Latest / Ridiculous History / The Ridiculous, Murky Origins of Pasta, Part Two: From Myth to the Modern Day

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The Ridiculous, Murky Origins of Pasta, Part Two: From Myth to the Modern Day · Ridiculous History

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Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
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Speaker 1: the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
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Speaker 1: for tuning in. Uh that's our super producer, mister Max Williams.
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Speaker 2: Manja, there he is, and you're Noel Brown and I'm
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Speaker 2: big bulling' and ooh, we're doing part two of a
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Speaker 2: two part series.
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Speaker 1: And I think we got something cooking right.
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Speaker 3: On a slow simmer. You want those little bubbles, the
0:54
Speaker 3: tiny bubbles is what you want, what we're looking for.
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Speaker 1: And you may think, hey, guys, why did you spend
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Speaker 1: so much time exploring legends about legends about one of
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Speaker 1: the world's most common staple foods. You might say, that's
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Speaker 1: prepastoris Legends of the Hidden Tai Shout out to the
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Speaker 1: thumbs down from Maxilla and.
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Speaker 3: The bad joke. Drum dot wave that wave. Let's jump
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Speaker 3: right in, guys, let's get lost in the sauce.
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Speaker 1: The legend you would hear about Marco Polo for a
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Speaker 1: very long time is that when he in his travels
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Speaker 1: in the East, when he made it to China, he
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Speaker 1: discovered pasta and he brought it back to Italy and
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Speaker 1: from there. The modern understanding of pasta, arose.
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Speaker 3: I'm gonna throw my money behind this one man, just
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Speaker 3: based on everything we know about Asian culture and like
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Speaker 3: just how far ahead they were on so many things.
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Speaker 3: This rings true to me.
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Speaker 1: It's weird, right, because he definitely went that way, he
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Speaker 1: definitely returned. It seems he also when he was there,
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Speaker 1: he had to eat right shout out to Checkers.
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Speaker 3: In Monster.
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Speaker 1: There's a There is a lot of historical disagreement about this.
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Speaker 1: We believe now that the myth probably arose from a
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Speaker 1: misinterpretation of a famous passage in Polo's travels, the Travels
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Speaker 1: of Marco Polo.
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Speaker 3: And now when I said I was throwing my money
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Speaker 3: behind this myth, and not necessarily the Marco Polo side
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Speaker 3: of it, just that it was probably done first in China.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel you there because also it goes back
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Speaker 1: to how pedantic we want to be about the definition
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Speaker 1: of pasta, right only Durham Wheat, you know what I mean.
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Speaker 3: Oh, I would not care to get that pedantic. I
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Speaker 3: really do stand by the whole building block of cuisine
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Speaker 3: kind of argument that it probably was discovered in parallel
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Speaker 3: from time immemorial, like you mentioned. But I just have
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Speaker 3: a sense that the modern kind of noodle, the way
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Speaker 3: it was stretched and sort of refined, probably originated in Asia.
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Speaker 1: I'm also on board with this. Not an expert, but
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Speaker 1: I got your back on this one. We know that
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Speaker 1: in Travels Polo mentions a tree and from this tree
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Speaker 1: something like pasta is created. It saghetti tree. It's the
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Speaker 1: spaghetti tree. Of course, it was probably the Sego Paul.
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Speaker 1: Maybe maybe breadfruit, something that produces a starchy food product
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Speaker 1: that resembles but depending on how pedantic you want to get,
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Speaker 1: is not pasta. And it looks like the story started
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Speaker 1: the Great Game of Telephone started somewhere in the nineteen
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Speaker 1: twenties or thirties. We get this from Jane Grigson, an
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Speaker 1: English food writer who in her research found an advertisement
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Speaker 1: for a Canadian spaghetti company that said something like, hey,
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Speaker 1: Marco Polo brought this all the way from China. And
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Speaker 1: we also want to give a big, big shout out
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Speaker 1: to Italics Magazine.
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Speaker 3: Which I greatly discovered.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, brief History Apasta by Timothy Santo Nostasso.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely fabulous piece and a fabulous resource overall Italics Magazine.
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Speaker 3: I don't know, Ben, this makes sense to me too,
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Speaker 3: because I mean, we certainly have seen lots of things
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Speaker 3: that have just crept their way into the zeitgeys because
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Speaker 3: of successful advertising campaigns. Let's look at you know, Santa
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Speaker 3: Claus and Coca Cola for example, Polar bears. Coca Cola
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Speaker 3: invented them, too, Lucky Charms, you know, invented Lepard. Okay,
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Speaker 3: I'm half to the Coca Cola and Santa Claus part
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Speaker 3: is true. And we certainly know this, yes, one hundred percent.
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Speaker 3: And we certainly know that average tizing is very popular
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Speaker 3: because it's just by way of like repetition, it can
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Speaker 3: kind of pound its way into the cultural kind of unconscious.
