Mothers of Pasta

Remember making dry pasta necklaces or glueing macaroni to construction paper  as a child?  We thought of these art pieces as great gifts to give our mothers while our mothers, I'm sure, thought them hideous nuisances to be thrown in the garbage as soon as we weren't looking.  Well, there's much more to where that pasta came from than you might think.

Today I was inspired to begin writing about food customs around the world.  This was spurred by a Frenchman telling me that there is a tradition in Holland in which family members will give a gift of a pepper grinder to a male on his 30th birthday if he is still a bachelor.  While I was unsuccessful in finding information on the history of how this tradition got started and what it might signify, (I wrote to The Splendid Table and hope the mystery will be unveiled soon) I stumbled upon something else that caught my fancy.  I learned that all the various types of pasta that we find in grocery stores actually originated in their own separate regions of Italy.  I had never given this any thought before. 

The climate of Italy is rather mild and makes for a great place to grow the semolina wheat that most pasta is made from.  Making pasta was a creative outlet for women in old Italy, and they would shape the pasta according to the sauces they would serve with it.  Ridged pastas, like penne, were meant to hold thick meat sauces while other smooth pastas held lighter cream-based sauces.  

The blog below does a great job of defining some specific pastas and their regions of origin:

http://mymelange.net/mymelange/2010/06/pasta-shapes-italy.html

Also, here is a site that has pics of 150 kinds of pasta and their names.  There are over 350 known shapes on the market:

http://www.archimedes-lab.org/pastashape.html

It occurred to me that when Americans think about Italians cooking we think of men, as in the stereotypical image of male chefs with their white aprons and white hats serving huge plates of spaghetti and meatballs or skillfully spinning pizza dough.  There were and are men doing these things in restaurants to make a living, but women took the stage in the home.  Whenever an Italian speaks of remembering a family members cooking, it is often of a mother or grandmother.  

I am now thinking about the trial and error that went into each pasta shape while it was being created.  Were there dramatic pasta  competitions between women in order for one style to be chosen for their region?  Were some shapes that were once popular lost over time?  So much work has been done to form these mundane things that permeate our daily lives.  Next time you indulge in a delicious dish of pasta, remember there's centuries worth of history in that there bowl.

P.S. In researching this topic I discovered there are even companies that make novelty "naughty" pasta shapes, with names like "Titaroni"or "Peckeroni Pasta".   If you listen close you can hear those ancient mothers of pasta rolling in their Italian graves!