September 12, 2024 • 36 mins
Today pasta is a worldwide phenomena, and the story of pasta's spread is, in a very real way, also a study of global trade and civilization. Tune in to part two of this week's two-part series as Ben, Noel and Max explore the continuing evolution of pasta. (Spoiler: people are still inventing new shapes!)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Uh that's our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Manja, there he is, and you're Noel Brown and I'm
big bulling' and ooh, we're doing part two of a
two part series.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And I think we got something cooking right.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
On a slow simmer. You want those little bubbles, the
tiny bubbles is what you want, what we're looking for.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
And you may think, hey, guys, why did you spend
so much time exploring legends about legends about one of
the world's most common staple foods. You might say, that's
prepastoris Legends of the Hidden Tai Shout out to the
(01:21):
thumbs down from Maxilla and.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
The bad joke. Drum dot wave that wave. Let's jump
right in, guys, let's get lost in the sauce.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
The legend you would hear about Marco Polo for a
very long time is that when he in his travels
in the East, when he made it to China, he
discovered pasta and he brought it back to Italy and
from there. The modern understanding of pasta, arose.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I'm gonna throw my money behind this one man, just
based on everything we know about Asian culture and like
just how far ahead they were on so many things.
This rings true to me.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
It's weird, right, because he definitely went that way, he
definitely returned. It seems he also when he was there,
he had to eat right shout out to Checkers.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
In Monster.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
There's a There is a lot of historical disagreement about this.
We believe now that the myth probably arose from a
misinterpretation of a famous passage in Polo's travels, the Travels
of Marco Polo.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
And now when I said I was throwing my money
behind this myth, and not necessarily the Marco Polo side
of it, just that it was probably done first in China.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, I feel you there because also it goes back
to how pedantic we want to be about the definition
of pasta, right only Durham Wheat, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Oh, I would not care to get that pedantic. I
really do stand by the whole building block of cuisine
kind of argument that it probably was discovered in parallel
from time immemorial, like you mentioned. But I just have
a sense that the modern kind of noodle, the way
it was stretched and sort of refined, probably originated in Asia.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
I'm also on board with this. Not an expert, but
I got your back on this one. We know that
in Travels Polo mentions a tree and from this tree
something like pasta is created. It saghetti tree. It's the
spaghetti tree. Of course, it was probably the Sego Paul.
(03:42):
Maybe maybe breadfruit, something that produces a starchy food product
that resembles but depending on how pedantic you want to get,
is not pasta. And it looks like the story started
the Great Game of Telephone started somewhere in the nineteen
twenties or thirties. We get this from Jane Grigson, an
(04:04):
English food writer who in her research found an advertisement
for a Canadian spaghetti company that said something like, hey,
Marco Polo brought this all the way from China. And
we also want to give a big, big shout out
to Italics Magazine.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Which I greatly discovered.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, brief History Apasta by Timothy Santo Nostasso.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Yeah, absolutely fabulous piece and a fabulous resource overall Italics Magazine.
I don't know, Ben, this makes sense to me too,
because I mean, we certainly have seen lots of things
that have just crept their way into the zeitgeys because
of successful advertising campaigns. Let's look at you know, Santa
Claus and Coca Cola for example, Polar bears. Coca Cola
invented them, too, Lucky Charms, you know, invented Lepard. Okay,
(04:51):
I'm half to the Coca Cola and Santa Claus part
is true. And we certainly know this, yes, one hundred percent.
And we certainly know that average tizing is very popular
because it's just by way of like repetition, it can
kind of pound its way into the cultural kind of unconscious.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And we know we know that part of this, right,
shout out to Emily Dickinson, tell the truth, but tell
it slant. Good advertising is based on an interpretation of
the truth. And this is where we this is where
we see the grain hit the mill. Civilizations in China
did historically make ground food products similar to barley flour,
(05:33):
and what Marco Polo mentions purportedly is definitely used to
make several things that would loosely resemble pasta. One he
describes as again lagana. And if you want to be
super pretentious, next time you go to an Italian restaurant,
why not order the lagana And if someone says, do
(05:56):
you mean lasagna, then put your nose up.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I said what I said, sir, a good day.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Also, we'll have the cheese steaks.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
By the way. You know, I just was curious because
I don't know. Sometimes I just say things off him
because it seems like it makes sense that I just
want to double check myself before I double wreck myself.
But the history of wheat cultivation dates back to ten
thousand BC. I mean, so this, you know, when I
said that this was something that was just around, it's true,
you know. And of course, like many things developed in
(06:30):
the Fertile Crescent, the Levant region, you know, area of
the Middle East from Jordan to Palestine and Lebanon to Syria, Turkey,
Iraq and Iran, so you know, again that kind of
basin of civilization kind of stuff. This really is a
staple crop that has been around for a very very
very long time.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, exactly. And there's another you know, little sprinkling of
couscous here. Marco Polo's original text no longer exist, so
we're reading from sources that read about it, and this
gives us this vast intercultural, intergenerational game of telephone. We do, however,
(07:12):
know that pasta was getting pretty popular in the thirteenth century,
even if they weren't using the word yet. So while
Marco Polo may not have been lying about what he
saw in this specific instance, it is incredibly unlikely that
he was the first dude ever to rock back to
Italy and go you guys, you guys, Pizon, you will
(07:36):
not believe what I've found.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
And back to the Fertile Crescent, which I just mentioned
a second ago. It is thought that that is how
newly dishes reached Europe. There are theories including that nomadic
Arabic tribes and trainers were responsible for bringing early forms
of pasta west.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
M h yeah, one hundred percent, you can. I mean. Also,
so the Silk Road a source of endless fascination. Another
example of this would be maybe I was recently looking
at maps of where Roman currency had been discovered across
the planet, and that currency extends far past what we
(08:17):
consider the historical borders of the Roman Empire. So these
trade networks are moving every single good idea, And of
course this is far before the concept of the patent system.
I love that you're pointing out the levat. I love
that we're pointing out this idea of cultural transmission, this
(08:40):
concept that somewhere in Asia people were the first people
to create noodles thousands of years ago. It argues that
this practice, this process naturally traveled westward. Like you're saying,
we don't know how it reached Europe, we do know
that once it hit them meta terranean, they used what
(09:02):
they had available, right, because they didn't maybe have the
same ingredients, the same base components, but they had something
like it, you know what I mean, just like the
the prison chef may say you want filet mignon.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
How about a right exactly? And then of course we
start seeing little changes that refine it and lengthen its
shelf life. For example, in the Mediterranean, the process of
making pasta was refined by adding Durham wheat because it
had high gluten content and increased the shelf life of
(09:41):
the product. When Durham wheat pasta gets dried, it can
last indefinitely, which makes it super super important for that
kind of staple use and sort of like hoarding you
know the stuff I mean, I've I don't know I've
never really looked, but is there an expiration date on pasta?