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Speaker 1: And we know we know that part of this, right,
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Speaker 1: shout out to Emily Dickinson, tell the truth, but tell
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Speaker 1: it slant. Good advertising is based on an interpretation of
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Speaker 1: the truth. And this is where we this is where
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Speaker 1: we see the grain hit the mill. Civilizations in China
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Speaker 1: did historically make ground food products similar to barley flour,
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Speaker 1: and what Marco Polo mentions purportedly is definitely used to
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Speaker 1: make several things that would loosely resemble pasta. One he
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Speaker 1: describes as again lagana. And if you want to be
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Speaker 1: super pretentious, next time you go to an Italian restaurant,
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Speaker 1: why not order the lagana And if someone says, do
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Speaker 1: you mean lasagna, then put your nose up.
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Speaker 3: I said what I said, sir, a good day.
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Speaker 1: Also, we'll have the cheese steaks.
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Speaker 3: By the way. You know, I just was curious because
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Speaker 3: I don't know. Sometimes I just say things off him
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Speaker 3: because it seems like it makes sense that I just
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Speaker 3: want to double check myself before I double wreck myself.
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Speaker 3: But the history of wheat cultivation dates back to ten
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Speaker 3: thousand BC. I mean, so this, you know, when I
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Speaker 3: said that this was something that was just around, it's true,
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Speaker 3: you know. And of course, like many things developed in
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Speaker 3: the Fertile Crescent, the Levant region, you know, area of
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Speaker 3: the Middle East from Jordan to Palestine and Lebanon to Syria, Turkey,
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Speaker 3: Iraq and Iran, so you know, again that kind of
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Speaker 3: basin of civilization kind of stuff. This really is a
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Speaker 3: staple crop that has been around for a very very
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Speaker 3: very long time.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And there's another you know, little sprinkling of
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Speaker 1: couscous here. Marco Polo's original text no longer exist, so
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Speaker 1: we're reading from sources that read about it, and this
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Speaker 1: gives us this vast intercultural, intergenerational game of telephone. We do, however,
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Speaker 1: know that pasta was getting pretty popular in the thirteenth century,
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Speaker 1: even if they weren't using the word yet. So while
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Speaker 1: Marco Polo may not have been lying about what he
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Speaker 1: saw in this specific instance, it is incredibly unlikely that
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Speaker 1: he was the first dude ever to rock back to
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Speaker 1: Italy and go you guys, you guys, Pizon, you will
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Speaker 1: not believe what I've found.
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Speaker 3: And back to the Fertile Crescent, which I just mentioned
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Speaker 3: a second ago. It is thought that that is how
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Speaker 3: newly dishes reached Europe. There are theories including that nomadic
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Speaker 3: Arabic tribes and trainers were responsible for bringing early forms
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Speaker 3: of pasta west.
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Speaker 1: M h yeah, one hundred percent, you can. I mean. Also,
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Speaker 1: so the Silk Road a source of endless fascination. Another
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Speaker 1: example of this would be maybe I was recently looking
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Speaker 1: at maps of where Roman currency had been discovered across
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Speaker 1: the planet, and that currency extends far past what we
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Speaker 1: consider the historical borders of the Roman Empire. So these
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Speaker 1: trade networks are moving every single good idea, And of
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Speaker 1: course this is far before the concept of the patent system.
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Speaker 1: I love that you're pointing out the levat. I love
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Speaker 1: that we're pointing out this idea of cultural transmission, this
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Speaker 1: concept that somewhere in Asia people were the first people
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Speaker 1: to create noodles thousands of years ago. It argues that
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Speaker 1: this practice, this process naturally traveled westward. Like you're saying,
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Speaker 1: we don't know how it reached Europe, we do know
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Speaker 1: that once it hit them meta terranean, they used what
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Speaker 1: they had available, right, because they didn't maybe have the
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Speaker 1: same ingredients, the same base components, but they had something
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Speaker 1: like it, you know what I mean, just like the
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Speaker 1: the prison chef may say you want filet mignon.
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Speaker 3: How about a right exactly? And then of course we
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Speaker 3: start seeing little changes that refine it and lengthen its
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Speaker 3: shelf life. For example, in the Mediterranean, the process of
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Speaker 3: making pasta was refined by adding Durham wheat because it
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Speaker 3: had high gluten content and increased the shelf life of
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Speaker 3: the product. When Durham wheat pasta gets dried, it can
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Speaker 3: last indefinitely, which makes it super super important for that
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Speaker 3: kind of staple use and sort of like hoarding you
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Speaker 3: know the stuff I mean, I've I don't know I've
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Speaker 3: never really looked, but is there an expiration date on pasta?
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Speaker 3: It's probably more like a best buy date. But I've
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Speaker 3: never had a pasta that I, you know, boiled, that
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Speaker 3: felt like it had gone bad or something like.
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Speaker 1: I don't want to make us seem like low class folks,
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Speaker 1: but I just sort of practiced the idea that dry
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Speaker 1: pasta does.
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Speaker 3: Not expire to Okay, just making sure we're on the
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Speaker 3: same pitch, thank you, bads, Like if we if.
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Speaker 1: We if we're on an expedition, you know, out to
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Speaker 1: Antarctica or something, and we find preserved pasta from the
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Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds. I'm not going to cook all it
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Speaker 1: of it, all of it at once, but I'm gonna
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Speaker 1: do like a test.
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Speaker 3: Noodle for sure. There's the wall. See what there it is.
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Speaker 3: I gotta throw to you though, because you have kind
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Speaker 3: of like a fun little pet theory amidst all of
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Speaker 3: these other fun little pet theories from historians.
