A short history of spaghetti with tomato sauce / Massimo Montanari ; translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti.

• Words: handle with care -- Recipes and products, or rather, time and space -- Reflecting on a plate of pasta -- Marco Polo and spaghetti: the birth of a fake news item -- Bread and pasta: from the Middle East to Europe -- New names for a new product -- The Sicilian melting pot and the birth of the pasta industry -- When spaghetti were called macaroni -- A new category of food -- How do you cook pasta? -- Cheese on macaroni -- Another way to eat: the fork -- Pasta changes its status -- Al dente -- We are what we eat -- White and red -- Spanish tomato sauce -- A felicitous encounter -- A spice for everyone -- Olive oil and the invention of the Mediterranean diet -- Garlic and onion, peasant aromas -- A touch of green -- The spaghetti tree.

• "Is it possible to identify a starting point in history from which everything else unfolds--a single moment that can explain the present and reveal the essence of our identities? According to Massimo Montanari, this is just a myth: by themselves, origins explain very little and historical phenomena can only be understood dynamically--by looking at how events and identities develop and change as a result of encounters and combinations that are often unexpected. As Montanari shows in this lively, brilliant, and surprising essay, all you need to debunk the "origins myth" is a plate of spaghetti. By tracing the history of the one of Italy's "national dishes"--from Asia to America, from Africa to Europe; from the beginning of agriculture to the Middle Ages and up to the 20th century--he shows that in order to understand who we are (our identity) we almost always need to look beyond ourselves to other cultures, peoples, and traditions." -- 

Ämnesord

Food habits  -- History. (LCSH)

Cooking (Pasta)  -- History. (LCSH)

Food  -- Social aspects -- History. (LCSH)

Pasta  -- historia (sao)

Matvanor  -- historia (sao)

Mat  -- sociala aspekter (sao)

Genre

History.  (fast)

Klassifikation

GT2868.68 (LCC)

394.1209 (DDC)

Mxk (kssb/8 (machine generated))