[Sca-cooks] Noodles/Pasta

[Volker Bach]

Gwynydd Of Culloden schrieb:
>
> 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?

The poor man gets blamed for everything, doesn't
he...

Apparently the idea of boiling dough is hardly
uncommon. Laurioux traces the etymological origin
of lasagna to 'laganum', a Roman dish that, in
Roman times, was probably baked rather than boiled
(but then again, so's lasagna). He also traces
'tria' (a medieval Neapolitan expression for what
he thinks are vermicelli) to the Muslim 'ittriya'
(no reference for this). Does anyone know of a
Middle Eastern source for pasta-like recipes? 13th
century texts (he refers to an article "Pates" by
himself in Medievales 17 (1989) for details on
this, which I don't have handy) are the first to
mention the words, and by the 14th century we have
recipes and treatments in books on dietetics (a
contemporary edition of the Tacuinum Sanitatis is
mentioned, unfortiubately without identifying the
edition). None of these sources to my knowledge
makes any reference to China or Messer Millione.

Got my reference: 12th century geographer Abu
Abd'Allah Idsrisi (sp?) mentions the large-scale
production of dried noodles (ittriya) in Trabia in
(then still heavily Muslim-dominated) south Italy.
Goodbye to that theory.

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

Unlikely. I mean, it is entirely possible that he
brought back some, or at least knowledge of it,
but he is hardly likely to be the first or only
European to do so. The Propyläen Technikgeschichte
(one of those quite monumental German works on a
given subject - wish they'd do one on cooking, but
that's probably too frivolous) traces the path of
gunpowder weapons from China, where simple guns
are speculated to have existed in the 12th
century, through India and the Middle East
(probably transmitted or at least helped along by
the Mongol invasions) to Europe, where they
probably arrived by the end of the 13th century,.
We have Roger Bacon's recipe for powder along with
the (quite odd) de Millimete illumination showing
a vase-like gun on a highly improbable table-like
carriage. A gun looking a lot like this was found
in Sweden and dated to c. 1320. If Marco Polo
brought back the secret of guns he must have been
inordinately careless with it :-)
there's an article on it in the Journal of Asian
Studies that I'm sure I have somewhere, but am too
lazy to start digging for (spent all day sewing
flags and guidons for the Nibelungen War)

Hail and Farewell

Giano