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Speaker 1: Yes, yes, sir, I want uh Noel Max, I want
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Speaker 1: to see what you guys think about this. Why did
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Speaker 1: the Marco Polo story stick around? Here's what I would posit.
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Speaker 1: It's because features an historical celebrity, an already famous historical figure.
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Speaker 3: Like legendary already right, he's right, So he's associated with
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Speaker 3: so many discoveries.
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Speaker 1: Humans like a face on a story. That's the thing.
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Speaker 1: It's much more memorable, much more communicable than just abstract
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Speaker 1: statistics or maps of change over time. Here's the idea,
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Speaker 1: what if centuries from now, you guys, someone told us
11:30
Speaker 1: in someone told school children Montezuma invented potato chips, or
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Speaker 1: that Ben Franklin discovered Viennetta, or that Ryl Crow was
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Speaker 1: the inventor of Dippin' dots.
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Speaker 3: Are that Ben Bolan is the original inventor of ninja
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Speaker 3: turtle shaped pasta.
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Speaker 1: Or that Noel Brown was the first guy to say
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Speaker 1: I'd like to call it a case idea.
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Speaker 3: That's true though it was me, thank you for finally
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Speaker 3: giving me my.
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Speaker 1: Do I knew it was Eufrido.
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Speaker 3: I don't know what then just kiss me on my mouth.
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Speaker 1: So in twenty twenty four, we can easily and safely
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Speaker 1: laugh at these examples, we can say they're not too whole.
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Speaker 1: But in thirty twenty four it might be a lot
12:15
Speaker 1: harder to figure out who made what went. Yeah, another
12:19
Speaker 1: example would be Archimedes screw. He probably made something like that,
12:23
Speaker 1: but he was definitely not the first dude to do it.
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Speaker 3: That's exactly it Wasn't that a way of moving water around? Yes, yeah,
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Speaker 3: and elevation like moving it to higher levels. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: And this is where we go to the original idea
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Speaker 1: that you were walking through in the beginning here, nol.
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Speaker 1: While the Polo story seems to be most likely an
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Speaker 1: historical hiccup, the idea of international pasta travel is probably
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Speaker 1: correct because Italy is along the Mediterranean that has always
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Speaker 1: been a hot spot for trade, even back in the
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Speaker 1: beginning of what we would call, you know, landed civilization.
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Speaker 1: Italy's not too far from the Middle East.
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Speaker 3: And now we bring you our regular segment, All Eyes
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Speaker 3: on Italy, Maxca. We get some Mediterranean kind of sound cute.
13:20
Speaker 3: Oh man, look, I feel that the breeze is blowing
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Speaker 3: them on a vespa, you know, with my best girl
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Speaker 3: right in through the countryside, believe it. And then she
13:29
Speaker 3: gets in my car and it blows up. And then okay,
13:31
Speaker 3: because it causes me to spy, I'm sorry, I was
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Speaker 3: with you thing. I'm back to the Godfather illusion. Man,
13:39
Speaker 3: what a scene, What a great film series of films.
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Speaker 3: Didn't you say you accidentally watched the Godfather movies out
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Speaker 3: of order?
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Speaker 1: Yes?
13:44
Speaker 3: Once? Yeah, yeah, that might be about a clever entity. Yeah,
13:49
Speaker 3: especially because the second one. I don't think the first
13:50
Speaker 3: one has flashbacks, but the second one is like half
13:53
Speaker 3: and half. So I could see how it could be
13:56
Speaker 3: confusing because you're like, like, who is this Robert de
13:59
Speaker 3: Niro character?
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Speaker 1: We know, you know, Oh my gosh, she's the same dude,
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Speaker 1: the same.
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Speaker 3: So back to all eyes audience. Food historians have estimated
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Speaker 3: that the the dish pasta I mean, it's not really
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Speaker 3: more of an ingredient than a dish, I suppose really
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Speaker 3: started to take hold in Italy because of extensive Mediterranean
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Speaker 3: trading during the Middle Ages.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, so we mentioned the thirteenth century earlier, right, references
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Speaker 1: to pasta dishes such as macaroni, ravioli, nocci vermicelli. These
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Speaker 1: starting yoki, uh, these start to crop up with increasing
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Speaker 1: frequency across the Italian peninsula. And in the fourteenth century
14:48
Speaker 1: we got to go to Bicaccio, the author of De Cameron,
14:53
Speaker 1: which is sort of the predecessor to Canterbury Tales. It
14:58
Speaker 1: inspired Chaucer kind of like Operation Ivy inspired Rancid.
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Speaker 3: I suppose that's true. Yeah, they're walking down there? No, no, no,
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Speaker 3: it's taking a nice stroll. Was the source material or
15:10
Speaker 3: the original one that inspired Truscer? Equally as body.
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Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you what, man, And I hate to
15:15
Speaker 1: say it. I'm probably not supposed to say this, but
15:18
Speaker 1: I didn't love it.
15:19
Speaker 4: No.
15:19
Speaker 1: I preferred Canterbury tales. I like the I like the
15:23
Speaker 1: body parts of the Canterbury tales.
