Pasta

December 2, 2002
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

January 1, 2003
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)