It's probably more like a best buy date. But I've
never had a pasta that I, you know, boiled, that
(10:05):
felt like it had gone bad or something like.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
I don't want to make us seem like low class folks,
but I just sort of practiced the idea that dry
pasta does.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Not expire to Okay, just making sure we're on the
same pitch, thank you, bads, Like if we if.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
We if we're on an expedition, you know, out to
Antarctica or something, and we find preserved pasta from the
early nineteen hundreds. I'm not going to cook all it
of it, all of it at once, but I'm gonna
do like a test.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Noodle for sure. There's the wall. See what there it is.
I gotta throw to you though, because you have kind
of like a fun little pet theory amidst all of
these other fun little pet theories from historians.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Yes, yes, sir, I want uh Noel Max, I want
to see what you guys think about this. Why did
the Marco Polo story stick around? Here's what I would posit.
It's because features an historical celebrity, an already famous historical figure.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Like legendary already right, he's right, So he's associated with
so many discoveries.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Humans like a face on a story. That's the thing.
It's much more memorable, much more communicable than just abstract
statistics or maps of change over time. Here's the idea,
what if centuries from now, you guys, someone told us
in someone told school children Montezuma invented potato chips, or
(11:34):
that Ben Franklin discovered Viennetta, or that Ryl Crow was
the inventor of Dippin' dots.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Are that Ben Bolan is the original inventor of ninja
turtle shaped pasta.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Or that Noel Brown was the first guy to say
I'd like to call it a case idea.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
That's true though it was me, thank you for finally
giving me my.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Do I knew it was Eufrido.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
I don't know what then just kiss me on my mouth.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
So in twenty twenty four, we can easily and safely
laugh at these examples, we can say they're not too whole.
But in thirty twenty four it might be a lot
harder to figure out who made what went. Yeah, another
example would be Archimedes screw. He probably made something like that,
but he was definitely not the first dude to do it.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
That's exactly it Wasn't that a way of moving water around? Yes, yeah,
and elevation like moving it to higher levels. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And this is where we go to the original idea
that you were walking through in the beginning here, nol.
While the Polo story seems to be most likely an
historical hiccup, the idea of international pasta travel is probably
correct because Italy is along the Mediterranean that has always
(12:56):
been a hot spot for trade, even back in the
beginning of what we would call, you know, landed civilization.
Italy's not too far from the Middle East.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
And now we bring you our regular segment, All Eyes
on Italy, Maxca. We get some Mediterranean kind of sound cute.
Oh man, look, I feel that the breeze is blowing
them on a vespa, you know, with my best girl
right in through the countryside, believe it. And then she
(13:29):
gets in my car and it blows up. And then okay,
because it causes me to spy, I'm sorry, I was
with you thing. I'm back to the Godfather illusion. Man,
what a scene, What a great film series of films.
Didn't you say you accidentally watched the Godfather movies out
of order?
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Once? Yeah, yeah, that might be about a clever entity. Yeah,
especially because the second one. I don't think the first
one has flashbacks, but the second one is like half
and half. So I could see how it could be
confusing because you're like, like, who is this Robert de
Niro character?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
We know, you know, Oh my gosh, she's the same dude,
the same.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
So back to all eyes audience. Food historians have estimated
that the the dish pasta I mean, it's not really
more of an ingredient than a dish, I suppose really
started to take hold in Italy because of extensive Mediterranean
trading during the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, so we mentioned the thirteenth century earlier, right, references
to pasta dishes such as macaroni, ravioli, nocci vermicelli. These
starting yoki, uh, these start to crop up with increasing
frequency across the Italian peninsula. And in the fourteenth century
(14:48):
we got to go to Bicaccio, the author of De Cameron,
which is sort of the predecessor to Canterbury Tales. It
inspired Chaucer kind of like Operation Ivy inspired Rancid.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
I suppose that's true. Yeah, they're walking down there? No, no, no,
it's taking a nice stroll. Was the source material or
the original one that inspired Truscer? Equally as body.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I'm gonna tell you what, man, And I hate to
say it. I'm probably not supposed to say this, but
I didn't love it.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
No.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I preferred Canterbury tales. I like the I like the
body parts of the Canterbury tales.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
I know, mean too, what's the one with the with
the guy crawling through the window and the kids? Yeah,
but the butthole situation, it's anyway, the details that looked
at me. There's that's where the term cook comes from.
A cuckolds, right, isn't that kind of originated? That?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Correct?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
I believe so. I believe that one particular Canterbury tale
involves someone kind of watching his wife cheating on him.
It's sort of a voyeuristic story. But then he puts
his butt through the window and ends up the dude
gives it a kiss. I'm sorry, I'm getting the details wrong,
but I remember that.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Lie.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, I do believe cuckold. It was originated in by
Chaucer and the Canterbury test.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
I just remember the moment where in the tail the
gui ling's in through the window and he realizes no
woman has a beard.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
H that was like the.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Banger mic drop. Anyway, So, uh, de Cameron going back
before Canterbury Tales, it has in there this story of
pasta chefs who are rolling steaming hot macaroni and ravioli
down a mountain of parmage on.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Cheese, like on top of old smoky or on top
of old meatball. And I lost my poor meatball because
it rolled down the hill and around down the hall
or whatever. This is very modern sounding. That's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
They're rolling it down to feed sinners, people have committed
the sin of gluttony, and so they're all at the
bottom of the cheese mountain.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
It's a weird thing.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
It's a weird thing.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Also, I'll hang out in that circle of hell.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
I'll do a week I'll do a long weekend. We
also want to shout out PBS dot org a great
article by Tory Avy uncover the history of Pasta, which
mentions our De Cameron reference. There throughout the Middle Ages
until the start of the sixteenth century. The thing is
(17:19):
ol Max. We talked about this all the time. Pasta
dishes back then were pretty different from the pasta you
would expect today. Chef Boyard, this.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Is not no. But it was by the late seventeenth
century that Naples really started to kind of lead the
charge and what we think of as modern kind of
pasta dishes. They were so fond of the stuff they
even got the nickname mangia foglia in the fifteen hundreds.
Then in the seventeen hundreds they started to be called
(17:52):
mangia macaroni or macaroni eaters, which sounds like you could
probably use as a bit of an epithet today, a
potentially problematic use could be used to malign a person
of Italian descent, you know, just say.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's the thing. We see this transformation
in these street names. We see this transformation from calling
people basically non consensual vegetarians mangia foglia you can only
afford to eat leaves. And then by the.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Seventeen I didn't even say that, it means leaf eater,
mangia foglia. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And then and then you later, because of the explosion
of pasta popularity, you become called macaroni eaters, and I
love I love the idea if anybody resurrects in some
way the Godfather franchise, No, they have to take your
idea of using that as a very specific epithet.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
I think it could be fun and probably somewhere in
the Sopranos. By the way, sorry, just really quickly. I
just saw yesterday a trailer on HBO for a I
think a two part Sopranos documentary that's coming out, and
I remember the filmmaker, but it was somebody with some
serious documentary bona fides, and it's got David Chase, you know,
(19:07):
Michael Imperiali, all the gang is back to talk about
the origins and the production of the Soprano, which is
so storied, and I'm very excited to watch that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Fingers crossed for her Zog.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
You think Herzog away in Oh that it may be,
I don't know. Yeah, Herzog. He is a fabulous documentarian
and as well as a narrative filmmaker. I love me
some Herzog. So what what was it, Ben that made
pasta macaroni so incredibly popular in Italy? Yeah, there had
to have been some sort of like sea change moment
(19:40):
because it absolutely exploded.