15:26
Speaker 3: I know, mean too, what's the one with the with
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Speaker 3: the guy crawling through the window and the kids? Yeah,
15:31
Speaker 3: but the butthole situation, it's anyway, the details that looked
15:35
Speaker 3: at me. There's that's where the term cook comes from.
15:38
Speaker 3: A cuckolds, right, isn't that kind of originated? That?
15:41
Speaker 1: Correct?
15:41
Speaker 3: I believe so. I believe that one particular Canterbury tale
15:44
Speaker 3: involves someone kind of watching his wife cheating on him.
15:49
Speaker 3: It's sort of a voyeuristic story. But then he puts
15:52
Speaker 3: his butt through the window and ends up the dude
15:55
Speaker 3: gives it a kiss. I'm sorry, I'm getting the details wrong,
15:58
Speaker 3: but I remember that.
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Speaker 1: Lie.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I do believe cuckold. It was originated in by
16:03
Speaker 3: Chaucer and the Canterbury test.
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Speaker 1: I just remember the moment where in the tail the
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Speaker 1: gui ling's in through the window and he realizes no
16:11
Speaker 1: woman has a beard.
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Speaker 3: H that was like the.
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Speaker 1: Banger mic drop. Anyway, So, uh, de Cameron going back
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Speaker 1: before Canterbury Tales, it has in there this story of
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Speaker 1: pasta chefs who are rolling steaming hot macaroni and ravioli
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Speaker 1: down a mountain of parmage on.
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Speaker 3: Cheese, like on top of old smoky or on top
16:35
Speaker 3: of old meatball. And I lost my poor meatball because
16:37
Speaker 3: it rolled down the hill and around down the hall
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Speaker 3: or whatever. This is very modern sounding. That's very interesting.
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Speaker 1: They're rolling it down to feed sinners, people have committed
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Speaker 1: the sin of gluttony, and so they're all at the
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Speaker 1: bottom of the cheese mountain.
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Speaker 3: It's a weird thing.
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Speaker 1: It's a weird thing.
16:55
Speaker 3: Also, I'll hang out in that circle of hell.
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Speaker 1: I'll do a week I'll do a long weekend. We
17:03
Speaker 1: also want to shout out PBS dot org a great
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Speaker 1: article by Tory Avy uncover the history of Pasta, which
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Speaker 1: mentions our De Cameron reference. There throughout the Middle Ages
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Speaker 1: until the start of the sixteenth century. The thing is
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Speaker 1: ol Max. We talked about this all the time. Pasta
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Speaker 1: dishes back then were pretty different from the pasta you
17:28
Speaker 1: would expect today. Chef Boyard, this.
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Speaker 3: Is not no. But it was by the late seventeenth
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Speaker 3: century that Naples really started to kind of lead the
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Speaker 3: charge and what we think of as modern kind of
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Speaker 3: pasta dishes. They were so fond of the stuff they
17:44
Speaker 3: even got the nickname mangia foglia in the fifteen hundreds.
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Speaker 3: Then in the seventeen hundreds they started to be called
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Speaker 3: mangia macaroni or macaroni eaters, which sounds like you could
17:57
Speaker 3: probably use as a bit of an epithet today, a
18:00
Speaker 3: potentially problematic use could be used to malign a person
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Speaker 3: of Italian descent, you know, just say.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's that's the thing. We see this transformation
18:10
Speaker 1: in these street names. We see this transformation from calling
18:14
Speaker 1: people basically non consensual vegetarians mangia foglia you can only
18:20
Speaker 1: afford to eat leaves. And then by the.
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Speaker 3: Seventeen I didn't even say that, it means leaf eater,
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Speaker 3: mangia foglia. Yeah yeah.
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Speaker 1: And then and then you later, because of the explosion
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Speaker 1: of pasta popularity, you become called macaroni eaters, and I
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Speaker 1: love I love the idea if anybody resurrects in some
18:39
Speaker 1: way the Godfather franchise, No, they have to take your
18:43
Speaker 1: idea of using that as a very specific epithet.
18:46
Speaker 3: I think it could be fun and probably somewhere in
18:48
Speaker 3: the Sopranos. By the way, sorry, just really quickly. I
18:51
Speaker 3: just saw yesterday a trailer on HBO for a I
18:56
Speaker 3: think a two part Sopranos documentary that's coming out, and
19:00
Speaker 3: I remember the filmmaker, but it was somebody with some
19:03
Speaker 3: serious documentary bona fides, and it's got David Chase, you know,
19:07
Speaker 3: Michael Imperiali, all the gang is back to talk about
19:10
Speaker 3: the origins and the production of the Soprano, which is
19:12
Speaker 3: so storied, and I'm very excited to watch that.
19:16
Speaker 1: Fingers crossed for her Zog.
19:18
Speaker 3: You think Herzog away in Oh that it may be,
19:21
Speaker 3: I don't know. Yeah, Herzog. He is a fabulous documentarian
19:24
Speaker 3: and as well as a narrative filmmaker. I love me
19:27
Speaker 3: some Herzog. So what what was it, Ben that made
19:32
Speaker 3: pasta macaroni so incredibly popular in Italy? Yeah, there had
19:37
Speaker 3: to have been some sort of like sea change moment
19:40
Speaker 3: because it absolutely exploded.
19:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is this is kind of a downer. Yeah,
19:48
Speaker 4: and Max if we could get some like sincere people
19:52
Speaker 4: struggling to survive music, maybe not for the whole not
20:00
Speaker 4: for the whole thing, just a little that's perfect right there.
20:03
Speaker 4: The first possibility is pretty pretty unfortunate. Most of the
20:09
Speaker 4: common folk in this area at this time were experiencing
20:12
Speaker 4: a decline in their standard of living. Things were getting
20:16
Speaker 4: more expensive, things were becoming less available, right, and this
20:22
Speaker 4: limited their access to foods like meat. On the other side,
20:27
Speaker 4: as this inequality increases, the well to do upper crust
20:31
Speaker 4: of the day, the ruling landowners, they start selling wheat
20:36
Speaker 4: pretty cheaply because they're also trying to negotiate through this economy.
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Speaker 4: And if you are to anthropomorphized pasta, this is a
20:43
Speaker 4: win win for you because now people are going to
20:47
Speaker 4: you because you're the thing they can afford to mess with.
20:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like, you know,
20:53
Speaker 3: how the potato was such a staple food in Ireland
20:57
Speaker 3: because it was just it was very hard. You know,
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Speaker 3: it would last, it wouldn't go bad. You know, A
21:03
Speaker 3: potato much like a carrot, maybe rot a little quicker
21:06
Speaker 3: than a kara, but you can store it if you
21:08
Speaker 3: store it in kind of a dark, dry place, and
21:11
Speaker 3: it was very easy to harvest and cultivate. So obviously,
21:14
Speaker 3: when the potato famine hit between eighteen forty five and
21:17
Speaker 3: fifty two, and so many Irish people were depending on
21:20
Speaker 3: that crop, it was absolutely disastrous. Don't believe there was
21:23
Speaker 3: a pasta famine in Italy, but it is a similar
21:26
Speaker 3: case where it was just something that was easy to cultivate,
21:29
Speaker 3: easy to make, and it stored well.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, one hundred percent. It also had religion on its side,
21:35
Speaker 1: because folks back then, in this period of history, in
21:39
Speaker 1: this part of the world, they had a lot of
21:41
Speaker 1: days where it was spiritually forbidden to eat meat. But
21:47
Speaker 1: this means that pasta is a great filling replacement that
21:50
Speaker 1: won't make God angry at you or the church at least.
21:54
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, gotta stay on their good side, right, especially
21:58
Speaker 3: that right totally.
22:00
Speaker 1: Then, from the seventeenth century moving forward, we see another
22:05
Speaker 1: reason for the popularity of pasta. It's industry, industrial pasta
22:12
Speaker 1: production factories and machines. This is so fascinating, right, This
22:17
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing that is a dangerous rabbit
22:22
Speaker 1: hole there was one called the Torchio that revolutionized pasta
22:27
Speaker 1: manufacturing because it was like a mechanical press that could
22:32
Speaker 1: make noodles. You're saving so much time.
22:33
Speaker 3: If anyone wants a really satisfying YouTube, watch just type
22:38
Speaker 3: in like pasta manufacturing and you can see when it's
22:42
Speaker 3: extruders I think is what they're called, where it pushes
22:44
Speaker 3: the dough through these metal things and then this really
22:47
Speaker 3: like quick little knife thing automatically comes and slices them off,
22:51
Speaker 3: and then it shoots them out again. I would have
22:53
Speaker 3: to imagine that pasta up to the point of this
22:55
Speaker 3: industrialization had to be hand pulled, and it was probably
22:59
Speaker 3: more long type or more rudimentary, small bite sized ones.
23:03
Speaker 3: You know that it could be fashioned by hand. But
23:05
Speaker 3: this is when we start to get into the like
23:08
Speaker 3: explosion of various pasta shapes that could really only be
23:11
Speaker 3: created using these extruders.
23:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, one hundred percent. And this goes to this goes
23:17
Speaker 1: to what we were talking about earlier in our patent
23:20
Speaker 1: episode recently, which is the idea of I think, no,
23:25
Speaker 1: you had the question can you patent a pasta? You
23:28
Speaker 1: patent at least as we'll find you patent the pasta machines,
23:33
Speaker 1: those extruders and things like that that you were mentioning.
23:36
Speaker 3: I guess it would be pretty hard to patent a
23:38
Speaker 3: pasta shape because you know, shapes do kind of exist
23:42
Speaker 3: in nature.
23:43
Speaker 1: I would have you a pasta tycoons that would be cool.
23:45
Speaker 4: Man.
23:45
Speaker 3: No, it's yeah, you're right. Like it was the same
23:47
Speaker 3: as like the Industrial Revolution, people patenting certain types of
23:51
Speaker 3: machines that would produce garments or what have you see again,
23:54
Speaker 3: shout out to our recent episode on patents. In seventeen forty,
23:57
Speaker 3: a license for the very first pasta factory was issued
24:01
Speaker 3: in Venice, and during the eighteen hundreds, watermills and stone
24:04
Speaker 3: grinders were used to separate semolina from the brand, thereby
24:09
Speaker 3: provoking an expansion of the pasta market that actually happened
24:14
Speaker 3: in parallel with the aforementioned Industrial Revolution.
24:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, and sometimes you'll find people calling this period the
24:23
Speaker 1: industry of pasta. In eighteen fifty nine, a guy named
24:33
Speaker 1: Joseph Topitz founds the first pasta factory that uses steam machines.
24:39
Speaker 1: He doesn't found it in Italy, he founds it in Hungary.
24:43
Speaker 1: This is one of the first factories of its kind
24:45
Speaker 1: in Central Europe and then in eighteen sixty seven you
24:49
Speaker 1: see more pasta manufacturers starting to sprout up. Like you
24:56
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier in the nineteen hundreds, artificial drying and Prusian
25:00
Speaker 1: innovations make it so much easier not just to craft
25:05
Speaker 1: specific shapes of pasta, but to keep them shelf stable
25:10
Speaker 1: and be able to send them around the world one
25:12
Speaker 1: hundred percent.
25:13
Speaker 3: And I'm sure there are some industrious chefs that were,
25:16
Speaker 3: you know, making little shapes by hand. I mean, the
25:19
Speaker 3: scope of this episode is maybe not necessarily to trace
25:22
Speaker 3: the origins of every single pasta shape, but if you're
25:25
Speaker 3: doing each one of those by hand, you need hundreds
25:29
Speaker 3: of them, you know, to have anything of value to
25:32
Speaker 3: be able to serve, you know, and a meal. So
25:34
Speaker 3: that would just be kind of prohibitively tedious. So it
25:37
Speaker 3: makes sense that this kind of explosion of industrialization led
25:41
Speaker 3: to a much more scalable way of creating these delicious, little,
25:45
Speaker 3: bite sized, grippy sauce magnets.
25:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh, I like sauce magnet. That feels like a
25:52
Speaker 1: great name for a band or album. In the I'm
25:56
Speaker 1: going to say late nineteen.
25:57
Speaker 3: Ninety they went on tour with Monster Magnet, right.
26:00
Speaker 1: And ICP was not allowed to tour with them.
26:05
Speaker 3: You Juggalos are apparently very nice people.
26:07
Speaker 1: They're super nice. They're super nice.
26:09
Speaker 3: I knew what I knew a Juggalo once. I knew
26:11
Speaker 3: a Juggalo once. He was my favorite bartender, and he
26:15
Speaker 3: didn't make a big to do about it. But then
26:16
Speaker 3: one day we noticed his hatchet man tattoo and asked
26:19
Speaker 3: him and he was just super nice and willing to
26:21
Speaker 3: share all about his experience at the gathering of Juggles. Yeah. Yeah,
26:25
Speaker 3: a fairly maligned group. I think they finally got off
26:28
Speaker 3: of that terrorist.
26:29
Speaker 1: The FBI was wrong. Yeah, the FBI was wrong in
26:32
Speaker 1: that regard was.
26:32
Speaker 3: A terrorist watch list. It was a gang watch list
26:35
Speaker 3: or like a yeah, a desiccation list. Uh.
26:38
Speaker 1: The the the Juggalos is a demographic are They've got
26:42
Speaker 1: a lot of heart to him, and a lot of them,
26:44
Speaker 1: to your point, are quietly spiritual, uh in their beliefs.
26:48
Speaker 1: You ask him about stuff, they'll be glad to tell you,
26:51
Speaker 1: but they're not going to push it on.
26:52
Speaker 3: You know. And I bet some of them like pasta.
26:55
Speaker 1: Yes, dude, most people like it's highly likely. Let's say
27:00
Speaker 1: it that way. And with this we have to agree
27:04
Speaker 1: ridiculous historians. The story of Marco Polo and pasta is
27:08
Speaker 1: a bit overblown, But the story of pasta itself is
27:11
Speaker 1: a story of parallel thinking and ingenuity. Something like pasta
27:16
Speaker 1: has been invented over and over and over again in
27:19
Speaker 1: different parts of the world, across the chasms of time,
27:23
Speaker 1: kind of like the discovery of fire, kind of like
27:27
Speaker 1: the discovery of the wheel. But because we are a
27:30
Speaker 1: US based show, we had to give you give you
27:34
Speaker 1: one bit of cool historical trivia. If you enjoy pasta
27:39
Speaker 1: in the United States, there's a president you should think.
27:42
Speaker 3: Oh Man exactly, Thomas Jefferson, Old Tommy Jeff's helped give
27:46
Speaker 3: pasta a big push into popularity here in the US
27:50
Speaker 3: of A. During an extended visit to Paris from seventeen
27:54
Speaker 3: eighty four to seventeen eighty nine, Jefferson eight what he
27:57
Speaker 3: called macaroni back then, But he also it could have
28:01
Speaker 3: just referred to any other shapes, because it reminds me,
28:03
Speaker 3: I believe, what is a Yankee doodle? He went to town
28:07
Speaker 3: riding on a pony, stuck the feather in his hat
28:09
Speaker 3: and called it macaroni. But I believe in the context
28:12
Speaker 3: of that song isn't macaroni Like it's kind of evoking
28:16
Speaker 3: the cheek coolness of the Italians. Yeah, it's like it's swag.
