The Best Pasta Sauces: Favorite Regional Italian Recipes PDF
Preview The Best Pasta Sauces: Favorite Regional Italian Recipes
BY MICOL NEGRIN The Best Pasta Sauces: Favorite Regional Italian Recipes Rustico: Regional Italian Country Cooking The Italian Grill: Fresh Ideas to Fire Up Your Outdoor Cooking As of press time, the URLs displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites on the Internet. Random House, Inc., is not responsible for, and should not be deemed to endorse or recommend, any website other than its own or any content available on the Internet (including without limitation at any website, blog page, information page) that is not created by Random House. Copyright © 2014 by Micol Negrin All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York. BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Photography by Dino De Angelis Wine pairings by Costas Mouzouras Negrin, Micol. The best pasta sauces : favorite regional Italian recipes / Micol Negrin.—First edition. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-345-54714-9 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-34554715-6 (ebook) 1. Sauces. 2. Cooking, Italian. I. Title. TX819.A1N44 2014 641.81′4—dc23 2014017531 www.ballantinebooks.com First Edition Book design by Liz Cosgrove v3.1 Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright INTRODUCTION THE TEN RULES OF COOKING PASTA SERVING PASTA ITALIAN-STYLE PASTA SAUCES IN THE ITALIAN KITCHEN NORTHERN ITALY Val d’Aosta, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Trentino–Alto Adige, Friuli– Venezia Giulia, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna CENTRAL ITALY The Marches, Tuscany, Umbria, Latium SOUTHERN ITALY Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria THE ISLANDS Sicily, Sardinia BASIC RECIPES MAIL-ORDER SOURCES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author Introduction A BRIEF HISTORY OF PASTA Legend has it that Marco Polo discovered noodles on his voyage to China—but nothing could be further from the truth. Pasta had already been a staple in the Mediterranean since the Neolithic era, about eight thousand years ago. The Etruscans (who lived in the tenth century BCE in what is now Tuscany, Umbria, and Latium), as well as the ancient Romans, Greeks, and Arabs, were preparing wheat-based noodles some three thousand years ago. At the necropolis of Cerveteri, an ancient Etruscan city, there are carvings of the tools needed for pasta making (rolling pins, cutters, and boards for rolling the dough) dating to the fourth century BCE. The Roman epicure Apicius described the making of lagane (similar to lasagna, either boiled or baked) and many pasta sauces in his fourth-century book, De Re Coquinaria, and in the twelfth century, the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi wrote about the mills of the town of Trabia, just twenty miles from Palermo in Sicily, where a long, thin pasta known as itryah was made using flour and water for dispatch across the Mediterranean. Most of the pasta eaten in Italy in ancient times was placed raw in sauce and baked in the oven, without being boiled first. In the Middle Ages, this changed, and new pasta shapes were introduced: some were short, some were filled, and, most important, the art of drying pasta was developed, likely introduced on behest of the Arabs who had settled in Sicily and required staple foods for their long journeys in the desert. Small shops specializing in pasta opened in Naples and Genoa, as well as in Sicily, and eventually spread across Italy. By the 1300s, Italian pasta-makers had formed guilds. Most significantly, by the 1700s industrial production of pasta began in earnest, making dried pasta available and affordable for more Italians than ever before. Tomatoes, a New World food, were initially planted as ornamentals rather than as food in Italy. Many botanists thought them poisonous, as they belong to the Solanaceae (or nightshade) family, which includes several toxic plants. It took nearly two centuries before tomatoes became a common ingredient on Italian tables. In the 1700s, tomatoes and pasta became a common pairing, as techniques for growing, processing, and preserving tomatoes progressed alongside the industrial production of pasta. The first tomatoes brought to Italy were likely a yellow variety (hence their name, pomodoro, which translates as “golden apple”). But before the 1700s, those who could afford to eat pasta often sauced it in ways we would
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