Speaker 4 (19:42):
Yeah, this is this is kind of a downer. Yeah,
and Max if we could get some like sincere people
struggling to survive music, maybe not for the whole not
for the whole thing, just a little that's perfect right there.
(20:03):
The first possibility is pretty pretty unfortunate. Most of the
common folk in this area at this time were experiencing
a decline in their standard of living. Things were getting
more expensive, things were becoming less available, right, and this
limited their access to foods like meat. On the other side,
(20:27):
as this inequality increases, the well to do upper crust
of the day, the ruling landowners, they start selling wheat
pretty cheaply because they're also trying to negotiate through this economy.
And if you are to anthropomorphized pasta, this is a
win win for you because now people are going to
(20:47):
you because you're the thing they can afford to mess with.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like, you know,
how the potato was such a staple food in Ireland
because it was just it was very hard. You know,
it would last, it wouldn't go bad. You know, A
potato much like a carrot, maybe rot a little quicker
than a kara, but you can store it if you
store it in kind of a dark, dry place, and
it was very easy to harvest and cultivate. So obviously,
(21:14):
when the potato famine hit between eighteen forty five and
fifty two, and so many Irish people were depending on
that crop, it was absolutely disastrous. Don't believe there was
a pasta famine in Italy, but it is a similar
case where it was just something that was easy to cultivate,
easy to make, and it stored well.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Yeah, one hundred percent. It also had religion on its side,
because folks back then, in this period of history, in
this part of the world, they had a lot of
days where it was spiritually forbidden to eat meat. But
this means that pasta is a great filling replacement that
won't make God angry at you or the church at least.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Oh yeah, gotta stay on their good side, right, especially
that right totally.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Then, from the seventeenth century moving forward, we see another
reason for the popularity of pasta. It's industry, industrial pasta
production factories and machines. This is so fascinating, right, This
is the kind of thing that is a dangerous rabbit
(22:22):
hole there was one called the Torchio that revolutionized pasta
manufacturing because it was like a mechanical press that could
make noodles. You're saving so much time.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
If anyone wants a really satisfying YouTube, watch just type
in like pasta manufacturing and you can see when it's
extruders I think is what they're called, where it pushes
the dough through these metal things and then this really
like quick little knife thing automatically comes and slices them off,
and then it shoots them out again. I would have
to imagine that pasta up to the point of this
(22:55):
industrialization had to be hand pulled, and it was probably
more long type or more rudimentary, small bite sized ones.
You know that it could be fashioned by hand. But
this is when we start to get into the like
explosion of various pasta shapes that could really only be
created using these extruders.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Yeah, one hundred percent. And this goes to this goes
to what we were talking about earlier in our patent
episode recently, which is the idea of I think, no,
you had the question can you patent a pasta? You
patent at least as we'll find you patent the pasta machines,
those extruders and things like that that you were mentioning.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
I guess it would be pretty hard to patent a
pasta shape because you know, shapes do kind of exist
in nature.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
I would have you a pasta tycoons that would be cool.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
Man.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
No, it's yeah, you're right. Like it was the same
as like the Industrial Revolution, people patenting certain types of
machines that would produce garments or what have you see again,
shout out to our recent episode on patents. In seventeen forty,
a license for the very first pasta factory was issued
in Venice, and during the eighteen hundreds, watermills and stone
grinders were used to separate semolina from the brand, thereby
(24:09):
provoking an expansion of the pasta market that actually happened
in parallel with the aforementioned Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, and sometimes you'll find people calling this period the
industry of pasta. In eighteen fifty nine, a guy named
Joseph Topitz founds the first pasta factory that uses steam machines.
(24:39):
He doesn't found it in Italy, he founds it in Hungary.
This is one of the first factories of its kind
in Central Europe and then in eighteen sixty seven you
see more pasta manufacturers starting to sprout up. Like you
mentioned earlier in the nineteen hundreds, artificial drying and Prusian
(25:00):
innovations make it so much easier not just to craft
specific shapes of pasta, but to keep them shelf stable
and be able to send them around the world one
hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
And I'm sure there are some industrious chefs that were,
you know, making little shapes by hand. I mean, the
scope of this episode is maybe not necessarily to trace
the origins of every single pasta shape, but if you're
doing each one of those by hand, you need hundreds
of them, you know, to have anything of value to
be able to serve, you know, and a meal. So
(25:34):
that would just be kind of prohibitively tedious. So it
makes sense that this kind of explosion of industrialization led
to a much more scalable way of creating these delicious, little,
bite sized, grippy sauce magnets.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah, oh, I like sauce magnet. That feels like a
great name for a band or album. In the I'm
going to say late nineteen.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Ninety they went on tour with Monster Magnet, right.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
And ICP was not allowed to tour with them.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
You Juggalos are apparently very nice people.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
They're super nice. They're super nice.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I knew what I knew a Juggalo once. I knew
a Juggalo once. He was my favorite bartender, and he
didn't make a big to do about it. But then
one day we noticed his hatchet man tattoo and asked
him and he was just super nice and willing to
share all about his experience at the gathering of Juggles. Yeah. Yeah,
a fairly maligned group. I think they finally got off
of that terrorist.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
The FBI was wrong. Yeah, the FBI was wrong in
that regard was.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
A terrorist watch list. It was a gang watch list
or like a yeah, a desiccation list. Uh.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
The the the Juggalos is a demographic are They've got
a lot of heart to him, and a lot of them,
to your point, are quietly spiritual, uh in their beliefs.
You ask him about stuff, they'll be glad to tell you,
but they're not going to push it on.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
You know. And I bet some of them like pasta.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yes, dude, most people like it's highly likely. Let's say
it that way. And with this we have to agree
ridiculous historians. The story of Marco Polo and pasta is
a bit overblown, But the story of pasta itself is
a story of parallel thinking and ingenuity. Something like pasta
(27:16):
has been invented over and over and over again in
different parts of the world, across the chasms of time,
kind of like the discovery of fire, kind of like
the discovery of the wheel. But because we are a
US based show, we had to give you give you
one bit of cool historical trivia. If you enjoy pasta
(27:39):
in the United States, there's a president you should think.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Oh Man exactly, Thomas Jefferson, Old Tommy Jeff's helped give
pasta a big push into popularity here in the US
of A. During an extended visit to Paris from seventeen
eighty four to seventeen eighty nine, Jefferson eight what he
called macaroni back then, But he also it could have
just referred to any other shapes, because it reminds me,
(28:03):
I believe, what is a Yankee doodle? He went to town
riding on a pony, stuck the feather in his hat
and called it macaroni. But I believe in the context
of that song isn't macaroni Like it's kind of evoking
the cheek coolness of the Italians. Yeah, it's like it's swag.