28:22
Speaker 3: It's referencing riz Yeah, there we go. It's referencing a
28:25
Speaker 3: sort of hipster aesthetic of the time. But this is
28:30
Speaker 3: so cool, man, because this shows us that while the
28:33
Speaker 3: Marco Polo example of going to China and then returning
28:37
Speaker 3: to Italy and saying, you guys, you gotta try this.
28:41
Speaker 1: While that may not be entirely true, the Jefferson story
28:45
Speaker 1: is he loved whatever he called macaroni so much that
28:49
Speaker 1: he came back to the United States with two whole
28:52
Speaker 1: cases of this stuff. He said, I have to bring
28:55
Speaker 1: this home. And then when he ran out, he contacted
28:59
Speaker 1: a buddy from Naples, Italy and was like, hey, man,
29:04
Speaker 1: you got any more of that macaro anymore?
29:06
Speaker 3: That needs more of that macron Now it's true, and
29:11
Speaker 3: the rest is history, ridiculous history in fact, But I
29:14
Speaker 3: gotta ask you, Ben. You know, we always say there's
29:17
Speaker 3: nothing new under the sun, and we've been talking about
29:19
Speaker 3: how long pasta has been a thing? Or noodles are
29:22
Speaker 3: you know, manipulating unleavened dough into various shapes and boiling
29:26
Speaker 3: it is there. Where's the innovation, Ben, where's the new
29:31
Speaker 3: cutting edge trend in pasta technology?
29:35
Speaker 1: Oh yes, oh beautiful man, this is something we have
29:39
Speaker 1: to bring up. There's a new pasta design that is
29:44
Speaker 1: hid in the streets and the dinner plates. It's Cascatelli.
29:48
Speaker 1: We want to give a shout out to Dan Pashman,
29:52
Speaker 1: host of several podcasts including The Sportful, who is the
29:56
Speaker 1: inventor or co inventor of this new pasta shape. And he,
30:02
Speaker 1: like us, got a little i don't want to say obsessed,
30:06
Speaker 1: but got a little centered on the idea of creating
30:11
Speaker 1: a new kind of pasta that that improved a couple
30:16
Speaker 1: of metrics that he invented himself. And he has a
30:19
Speaker 1: whole five episode podcast series about this called Mission Impostable.
30:25
Speaker 3: You can buy it. Actually, Svoglini Pasta makes it. It's Cascatelle.
30:31
Speaker 3: Buy sporkfull an original pasta shape. And you know what
30:35
Speaker 3: it kind of looks like, Ben, It kind of looks
30:37
Speaker 3: like tripe. It's it has this like intestiny like waviness
30:43
Speaker 3: to the top, but it also is a C shape
30:46
Speaker 3: and the bottom of it is kind of hollow, you know,
30:49
Speaker 3: there's these two sort of I guess you could say channels, right,
30:53
Speaker 3: sauce channels. So you got the grippy bits. I know
30:55
Speaker 3: I've been saying that a lot, but I really do
30:57
Speaker 3: think it holds sauce literally. So you've got the grippy,
31:01
Speaker 3: kind of wavey bit on the top and then the
31:03
Speaker 3: hollow little sauce channels on the bottom. And the fact
31:06
Speaker 3: that it's a C shape means gravity's kind of on
31:09
Speaker 3: your side. It's brilliant, man. And I gotta say I've
31:13
Speaker 3: gotten something similar to this at our decab farmers market.
31:16
Speaker 3: They make their own pasta there, and I'm pretty sure
31:19
Speaker 3: it's not this exactly, but I bought something very much
31:21
Speaker 3: resembling this tripe like array there. And I'm gonna go
31:25
Speaker 3: find me some Swolini Pasta Cascatelli by Sport Film. Yeah, yeah, it.
31:30
Speaker 1: Look, we haven't talked to Dad about this. We're just
31:33
Speaker 1: fans of this particular aspect of innovation, you know what
31:37
Speaker 1: I mean.
31:38
Speaker 3: I mean, how cool is it that it could be
31:40
Speaker 3: you could literally invent a new pasta shape. It gives
31:43
Speaker 3: me hope for the future of the world.
31:46
Speaker 1: We're gonna finally turn this civilization around. You know Dad
31:50
Speaker 1: also had he here the metrics you had that we
31:54
Speaker 1: just love. He said, I've been he's been evaluated. As
32:00
Speaker 1: he gets to this, he's been evaluating all the existing
32:03
Speaker 1: pasta shapes and he starts to rate them on what
32:05
Speaker 1: he calls saucibility, How well the sausage. Here's fork ability,
32:10
Speaker 1: how easy is it to eat with a fork? And
32:14
Speaker 1: you'll love this one. Tooth sinkability. It's very toothsome there,
32:18
Speaker 1: it is toothsome. Actually, I'm I didn't think of that.
32:21
Speaker 3: You're right, bro, there is a schematic for this thing,
32:25
Speaker 3: I think. Also on the Folini Pasta website he refers
32:30
Speaker 3: to it as a Bucatini, which we've already said was
32:32
Speaker 3: one of our favorites. Haf tube plus ruffles that create
32:37
Speaker 3: a sauce trough I believe, I said, sauce channels with
32:40
Speaker 3: saucetroughs even better for maximum sauceibility. And then it just
32:43
Speaker 3: describes the process using a bronze dye extruder that creates
32:48
Speaker 3: a rougher surface, grippy, further boosting sausibility.
