ROUSES_MarApr2019_Magazine-R

Franco Sacchetti, eating pasta becomes a moral lesson for his anti-hero Noddo d’Andrea, who is known far and wide for wolfing down his plate of noodles — as well as everyone else’s at the table — a little too quickly: It chanced upon one occasion that when Noddo was dining together with others, he was put to share a dish with a pleasant man named Giovanni Cascio. And when boiling hot macaroni was brought to the table, then Giovanni, having several times heard tell of Noddo’s habits and finding himself put to share a dish with him, said within himself: “Truly, I am fortunate! I thought I was coming here to dine, and I shall have come only to behold Noddo devouring, and macaroni too, to make matters worse! Provided he doth not eat me, I shall do well.” Eventually, Giovanni tricks Noddo (via shaming him, mostly) into not eating his serving of piping- hot macaroni too quickly or being greedy about stealing the food of others. “Thus did a man who gorged without measure have the new experience of finding one who obliged him to eat his maca- roni moderately,” the story concludes. Back from the land of fables, the German poet Goethe even made note of the booming pasta scene around Naples during his travels in 1787, noting that, “It can be bought everywhere and in all the shops for very little money. As a rule, it is simply cooked in water and seasoned with grated cheese.”

photo by Romney Caruso

Much like the Marco Polo shenanigans, how pasta came to the United States is also steeped in a good deal of American mythology. Around the time Goethe was ogling the wares in Naples, it’s said that Thomas Jefferson introduced dried pasta to America, thanks in part to the fact that he asked an Italian friend to ship the first “maccarony machine” to the states in 1789, and he served “a pie called macaroni” at an official state dinner in 1802. And while Jefferson may have helped popularize the dish among a certain upper-crust set, it wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century — when five million Italians immigrated to the United States — that pasta gained a foothold among the working class. Soon, Italian-American food — a specialty cuisine in its own right — began to evolve from the fusion of regional Italian variations and differing access to ingredients in the U.S.: Meat was cheaper and more plentiful, for example, while fresh fruits and vegetables were harder to come by in cities where immigrants primarily settled. And then, there’s the curious case of spaghetti and meatballs. “For whatever reasons, what became the Italian- American cuisine started with a base of Campanian food, minus many kinds of vegetables and cheeses

14 MARCH•APRIL 2019