[Sca-cooks] Noodles/Pasta

[david friedman]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
>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).

Does he discuss the alternative that it derives from "losinge" via
"Loseyns," which is a 14th c. English (I think) pasta recipe. I'm
pretty sure that Charles Perry has a discussion somewhere, probably
PPC, that links "losinge" "lasagne," and something Arabic. And I
think he has an article arguing that there is no clear evidence of
pasta in classical antiquity.

>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?

Al- Baghdadi and Ibn al-Mubarrad both have pasta recipes; the former
predates Marco Polo by fifty years or so.  I believe pasta recipes
show up in the earliest post-Roman European cookbooks, which are
roughly contemporary with Marco Polo.
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/