It's referencing riz Yeah, there we go. It's referencing a
(28:25):
sort of hipster aesthetic of the time. But this is
so cool, man, because this shows us that while the
Marco Polo example of going to China and then returning
to Italy and saying, you guys, you gotta try this.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
While that may not be entirely true, the Jefferson story
is he loved whatever he called macaroni so much that
he came back to the United States with two whole
cases of this stuff. He said, I have to bring
this home. And then when he ran out, he contacted
a buddy from Naples, Italy and was like, hey, man,
(29:04):
you got any more of that macaro anymore?
Speaker 3 (29:06):
That needs more of that macron Now it's true, and
the rest is history, ridiculous history in fact, But I
gotta ask you, Ben. You know, we always say there's
nothing new under the sun, and we've been talking about
how long pasta has been a thing? Or noodles are
you know, manipulating unleavened dough into various shapes and boiling
(29:26):
it is there. Where's the innovation, Ben, where's the new
cutting edge trend in pasta technology?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Oh yes, oh beautiful man, this is something we have
to bring up. There's a new pasta design that is
hid in the streets and the dinner plates. It's Cascatelli.
We want to give a shout out to Dan Pashman,
host of several podcasts including The Sportful, who is the
(29:56):
inventor or co inventor of this new pasta shape. And he,
like us, got a little i don't want to say obsessed,
but got a little centered on the idea of creating
a new kind of pasta that that improved a couple
of metrics that he invented himself. And he has a
(30:19):
whole five episode podcast series about this called Mission Impostable.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
You can buy it. Actually, Svoglini Pasta makes it. It's Cascatelle.
Buy sporkfull an original pasta shape. And you know what
it kind of looks like, Ben, It kind of looks
like tripe. It's it has this like intestiny like waviness
to the top, but it also is a C shape
(30:46):
and the bottom of it is kind of hollow, you know,
there's these two sort of I guess you could say channels, right,
sauce channels. So you got the grippy bits. I know
I've been saying that a lot, but I really do
think it holds sauce literally. So you've got the grippy,
kind of wavey bit on the top and then the
hollow little sauce channels on the bottom. And the fact
that it's a C shape means gravity's kind of on
(31:09):
your side. It's brilliant, man. And I gotta say I've
gotten something similar to this at our decab farmers market.
They make their own pasta there, and I'm pretty sure
it's not this exactly, but I bought something very much
resembling this tripe like array there. And I'm gonna go
find me some Swolini Pasta Cascatelli by Sport Film. Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Look, we haven't talked to Dad about this. We're just
fans of this particular aspect of innovation, you know what
I mean.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I mean, how cool is it that it could be
you could literally invent a new pasta shape. It gives
me hope for the future of the world.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
We're gonna finally turn this civilization around. You know Dad
also had he here the metrics you had that we
just love. He said, I've been he's been evaluated. As
he gets to this, he's been evaluating all the existing
pasta shapes and he starts to rate them on what
he calls saucibility, How well the sausage. Here's fork ability,
(32:10):
how easy is it to eat with a fork? And
you'll love this one. Tooth sinkability. It's very toothsome there,
it is toothsome. Actually, I'm I didn't think of that.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
You're right, bro, there is a schematic for this thing,
I think. Also on the Folini Pasta website he refers
to it as a Bucatini, which we've already said was
one of our favorites. Haf tube plus ruffles that create
a sauce trough I believe, I said, sauce channels with
saucetroughs even better for maximum sauceibility. And then it just
(32:43):
describes the process using a bronze dye extruder that creates
a rougher surface, grippy, further boosting sausibility.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yes, please do check out Mission Impossible, and everybody, thank
you for tuning into our our series where we hopefully
corrected some one of the most popular pasta myths.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
But what a wild ride.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
If you have been a turney, if you have been
eating pasta while you're listening to this, congratulations and thank
you for joining us. Share your favorite pasta stories weird
facts on our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
That's right, And can I just say, can we leave
you with a little recipe? Man, I'm sure you know
about this. But in the new relatively new show FX
show The Bear, which is about the journey of a
chef and his restaurant from like a kind of a
what do they call it? A beef sandwich place, to
like a fine dining experience, in the season one, they
(33:49):
make a family recipe for a pasta sauce for like
a what do you call it? Like a gravy. And
the key to it, and I do this every time
is you get a little bit of all oil in
a sauce pan, get it to where it's boiling, starting
to simmer, and then you take basil leaves and garlic
and you kind of simmer them and break them down
(34:10):
in that on a low heat, and then you let
it cool and then you blitze it in the you know,
in a food processor, and I swear to you you
will never have more of a basially infused garlic you flavor.
And then you make your sauce using sandwichchano, tomatoes, tomato paste,
et cetera seasoning, and then you add in this mushed
up garlic basil olive oil mixture at the end and
(34:33):
stir it in and it is incredible.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Oh. Also, if you have a tomato sauce that's feeling
too acidic, you can just put a piece of carrot
in there the way you put a bay leaf and
soup and then take it out. It'll repair the acidity.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Interesting because I mean, there is that kind of holy
trinity that a lot of people use. I guess I
forget what they call it. But like you start making
your sauce with carrot, celery, and onion, So maybe the
carrot part of it is more of a balancing the acidity.
But if you need a little extra help at the end,
just throwing a little chunk of carrot, that's great. Great
wreck bend.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
And speaking of great recommendations, we cannot recommend and thank
our super producer Max Williams enough, but we will attempt
to do so.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Thanks Max.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
Hey, Thanks Max, You're the best. Thanks well.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
By the way, did you guys know this episode is
incredibly painful for me because I cannot eat pasta the
condition condition. I can't tomatoes either.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Jesus well mac head have mushrooms and no, I'm a
big mushroom fan. Oh good, it's good. Finally a thing
that Max can enjoy with the rest of us. Max,
I do hope that the condition leaves you one of
these days. So I know, as you said, it was temporary,
but we don't quite know how long. So we're we're
all on your corner.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
Max, Right, this fainting couch is rent to own, and
I'm really hoping I don't hit the time period where
it becomes oh yes, you get.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
The vapors and you just have to like fall onto
the fainting couch.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Beautiful. Thank you as well to our composer Alex Williams.
