ROME
ORETTA ZANINI DE VITA, the pre-eminent Italian food historian, seems
to have a tool for every pasta: a centuries-old ravioli cutter, a
wooden stamp that mints pasta like coins, a chitarra for creating thick
strands of tagliatelle.
On a recent morning, as she leaned over a custom-made poplar-wood
board and rolled out a simple dough of eggs and flour for a southern
Italian-style strozzapreti, she took out a long, thin reed.
“If you don’t have a reed, you can always use an umbrella spoke,”
she said cheerily, rolling flat strips of dough around the reed until
the sides curled.
Ms. Zanini De Vita, a sprightly 73, has curly blond hair and bright
blue eyes that light up when she gets animated — which is often. As she
raced around her ground-floor apartment fetching ingredients and
utensils, her white cotton smock trimmed with lace gave her the
appearance of a cherubic altar boy.
Her conversation is as animated as her cooking. Her words flow like
a river in full flood as she speaks about pasta, the subject of her
latest book, the “Encyclopedia of Pasta,” which just appeared in
English from the University of California Press,
translated by the Rome-based food writer Maureen B. Fant, who has
contributed articles to The New York Times. Through hundreds of
descriptions of pasta styles, with explanations of their origins and of
how they’re made, the book places pasta in its social and historical
context.
“I think of her as a kind of Julia Child,”
said Mona Talbott, the executive chef at the American Academy in Rome
and coordinator of its Rome Sustainable Food Project, founded by Alice Waters. “Julia Child demystified French food. Oretta demystifies pasta.”
Indeed, in its 300-odd pages, the “Encyclopedia of Pasta” ranges
from abbotta pezziende, a short pasta that means “feed the beggar” in
Abruzzo dialect, to the zumari of Puglia, a long pasta traditionally
added to vegetable soups. In between there are the corzetti of Liguria
and Piedmont, the little stamped-out coins; pi fasacc of Lombardy,
which look like little babies in a papoose; avemarie, which cook for as
long as it takes to say a Hail Mary; and several dozen variations on
macaroni and ravioli. Each illustrated entry lists ingredients,
provenance and how the pasta is traditionally served.
The range of shapes shows that cooking “was a way of self-expression
for women to show their creativity and imagination with little or no
resources,” Ms. Talbott said. She cited gnocchi ricci, or curly
gnocchi, a specialty of Amatrice in Lazio, the city famous for
spaghetti all’amatriciana, which are made by kneading together one
dough made with flour and eggs, another made with flour, boiling water
and salt.
The book also explodes a few myths. Do not think of mentioning the popular belief that Marco Polo
had a role in the history of pasta. “Ma no,” she said in a jovial
paroxysm of outrage. “When Marco Polo came back they had been eating
pasta in Italy for 200 years!”
Instead, she notes in her encyclopedia, dried pasta made with durum
wheat was found in Italy starting around A.D. 800. It was spread by the
Muslim conquerors of Sicily, and by the 12th century the maritime
republics of Genoa and Pisa marketed dried pasta.
“Documents exist to prove this, should there be anyone left — and
it appears that there is — who still believes that Marco Polo
introduced noodles into Italy in 1296 on his return to Venice from
China,” she writes.
Ms. Zanini De Vita knows her pasta and her history. She was born in
Bologna, the sine qua non of Italian culinary excellence. Her father
was an architect and painter. Her mother died shortly after she was
born, and she learned to cook from the nuns at the convent school where
she was educated.
“I always left the study room to see what the sister was up to in
the kitchen,” she recalled. The nuns taught the girls that their
tortellini dough was thin enough only when they held it up the window
and could see the nearby Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca.
Before agreeing to demonstrate her own pasta-making techniques, Ms.
Zanini De Vita, who used to run her own cooking school and still
teaches the occasional lesson, insisted it be known that the
“Encyclopedia of Pasta” is not “a recipe book.”
She is correct; it is a social history disguised as a food book. A
repository of collective memory, it shows a country so varied as to
defy unification, and so poor for so long that pasta was a luxury for
four-fifths of Italians until the prosperity that came after World War
II.
For centuries “pasta was a luxury, you ate it only inside vegetable
soup,” Ms. Zanini DeVita said. In the southern Basilicata region it was
eaten “once or twice a year: for Easter, Christmas and Carnival.” Flour
was for the rich. “The poor wouldn’t even see it in paintings,” she
said. Time and again in her research she was struck by “the poverty of
Southern Italy — of all Italy but of the south in particular,” she
added.
In a restaurant in Puglia, she once came across spaghetti di grano
arso con le vongole, burnt-flour spaghetti with clams. It stems from
the days when the poor would comb the threshing floor for crumbs left
behind after milling, toasting what they found. “It has a slightly
smoky flavor, and I have to say it goes very well with clams,” she
said. “Now it’s a niche product. I suppose they make it by toasting the
flour.”