32:52
Speaker 1: Yes, please do check out Mission Impossible, and everybody, thank
32:58
Speaker 1: you for tuning into our our series where we hopefully
33:04
Speaker 1: corrected some one of the most popular pasta myths.
33:08
Speaker 3: But what a wild ride.
33:11
Speaker 1: If you have been a turney, if you have been
33:17
Speaker 1: eating pasta while you're listening to this, congratulations and thank
33:22
Speaker 1: you for joining us. Share your favorite pasta stories weird
33:25
Speaker 1: facts on our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians.
33:29
Speaker 3: That's right, And can I just say, can we leave
33:31
Speaker 3: you with a little recipe? Man, I'm sure you know
33:33
Speaker 3: about this. But in the new relatively new show FX
33:37
Speaker 3: show The Bear, which is about the journey of a
33:40
Speaker 3: chef and his restaurant from like a kind of a
33:43
Speaker 3: what do they call it? A beef sandwich place, to
33:45
Speaker 3: like a fine dining experience, in the season one, they
33:49
Speaker 3: make a family recipe for a pasta sauce for like
33:53
Speaker 3: a what do you call it? Like a gravy. And
33:56
Speaker 3: the key to it, and I do this every time
33:59
Speaker 3: is you get a little bit of all oil in
34:00
Speaker 3: a sauce pan, get it to where it's boiling, starting
34:03
Speaker 3: to simmer, and then you take basil leaves and garlic
34:07
Speaker 3: and you kind of simmer them and break them down
34:10
Speaker 3: in that on a low heat, and then you let
34:12
Speaker 3: it cool and then you blitze it in the you know,
34:15
Speaker 3: in a food processor, and I swear to you you
34:18
Speaker 3: will never have more of a basially infused garlic you flavor.
34:22
Speaker 3: And then you make your sauce using sandwichchano, tomatoes, tomato paste,
34:26
Speaker 3: et cetera seasoning, and then you add in this mushed
34:29
Speaker 3: up garlic basil olive oil mixture at the end and
34:33
Speaker 3: stir it in and it is incredible.
34:35
Speaker 1: Oh. Also, if you have a tomato sauce that's feeling
34:38
Speaker 1: too acidic, you can just put a piece of carrot
34:41
Speaker 1: in there the way you put a bay leaf and
34:43
Speaker 1: soup and then take it out. It'll repair the acidity.
34:47
Speaker 3: Interesting because I mean, there is that kind of holy
34:49
Speaker 3: trinity that a lot of people use. I guess I
34:52
Speaker 3: forget what they call it. But like you start making
34:54
Speaker 3: your sauce with carrot, celery, and onion, So maybe the
34:58
Speaker 3: carrot part of it is more of a balancing the acidity.
35:01
Speaker 3: But if you need a little extra help at the end,
35:03
Speaker 3: just throwing a little chunk of carrot, that's great. Great
35:06
Speaker 3: wreck bend.
35:07
Speaker 1: And speaking of great recommendations, we cannot recommend and thank
35:12
Speaker 1: our super producer Max Williams enough, but we will attempt
35:17
Speaker 1: to do so.
35:18
Speaker 3: Now.
35:18
Speaker 1: Thanks Max.
35:19
Speaker 3: Hey, Thanks Max, You're the best. Thanks well.
35:22
Speaker 5: By the way, did you guys know this episode is
35:24
Speaker 5: incredibly painful for me because I cannot eat pasta the
35:28
Speaker 5: condition condition. I can't tomatoes either.
35:31
Speaker 3: Jesus well mac head have mushrooms and no, I'm a
35:33
Speaker 3: big mushroom fan. Oh good, it's good. Finally a thing
35:36
Speaker 3: that Max can enjoy with the rest of us. Max,
35:39
Speaker 3: I do hope that the condition leaves you one of
35:42
Speaker 3: these days. So I know, as you said, it was temporary,
35:44
Speaker 3: but we don't quite know how long. So we're we're
35:46
Speaker 3: all on your corner.
35:47
Speaker 5: Max, Right, this fainting couch is rent to own, and
35:50
Speaker 5: I'm really hoping I don't hit the time period where
35:53
Speaker 5: it becomes oh yes, you get.
35:56
Speaker 3: The vapors and you just have to like fall onto
35:59
Speaker 3: the fainting couch.
36:00
Speaker 1: Beautiful. Thank you as well to our composer Alex Williams.
36:05
Speaker 1: We mentioned Christopher Hasiotis. Thank you to Christopher also, and
36:09
Speaker 1: then oh, Eve's Jeff Cooke.
36:11
Speaker 3: That's right. Advice all here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the
36:15
Speaker 3: quizz A, j Bahamas Jacobs, the Puzzler Ben, thank you
36:19
Speaker 3: for this incredible research brief that you prepared, and for
36:21
Speaker 3: sharing your love and obsession with pasta with me and
36:25
Speaker 3: Max and the world.
36:27
Speaker 1: Hey it's lunchtime.
36:29
Speaker 3: I shed a tear into my bucatini. See you next time. Books.
36:40
Speaker 3: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
36:44
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.