We mentioned Christopher Hasiotis. Thank you to Christopher also, and
then oh, Eve's Jeff Cooke.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
That's right. Advice all here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the
quizz A, j Bahamas Jacobs, the Puzzler Ben, thank you
for this incredible research brief that you prepared, and for
sharing your love and obsession with pasta with me and
Max and the world.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Hey it's lunchtime.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
I shed a tear into my bucatini. See you next time. Books.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Uh that's our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Manja, there he is, and you're Noel Brown and I'm
big bulling' and ooh, we're doing part two of a
two part series.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And I think we got something cooking right.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
On a slow simmer. You want those little bubbles, the
tiny bubbles is what you want, what we're looking for.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
And you may think, hey, guys, why did you spend
so much time exploring legends about legends about one of
the world's most common staple foods. You might say, that's
prepastoris Legends of the Hidden Tai Shout out to the
(01:21):
thumbs down from Maxilla and.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
The bad joke. Drum dot wave that wave. Let's jump
right in, guys, let's get lost in the sauce.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
The legend you would hear about Marco Polo for a
very long time is that when he in his travels
in the East, when he made it to China, he
discovered pasta and he brought it back to Italy and
from there. The modern understanding of pasta, arose.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I'm gonna throw my money behind this one man, just
based on everything we know about Asian culture and like
just how far ahead they were on so many things.
This rings true to me.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
It's weird, right, because he definitely went that way, he
definitely returned. It seems he also when he was there,
he had to eat right shout out to Checkers.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
In Monster.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
There's a There is a lot of historical disagreement about this.
We believe now that the myth probably arose from a
misinterpretation of a famous passage in Polo's travels, the Travels
of Marco Polo.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
And now when I said I was throwing my money
behind this myth, and not necessarily the Marco Polo side
of it, just that it was probably done first in China.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, I feel you there because also it goes back
to how pedantic we want to be about the definition
of pasta, right only Durham Wheat, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Oh, I would not care to get that pedantic. I
really do stand by the whole building block of cuisine
kind of argument that it probably was discovered in parallel
from time immemorial, like you mentioned. But I just have
a sense that the modern kind of noodle, the way
it was stretched and sort of refined, probably originated in Asia.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
I'm also on board with this. Not an expert, but
I got your back on this one. We know that
in Travels Polo mentions a tree and from this tree
something like pasta is created. It saghetti tree. It's the
spaghetti tree. Of course, it was probably the Sego Paul.
(03:42):
Maybe maybe breadfruit, something that produces a starchy food product
that resembles but depending on how pedantic you want to get,
is not pasta. And it looks like the story started
the Great Game of Telephone started somewhere in the nineteen
twenties or thirties. We get this from Jane Grigson, an
(04:04):
English food writer who in her research found an advertisement
for a Canadian spaghetti company that said something like, hey,
Marco Polo brought this all the way from China. And
we also want to give a big, big shout out
to Italics Magazine.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Which I greatly discovered.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah, brief History Apasta by Timothy Santo Nostasso.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Yeah, absolutely fabulous piece and a fabulous resource overall Italics Magazine.
I don't know, Ben, this makes sense to me too,
because I mean, we certainly have seen lots of things
that have just crept their way into the zeitgeys because
of successful advertising campaigns. Let's look at you know, Santa
Claus and Coca Cola for example, Polar bears. Coca Cola
invented them, too, Lucky Charms, you know, invented Lepard. Okay,
(04:51):
I'm half to the Coca Cola and Santa Claus part
is true. And we certainly know this, yes, one hundred percent.
And we certainly know that average tizing is very popular
because it's just by way of like repetition, it can
kind of pound its way into the cultural kind of unconscious.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And we know we know that part of this, right,
shout out to Emily Dickinson, tell the truth, but tell
it slant. Good advertising is based on an interpretation of
the truth. And this is where we this is where
we see the grain hit the mill. Civilizations in China
did historically make ground food products similar to barley flour,
(05:33):
and what Marco Polo mentions purportedly is definitely used to
make several things that would loosely resemble pasta. One he
describes as again lagana. And if you want to be
super pretentious, next time you go to an Italian restaurant,
why not order the lagana And if someone says, do
(05:56):
you mean lasagna, then put your nose up.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I said what I said, sir, a good day.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Also, we'll have the cheese steaks.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
By the way. You know, I just was curious because
I don't know. Sometimes I just say things off him
because it seems like it makes sense that I just
want to double check myself before I double wreck myself.
But the history of wheat cultivation dates back to ten
thousand BC. I mean, so this, you know, when I
said that this was something that was just around, it's true,
you know. And of course, like many things developed in
(06:30):
the Fertile Crescent, the Levant region, you know, area of
the Middle East from Jordan to Palestine and Lebanon to Syria, Turkey,
Iraq and Iran, so you know, again that kind of
basin of civilization kind of stuff. This really is a
staple crop that has been around for a very very
very long time.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, exactly. And there's another you know, little sprinkling of
couscous here. Marco Polo's original text no longer exist, so
we're reading from sources that read about it, and this
gives us this vast intercultural, intergenerational game of telephone. We do, however,
(07:12):
know that pasta was getting pretty popular in the thirteenth century,
even if they weren't using the word yet. So while
Marco Polo may not have been lying about what he
saw in this specific instance, it is incredibly unlikely that
he was the first dude ever to rock back to
Italy and go you guys, you guys, Pizon, you will
(07:36):
not believe what I've found.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
And back to the Fertile Crescent, which I just mentioned
a second ago. It is thought that that is how
newly dishes reached Europe. There are theories including that nomadic
Arabic tribes and trainers were responsible for bringing early forms
of pasta west.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
M h yeah, one hundred percent, you can. I mean. Also,
so the Silk Road a source of endless fascination. Another
example of this would be maybe I was recently looking
at maps of where Roman currency had been discovered across
the planet, and that currency extends far past what we
(08:17):
consider the historical borders of the Roman Empire. So these
trade networks are moving every single good idea, And of
course this is far before the concept of the patent system.
I love that you're pointing out the levat. I love
that we're pointing out this idea of cultural transmission, this
(08:40):
concept that somewhere in Asia people were the first people
to create noodles thousands of years ago. It argues that
this practice, this process naturally traveled westward. Like you're saying,
we don't know how it reached Europe, we do know
that once it hit them meta terranean, they used what
(09:02):
they had available, right, because they didn't maybe have the
same ingredients, the same base components, but they had something
like it, you know what I mean, just like the
the prison chef may say you want filet mignon.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
How about a right exactly? And then of course we
start seeing little changes that refine it and lengthen its
shelf life. For example, in the Mediterranean, the process of
making pasta was refined by adding Durham wheat because it
had high gluten content and increased the shelf life of
(09:41):
the product. When Durham wheat pasta gets dried, it can
last indefinitely, which makes it super super important for that
kind of staple use and sort of like hoarding you
know the stuff I mean, I've I don't know I've
never really looked, but is there an expiration date on pasta?
