A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce by Massimo Montanari

Author:Massimo Montanari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHITE AND RED

Is amatriciana sauce white or red?

The tomato is one of those things that divides the world in two, and since white has become “old style,” it is not hard to deduce that in the history of gastronomy there is a before and an after the introduction of the tomato. But the process has been rather long and full of twists and turns, and it is not possible to mark an exact point on the time line that divides the two periods.

For centuries, pasta was rigorously served white. Cheese (with the addition of butter and spices for those who could afford them) was its most customary condiment. The use of lard and, sometimes, oil has also been attested. But the color was always white. That changed with the arrival of tomato sauce, but it arrived late, not before the 1800s. Goethe, who was in Naples in 1787, notes that “the macaroni [ . . . ] are cooked simply in water and are dressed with grated cheese.”98 At that time, the tomato had been known for centuries, and we have to explain not only what factors led to its finally being used but also why it took so long.

Original to the western coasts of South America, where it still grows wild, the tomato enjoyed an extraordinary success among the Maya and the Aztecs. It was in Mexico that it met up with the Spaniards of Hernán Cortés, when they occupied the country between 1519 and 1521. It was immediately taken to Spain and that’s how the tomato came to be grafted onto the gastronomic culture of Italy. Naturalists and botanists are the first to mention it, starting with Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1544) who cites it in his commentary on the pharmacological text of Pedacio Dioscoride.99 Of these “new plants just arrived in Italy,” Mattioli describes the appearance and color, red or golden, explaining that they can be sliced and cooked like eggplant, that is, in a frying pan, and dressed with salt, olive oil, and black pepper. Just ten years later, in a new edition of the book, he would give these plants a name, “pomi d’oro” (golden pomes), which would become the established name in Italian (while Spanish and the other major European languages would use names derived from the Aztec tomatl).

Tomatoes, then, are treated like eggplants. This association, justified on the botanical level by their common belonging to the Solanaceae family, would be adopted by subsequent writers and it would not have a positive influence on the image of the tomato, given the prejudices against the eggplant, known in Italian as melanzana or mela (apple) insana (insane or unhealthy).100 Pietro Antonio Michiel goes so far as to classify these “pomes from Peru” as a variety of eggplant and repeats, like Mattioli, that they are to be cooked in a frying pan “with butter or oil” but that they are “harmful and noxious”; their very odor causes “torment to the eyes and the head.”101 Castore Durante (1585) also

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