
) which means "a mix of flour and water". The Romans used this food too, in fact in
De re coquinaria libri Apicius gives the recipe for a
làgana pie, which is basically what we now call
lasagne (and we're talking 200 A.D.).
Some even say Marco Polo introduced spaghetti (if not really pasta), but that's not true either. (sorry, Paul
)
In fact spaghetti were probably invented in Sicily in a little town called Trabìa. There are references to a dish that looked like very thin stripes of a dough made of flour and water called
itriyya. That's actually an Arabic name (Sicily was ruled by Arabs) and even today some Sicilians call spaghetti
vermicelli di Tria.
As for Dictionary.com's definition of noodle (
A narrow, ribbonlike strip of dried dough, usually made of flour, eggs, and water.), well, this makes me think of tagliatelle more than anything else. And in fact tagliolini, tagliatelle, fettuccine, etc. are usually made with eggs.
On the other hand, pasta is made
only with durum wheat semolina [
Triticum durum], whereas "noodles" are made with wheat [
Triticum vulgare] and usually eggs.
Okay, that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about pasta. Sorry it got so long.
As for marinara sauce, what Yvonne said.
Elena