It's probably more like a best buy date. But I've
never had a pasta that I, you know, boiled, that
(10:05):
felt like it had gone bad or something like.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
I don't want to make us seem like low class folks,
but I just sort of practiced the idea that dry
pasta does.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Not expire to Okay, just making sure we're on the
same pitch, thank you, bads, Like if we if.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
We if we're on an expedition, you know, out to
Antarctica or something, and we find preserved pasta from the
early nineteen hundreds. I'm not going to cook all it
of it, all of it at once, but I'm gonna
do like a test.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Noodle for sure. There's the wall. See what there it is.
I gotta throw to you though, because you have kind
of like a fun little pet theory amidst all of
these other fun little pet theories from historians.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Yes, yes, sir, I want uh Noel Max, I want
to see what you guys think about this. Why did
the Marco Polo story stick around? Here's what I would posit.
It's because features an historical celebrity, an already famous historical figure.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Like legendary already right, he's right, So he's associated with
so many discoveries.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Humans like a face on a story. That's the thing.
It's much more memorable, much more communicable than just abstract
statistics or maps of change over time. Here's the idea,
what if centuries from now, you guys, someone told us
in someone told school children Montezuma invented potato chips, or
(11:34):
that Ben Franklin discovered Viennetta, or that Ryl Crow was
the inventor of Dippin' dots.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Are that Ben Bolan is the original inventor of ninja
turtle shaped pasta.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Or that Noel Brown was the first guy to say
I'd like to call it a case idea.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
That's true though it was me, thank you for finally
giving me my.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Do I knew it was Eufrido.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
I don't know what then just kiss me on my mouth.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
So in twenty twenty four, we can easily and safely
laugh at these examples, we can say they're not too whole.
But in thirty twenty four it might be a lot
harder to figure out who made what went. Yeah, another
example would be Archimedes screw. He probably made something like that,
but he was definitely not the first dude to do it.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
That's exactly it Wasn't that a way of moving water around? Yes, yeah,
and elevation like moving it to higher levels. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And this is where we go to the original idea
that you were walking through in the beginning here, nol.
While the Polo story seems to be most likely an
historical hiccup, the idea of international pasta travel is probably
correct because Italy is along the Mediterranean that has always
(12:56):
been a hot spot for trade, even back in the
beginning of what we would call, you know, landed civilization.
Italy's not too far from the Middle East.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
And now we bring you our regular segment, All Eyes
on Italy, Maxca. We get some Mediterranean kind of sound cute.
Oh man, look, I feel that the breeze is blowing
them on a vespa, you know, with my best girl
right in through the countryside, believe it. And then she
(13:29):
gets in my car and it blows up. And then okay,
because it causes me to spy, I'm sorry, I was
with you thing. I'm back to the Godfather illusion. Man,
what a scene, What a great film series of films.
Didn't you say you accidentally watched the Godfather movies out
of order?
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Once? Yeah, yeah, that might be about a clever entity. Yeah,
especially because the second one. I don't think the first
one has flashbacks, but the second one is like half
and half. So I could see how it could be
confusing because you're like, like, who is this Robert de
Niro character?
Speaker 1 (14:00):
We know, you know, Oh my gosh, she's the same dude,
the same.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
So back to all eyes audience. Food historians have estimated
that the the dish pasta I mean, it's not really
more of an ingredient than a dish, I suppose really
started to take hold in Italy because of extensive Mediterranean
trading during the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, so we mentioned the thirteenth century earlier, right, references
to pasta dishes such as macaroni, ravioli, nocci vermicelli. These
starting yoki, uh, these start to crop up with increasing
frequency across the Italian peninsula. And in the fourteenth century
(14:48):
we got to go to Bicaccio, the author of De Cameron,
which is sort of the predecessor to Canterbury Tales. It
inspired Chaucer kind of like Operation Ivy inspired Rancid.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
I suppose that's true. Yeah, they're walking down there? No, no, no,
it's taking a nice stroll. Was the source material or
the original one that inspired Truscer? Equally as body.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I'm gonna tell you what, man, And I hate to
say it. I'm probably not supposed to say this, but
I didn't love it.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
No.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I preferred Canterbury tales. I like the I like the
body parts of the Canterbury tales.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
I know, mean too, what's the one with the with
the guy crawling through the window and the kids? Yeah,
but the butthole situation, it's anyway, the details that looked
at me. There's that's where the term cook comes from.
A cuckolds, right, isn't that kind of originated? That?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Correct?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
I believe so. I believe that one particular Canterbury tale
involves someone kind of watching his wife cheating on him.
It's sort of a voyeuristic story. But then he puts
his butt through the window and ends up the dude
gives it a kiss. I'm sorry, I'm getting the details wrong,
but I remember that.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Lie.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, I do believe cuckold. It was originated in by
Chaucer and the Canterbury test.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
I just remember the moment where in the tail the
gui ling's in through the window and he realizes no
woman has a beard.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
H that was like the.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Banger mic drop. Anyway, So, uh, de Cameron going back
before Canterbury Tales, it has in there this story of
pasta chefs who are rolling steaming hot macaroni and ravioli
down a mountain of parmage on.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Cheese, like on top of old smoky or on top
of old meatball. And I lost my poor meatball because
it rolled down the hill and around down the hall
or whatever. This is very modern sounding. That's very interesting.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
They're rolling it down to feed sinners, people have committed
the sin of gluttony, and so they're all at the
bottom of the cheese mountain.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
It's a weird thing.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
It's a weird thing.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Also, I'll hang out in that circle of hell.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
I'll do a week I'll do a long weekend. We
also want to shout out PBS dot org a great
article by Tory Avy uncover the history of Pasta, which
mentions our De Cameron reference. There throughout the Middle Ages
until the start of the sixteenth century. The thing is
(17:19):
ol Max. We talked about this all the time. Pasta
dishes back then were pretty different from the pasta you
would expect today. Chef Boyard, this.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
Is not no. But it was by the late seventeenth
century that Naples really started to kind of lead the
charge and what we think of as modern kind of
pasta dishes. They were so fond of the stuff they
even got the nickname mangia foglia in the fifteen hundreds.
Then in the seventeen hundreds they started to be called
(17:52):
mangia macaroni or macaroni eaters, which sounds like you could
probably use as a bit of an epithet today, a
potentially problematic use could be used to malign a person
of Italian descent, you know, just say.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's the thing. We see this transformation
in these street names. We see this transformation from calling
people basically non consensual vegetarians mangia foglia you can only
afford to eat leaves. And then by the.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Seventeen I didn't even say that, it means leaf eater,
mangia foglia. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And then and then you later, because of the explosion
of pasta popularity, you become called macaroni eaters, and I
love I love the idea if anybody resurrects in some
way the Godfather franchise, No, they have to take your
idea of using that as a very specific epithet.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
I think it could be fun and probably somewhere in
the Sopranos. By the way, sorry, just really quickly. I
just saw yesterday a trailer on HBO for a I
think a two part Sopranos documentary that's coming out, and
I remember the filmmaker, but it was somebody with some
serious documentary bona fides, and it's got David Chase, you know,
(19:07):
Michael Imperiali, all the gang is back to talk about
the origins and the production of the Soprano, which is
so storied, and I'm very excited to watch that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Fingers crossed for her Zog.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
You think Herzog away in Oh that it may be,
I don't know. Yeah, Herzog. He is a fabulous documentarian
and as well as a narrative filmmaker. I love me
some Herzog. So what what was it, Ben that made
pasta macaroni so incredibly popular in Italy? Yeah, there had
to have been some sort of like sea change moment
(19:40):
because it absolutely exploded.
