[Sca-cooks] Noodles/Pasta

[Philip W. Troy & Susan Troy]

Gwynydd Of Culloden wrote:
>
> I was having a discussion with a friend and he happened to mention that
> "Marco Polo brought noodles back from China".  I told him that I really
> didn't think it was true but, when he asked, I couldn't tell him what the
> earliest known European recipe for pasta was.  Can anyone help here?

Well, unless there are sources I'm not aware of (well obviously there
are, but you know what I mean), it's actually an interesting question. I
don't recall seeing any pasta recipes in the various Harpestraeng ms
variants, and they appear to date from somewhere around 1250 C.E. They
seem to represent a cuisine from a part of the world that has easy
access to hard wheats.

On the other hand, BL ms. Add. 32085, an English ms. written in French,
dates from very shortly thereafter, maybe 1275 C.E. It has three obvious
pasta recipes (a ravioli, a woven particolored mat of noodles called
cressee, and -- ta da -- kuskynole, a fruit-filled pasta that gets
boiled and then grilled). This suggests that pasta was known in
_England_, as well as, possibly, in French court cookery, right around
the time Marco was leaving for the Far East. Assuming, rightly or
wrongly, that Marco "brought back" the idea of pasta to Italy upon his
return in 1295, we're talking about a negative number of years for the
idea to be established in England. That's quick.

More likely, the English pasta recipes are either simply descended from
foods known from the Roman Empire in Europe (for example, the tractae
Cato describes), or perhaps either "brought back" by early Crusaders or
carried across Europe from al-Andalus, where Islamic pasta dishes were
presumably well known.

> (Oh, he also said that MP brought back gunpowder ... any ideas on this one?)

I don't know. I believe it's been recorded that Friar Roger Bacon
experimented with gunpowder, and he died around the time Marco returned.
Again, we could be looking at time travel here.

Of course, everyone klnows the Chinese had time travel when most of our
ancestors were painting themselves blue and living in caves. Also the
Zambone ice-scraping machine...

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98