Italian food comments

[Serrart]

Originally Posted by Richard B

I read it originated in Greece.
Pizza History

And this about pasta, true or not?:

History Of Pasta

It is said that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy after his journeys in China. Perhaps this is due to the similarity between pasta and noodles, as the Chinese had perfected the long, thin noodle many centuries before.

There is another legend that an Italian sailor persuaded his Chinese mistress to show him how to make noodles. then with Italian flair, he rolled the dough into bigger and wider rolls, and pasta was born.

Spaghetti's popularity in the United States dates back only fifty years. It arrived here in the 1920s with the immigration from southern Italy. It is said that this dish was greatly assisted by Prohibition. This is because the only place where a glass of wine could be drunk, more or less legally, were the Italian speakeasies that all served spaghetti. There are about 150 major varieties of pasta, cut in every imaginable shape.

About the pizza, flat buns seasoned with herbs where even present in Old Egypt, those were definitely the archetypes, that we still do too and call them "focacce". But the classic pizza was born in Naples during XVII century, and in XIX Pizza Margherita (made with mozzarella and tomato)the basis for all our pizzas was invented in honour of the Queen who was visiting Naples. Now of course we put everything on our pizzas too, but they are still very different from yours, especially for the way it's baked.

About pasta, it's still an open debate; what we know for sure is that in Ancient Rome there was already prepared a pasta very similar to lasagna, called lagane (there 's also a latin recipe book). And for the first time something similar to maccheroni was descripted in a book in Sicily in 1154, before Marco polo's trip to China. By the way, as for pizza, the main difference it's the way it's prepared and cooked, I think. You have to eat in here to understand the difference, IMO.

Romy