Speaker 4 (19:42):
Yeah, this is this is kind of a downer. Yeah,
and Max if we could get some like sincere people
struggling to survive music, maybe not for the whole not
for the whole thing, just a little that's perfect right there.
(20:03):
The first possibility is pretty pretty unfortunate. Most of the
common folk in this area at this time were experiencing
a decline in their standard of living. Things were getting
more expensive, things were becoming less available, right, and this
limited their access to foods like meat. On the other side,
(20:27):
as this inequality increases, the well to do upper crust
of the day, the ruling landowners, they start selling wheat
pretty cheaply because they're also trying to negotiate through this economy.
And if you are to anthropomorphized pasta, this is a
win win for you because now people are going to
(20:47):
you because you're the thing they can afford to mess with.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like, you know,
how the potato was such a staple food in Ireland
because it was just it was very hard. You know,
it would last, it wouldn't go bad. You know, A
potato much like a carrot, maybe rot a little quicker
than a kara, but you can store it if you
store it in kind of a dark, dry place, and
it was very easy to harvest and cultivate. So obviously,
(21:14):
when the potato famine hit between eighteen forty five and
fifty two, and so many Irish people were depending on
that crop, it was absolutely disastrous. Don't believe there was
a pasta famine in Italy, but it is a similar
case where it was just something that was easy to cultivate,
easy to make, and it stored well.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Yeah, one hundred percent. It also had religion on its side,
because folks back then, in this period of history, in
this part of the world, they had a lot of
days where it was spiritually forbidden to eat meat. But
this means that pasta is a great filling replacement that
won't make God angry at you or the church at least.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Oh yeah, gotta stay on their good side, right, especially
that right totally.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Then, from the seventeenth century moving forward, we see another
reason for the popularity of pasta. It's industry, industrial pasta
production factories and machines. This is so fascinating, right, This
is the kind of thing that is a dangerous rabbit
(22:22):
hole there was one called the Torchio that revolutionized pasta
manufacturing because it was like a mechanical press that could
make noodles. You're saving so much time.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
If anyone wants a really satisfying YouTube, watch just type
in like pasta manufacturing and you can see when it's
extruders I think is what they're called, where it pushes
the dough through these metal things and then this really
like quick little knife thing automatically comes and slices them off,
and then it shoots them out again. I would have
to imagine that pasta up to the point of this
(22:55):
industrialization had to be hand pulled, and it was probably
more long type or more rudimentary, small bite sized ones.
You know that it could be fashioned by hand. But
this is when we start to get into the like
explosion of various pasta shapes that could really only be
created using these extruders.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Yeah, one hundred percent. And this goes to this goes
to what we were talking about earlier in our patent
episode recently, which is the idea of I think, no,
you had the question can you patent a pasta? You
patent at least as we'll find you patent the pasta machines,
those extruders and things like that that you were mentioning.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
I guess it would be pretty hard to patent a
pasta shape because you know, shapes do kind of exist
in nature.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
I would have you a pasta tycoons that would be cool.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
Man.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
No, it's yeah, you're right. Like it was the same
as like the Industrial Revolution, people patenting certain types of
machines that would produce garments or what have you see again,
shout out to our recent episode on patents. In seventeen forty,
a license for the very first pasta factory was issued
in Venice, and during the eighteen hundreds, watermills and stone
grinders were used to separate semolina from the brand, thereby
(24:09):
provoking an expansion of the pasta market that actually happened
in parallel with the aforementioned Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, and sometimes you'll find people calling this period the
industry of pasta. In eighteen fifty nine, a guy named
Joseph Topitz founds the first pasta factory that uses steam machines.
(24:39):
He doesn't found it in Italy, he founds it in Hungary.
This is one of the first factories of its kind
in Central Europe and then in eighteen sixty seven you
see more pasta manufacturers starting to sprout up. Like you
mentioned earlier in the nineteen hundreds, artificial drying and Prusian
(25:00):
innovations make it so much easier not just to craft
specific shapes of pasta, but to keep them shelf stable
and be able to send them around the world one
hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
And I'm sure there are some industrious chefs that were,
you know, making little shapes by hand. I mean, the
scope of this episode is maybe not necessarily to trace
the origins of every single pasta shape, but if you're
doing each one of those by hand, you need hundreds
of them, you know, to have anything of value to
be able to serve, you know, and a meal. So
(25:34):
that would just be kind of prohibitively tedious. So it
makes sense that this kind of explosion of industrialization led
to a much more scalable way of creating these delicious, little,
bite sized, grippy sauce magnets.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah, oh, I like sauce magnet. That feels like a
great name for a band or album. In the I'm
going to say late nineteen.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Ninety they went on tour with Monster Magnet, right.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
And ICP was not allowed to tour with them.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
You Juggalos are apparently very nice people.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
They're super nice. They're super nice.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I knew what I knew a Juggalo once. I knew
a Juggalo once. He was my favorite bartender, and he
didn't make a big to do about it. But then
one day we noticed his hatchet man tattoo and asked
him and he was just super nice and willing to
share all about his experience at the gathering of Juggles. Yeah. Yeah,
a fairly maligned group. I think they finally got off
of that terrorist.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
The FBI was wrong. Yeah, the FBI was wrong in
that regard was.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
A terrorist watch list. It was a gang watch list
or like a yeah, a desiccation list. Uh.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
The the the Juggalos is a demographic are They've got
a lot of heart to him, and a lot of them,
to your point, are quietly spiritual, uh in their beliefs.
You ask him about stuff, they'll be glad to tell you,
but they're not going to push it on.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
You know. And I bet some of them like pasta.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yes, dude, most people like it's highly likely. Let's say
it that way. And with this we have to agree
ridiculous historians. The story of Marco Polo and pasta is
a bit overblown, But the story of pasta itself is
a story of parallel thinking and ingenuity. Something like pasta
(27:16):
has been invented over and over and over again in
different parts of the world, across the chasms of time,
kind of like the discovery of fire, kind of like
the discovery of the wheel. But because we are a
US based show, we had to give you give you
one bit of cool historical trivia. If you enjoy pasta
(27:39):
in the United States, there's a president you should think.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Oh Man exactly, Thomas Jefferson, Old Tommy Jeff's helped give
pasta a big push into popularity here in the US
of A. During an extended visit to Paris from seventeen
eighty four to seventeen eighty nine, Jefferson eight what he
called macaroni back then, But he also it could have
just referred to any other shapes, because it reminds me,
(28:03):
I believe, what is a Yankee doodle? He went to town
riding on a pony, stuck the feather in his hat
and called it macaroni. But I believe in the context
of that song isn't macaroni Like it's kind of evoking
the cheek coolness of the Italians. Yeah, it's like it's swag.