The history of pasta is also the history of conquest. The
orecchiette of Puglia, “little ears” that lovingly show their makers’
thumbprints, date back to the 13th-century domination of Southern Italy
by the Angevins of France. “They resemble the crosets of Provence,
which are still made in Piedmont with the same name,” she writes.
To research the book, Ms. Zanini De Vita spent four years traveling
around Italy, poking around in archives and interviewing hundreds of
people, sometimes striking up conversations with old women sitting
outside the local church. “In some towns, the first thing I’d do is
talk to the parish priest,” she said.
Her husband, Carlo De Vita, a historian of arms and armor and
consultant to the Vatican Museums who died several years ago, traveled
with her and helped her decipher old manuscripts, like naval records of
pasta shipments.
“In food there’s lots of regionalism,” Ms. Zanini De Vita said. “Everyone thinks he has the most authentic recipe.”
When her book first appeared in Italian four years ago, “I know that
I ruffled some feathers since I said it wasn’t true that ravioli
originated in Liguria,” she said, “even though they say they were the
creators.” (Instead, she traces its origins to the 11th-century Arab
world.)
“I said, ‘Show me the documents,’ ” she said emphatically. “For now, the documents don’t show that.”
The journey also revealed much about the narcissism of small
differences. In one town in Lazio, she discovered the same pasta called
by different names in different parts of town. “Four hundred meters
away,” she cried. “As close as my house is from the bus stop down the
block. Everywhere you go there are these envies, these stupid
provincial arguments.”
Isn’t it enough to make one question how Italy could ever have been
unified into a country? Yes, came her quick response. The unification
of Italy in the 1860s “was a big error,” she said. “They should have
made a country like Switzerland, connected states.”
By now, the cherry tomatoes
Ms. Zanini De Vita had put into the oven to serve with the
strozzapreti, were done roasting. She ducked into her tiny galley
kitchen, designed to be small enough so that no one can bother her
while she cooks, and took them out. She mushed them animatedly with a
wooden spoon, sprinkling in a mixture of aged Parmesan, basil and
garlic from near Sulmona in Abruzzo that she had ground in a food
processor. She tossed them with the cooked pasta, adding olive oil.
Hers came from Sabina, outside Rome. “It has to be very good oil,” she
said.
It was. The pasta was delicious and chewy. The roasted tomatoes had
melted into a rich paste, with a tiny kick of garlic and the coarseness
of the Parmesan to bind them.
The rules for which kind of sauce goes with which kind of pasta can
seem baroque — and by most Italian standards, surprisingly rigorously
enforced — but for Italians they’re grounded in habit and common sense.
A Bolognese sauce goes on a long pasta, a pesto on a short pasta, and
heaven forbid you ever sprinkle cheese on a pasta with fish sauce
“There’s no logical explanation,” Ms. Zanini De Vita said. It’s pure habit, she added. “It’s in our spiritual formation.”
In recent years, Italy has transformed from a nation of emigrants to
a nation of immigrants. But Ms. Zanini De Vita finds the running debate
about whether immigrants can prepare Italian food ridiculous.
“It’s only a question of technique and ingredients, so it’s sheer stupidity to think that they can’t do it,” she said.
Still, she added, perhaps non-Italians are missing an ingredient.
“What would be harder for foreigners to do is to invent things,” she
said. Or go on instinct. “We have that inside our DNA,” she said.
Francesca Gilberti contributed reporting.
The pre-eminent Italian food historian Oretta Zanini De Vita's latest
book, the "Encyclopedia of Pasta," has just appeared in English.
Through hundreds of descriptions of pasta styles, with explanations of
their origins and of how they're made, the book places pasta in its
social and historical context over the centuries.
Ms. Zanini De Vita demonstrates how to make a southern Italian-style
strozzapreti. Flat strips of dough are rolled around the reed until the
sides curl.
Ms. Zanini De Vita used to run her own cooking school and still teaches the occasional lesson.
Pasta-making tools from Ms. Zanini De Vita's collection.
A wooden stamp that mints pasta like coins.
To research the book, Ms. Zanini De Vita, left, spent four years
traveling around Italy, poking around in archives and interviewing
hundreds of people, sometimes striking up conversations with old women
sitting outside the local church. "In some towns, the first thing I'd
do is talk to the parish priest," she said.
A mix of Ms. Zanini De Vita's favorite pasta shapes.
Roasted cherry tomatoes mixed with aged Parmesan, basil and garlic, the makings of a sauce to serve with the strozzapreti.
The finished strozzapreti dish. The rules for which kind of sauce goes
with which kind of pasta can seem baroque, but for Italians they're
grounded in habit and common sense. "It's in our spiritual formation,"
she said.
Recent Comments