SC - (Fwd) [SCA-CAID:10641] Something on pasta

[Jeanne Stapleton]

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Date:          Wed, 5 Mar 1997 15:02:21 -0800 (PST)
Reply-to:      sca-caid at anthrax.ecst.csuchico.edu
From:          gswitzer at loop.com
To:            Multiple recipients of list <sca-caid at anthrax.ecst.csuchico.edu>
Subject:       [SCA-CAID:10641] Something on pasta

 The Folklore column in today's LA Times Food Section had a short bit
 of 
interest to the ongoing "is pasta period" debate...

 FOLKLORE: Charles Perry

 OLD NON-PASTA

 Some people like to think the ancient Romans made pasta.  The Museo
degli Spaghetti in Campodassio, Liguria, promotes the idea that
macaroni was already known 2,500 years ago, when Rome was under
Etruscan rule.  The evidence is a rolling pin and a thick wire,
supposedly for rolling the macaroni around, which were found in an
Etruscan kitchen.
 A rolling pin and a knitting needle.  Hmm, not quite smoking-gun
evidence, particularly when Renaissance Italian cookbooks make it
clear that macaroni was originally a flat noodle and that the hollow
kind developed later.
 Sometimes people mention "tracta" as a candidate for Roman
 noodlehood.  
This Latin word basically meant a sheet of rolled-out dough (it was
called for in the making of a sort of cheese pie), but "De Re
Coquinaria," the cookbook ascribed to the 2nd century gourmet Apicius,
has a dozen recipes for which "tracta" is crumbled into boiling
liquid.
 Unfortunately, none of these recipes says to cook the "tracta" until
done.  On the contrary, the "tracta" was added as a thickener.  You
were supposed to "bind" the sauce with it ("obligas"-the sane word
when a sauce is thickened with cornstarch or eggs) and the resulting
texture was described as "smooth" ("levis").
 Try binding a sauce with crumbled dry noodles some time and see what
 you 
get.  For crumbling into sauce, "tracta" was probably not raw dough
but a sort of round cracker-a rather chewy, long keeping cracker like
ship's biscuit.
 But cheer up.  Though "tracta" wasn't pasta, it might have been the
origin of the medieval practice of thickening sauces with bread
crumbs.

 Wednesday, March 5, 1997

 Ishido Matsukage  (who's noodles are plenty period, thanks.)



jstaplet at adm.law.du.edu
University of Denver
College of Law
Ext. 6288