It's referencing riz Yeah, there we go. It's referencing a
(28:25):
sort of hipster aesthetic of the time. But this is
so cool, man, because this shows us that while the
Marco Polo example of going to China and then returning
to Italy and saying, you guys, you gotta try this.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
While that may not be entirely true, the Jefferson story
is he loved whatever he called macaroni so much that
he came back to the United States with two whole
cases of this stuff. He said, I have to bring
this home. And then when he ran out, he contacted
a buddy from Naples, Italy and was like, hey, man,
(29:04):
you got any more of that macaro anymore?
Speaker 3 (29:06):
That needs more of that macron Now it's true, and
the rest is history, ridiculous history in fact, But I
gotta ask you, Ben. You know, we always say there's
nothing new under the sun, and we've been talking about
how long pasta has been a thing? Or noodles are
you know, manipulating unleavened dough into various shapes and boiling
(29:26):
it is there. Where's the innovation, Ben, where's the new
cutting edge trend in pasta technology?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Oh yes, oh beautiful man, this is something we have
to bring up. There's a new pasta design that is
hid in the streets and the dinner plates. It's Cascatelli.
We want to give a shout out to Dan Pashman,
host of several podcasts including The Sportful, who is the
(29:56):
inventor or co inventor of this new pasta shape. And he,
like us, got a little i don't want to say obsessed,
but got a little centered on the idea of creating
a new kind of pasta that that improved a couple
of metrics that he invented himself. And he has a
(30:19):
whole five episode podcast series about this called Mission Impostable.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
You can buy it. Actually, Svoglini Pasta makes it. It's Cascatelle.
Buy sporkfull an original pasta shape. And you know what
it kind of looks like, Ben, It kind of looks
like tripe. It's it has this like intestiny like waviness
to the top, but it also is a C shape
(30:46):
and the bottom of it is kind of hollow, you know,
there's these two sort of I guess you could say channels, right,
sauce channels. So you got the grippy bits. I know
I've been saying that a lot, but I really do
think it holds sauce literally. So you've got the grippy,
kind of wavey bit on the top and then the
hollow little sauce channels on the bottom. And the fact
that it's a C shape means gravity's kind of on
(31:09):
your side. It's brilliant, man. And I gotta say I've
gotten something similar to this at our decab farmers market.
They make their own pasta there, and I'm pretty sure
it's not this exactly, but I bought something very much
resembling this tripe like array there. And I'm gonna go
find me some Swolini Pasta Cascatelli by Sport Film. Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Look, we haven't talked to Dad about this. We're just
fans of this particular aspect of innovation, you know what
I mean.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I mean, how cool is it that it could be
you could literally invent a new pasta shape. It gives
me hope for the future of the world.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
We're gonna finally turn this civilization around. You know Dad
also had he here the metrics you had that we
just love. He said, I've been he's been evaluated. As
he gets to this, he's been evaluating all the existing
pasta shapes and he starts to rate them on what
he calls saucibility, How well the sausage. Here's fork ability,
(32:10):
how easy is it to eat with a fork? And
you'll love this one. Tooth sinkability. It's very toothsome there,
it is toothsome. Actually, I'm I didn't think of that.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
You're right, bro, there is a schematic for this thing,
I think. Also on the Folini Pasta website he refers
to it as a Bucatini, which we've already said was
one of our favorites. Haf tube plus ruffles that create
a sauce trough I believe, I said, sauce channels with
saucetroughs even better for maximum sauceibility. And then it just
(32:43):
describes the process using a bronze dye extruder that creates
a rougher surface, grippy, further boosting sausibility.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yes, please do check out Mission Impossible, and everybody, thank
you for tuning into our our series where we hopefully
corrected some one of the most popular pasta myths.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
But what a wild ride.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
If you have been a turney, if you have been
eating pasta while you're listening to this, congratulations and thank
you for joining us. Share your favorite pasta stories weird
facts on our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
That's right, And can I just say, can we leave
you with a little recipe? Man, I'm sure you know
about this. But in the new relatively new show FX
show The Bear, which is about the journey of a
chef and his restaurant from like a kind of a
what do they call it? A beef sandwich place, to
like a fine dining experience, in the season one, they
(33:49):
make a family recipe for a pasta sauce for like
a what do you call it? Like a gravy. And
the key to it, and I do this every time
is you get a little bit of all oil in
a sauce pan, get it to where it's boiling, starting
to simmer, and then you take basil leaves and garlic
and you kind of simmer them and break them down
(34:10):
in that on a low heat, and then you let
it cool and then you blitze it in the you know,
in a food processor, and I swear to you you
will never have more of a basially infused garlic you flavor.
And then you make your sauce using sandwichchano, tomatoes, tomato paste,
et cetera seasoning, and then you add in this mushed
up garlic basil olive oil mixture at the end and
(34:33):
stir it in and it is incredible.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Oh. Also, if you have a tomato sauce that's feeling
too acidic, you can just put a piece of carrot
in there the way you put a bay leaf and
soup and then take it out. It'll repair the acidity.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Interesting because I mean, there is that kind of holy
trinity that a lot of people use. I guess I
forget what they call it. But like you start making
your sauce with carrot, celery, and onion, So maybe the
carrot part of it is more of a balancing the acidity.
But if you need a little extra help at the end,
just throwing a little chunk of carrot, that's great. Great
wreck bend.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
And speaking of great recommendations, we cannot recommend and thank
our super producer Max Williams enough, but we will attempt
to do so.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Thanks Max.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
Hey, Thanks Max, You're the best. Thanks well.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
By the way, did you guys know this episode is
incredibly painful for me because I cannot eat pasta the
condition condition. I can't tomatoes either.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Jesus well mac head have mushrooms and no, I'm a
big mushroom fan. Oh good, it's good. Finally a thing
that Max can enjoy with the rest of us. Max,
I do hope that the condition leaves you one of
these days. So I know, as you said, it was temporary,
but we don't quite know how long. So we're we're
all on your corner.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
Max, Right, this fainting couch is rent to own, and
I'm really hoping I don't hit the time period where
it becomes oh yes, you get.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
The vapors and you just have to like fall onto
the fainting couch.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Beautiful. Thank you as well to our composer Alex Williams.
We mentioned Christopher Hasiotis. Thank you to Christopher also, and
then oh, Eve's Jeff Cooke.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
That's right. Advice all here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the
quizz A, j Bahamas Jacobs, the Puzzler Ben, thank you
for this incredible research brief that you prepared, and for
sharing your love and obsession with pasta with me and
Max and the world.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Hey it's lunchtime.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
I shed a tear into my bucatini. See you next time. Books.
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Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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