You’ll Want to Check Out This Definitive Book on Pasta
With 1001 recipes, 1974 masterwork ‘The Pasta Codex’ is finally translated into English
“Is it a vicious lie that pasta makes you fat?” This is but one pressing issue that Vincenzo Buonassisi raises in the wide-ranging introduction to The Pasta Codex, his 1974 masterwork that has finally been translated into English for the first time. Buonassisi also delves into who invented pasta (likely “primitive man”), explicates the Roman poet Horace’s beloved “tagliatelle” with leeks and chickpeas, dismisses the myth of Marco Polo bringing spaghetti from China, muses on the taste for sweet pastas during the Renaissance, and notes a document from 1041 in which the word “maccherone” is used to insult someone as “a bit of a dope.”
We learn that the first forks were brought to Italy — to make pasta eating easier — from Byzantium in the late 11th century, that a 1792 American cookbook erroneously suggested pasta be cooked in water for three hours, and that Lord Byron “connected pasta with erotic themes” offering, in his Don Juan, an aphrodisiac of vermicelli, oysters, and eggs. As to whether pasta is unhealthy, Buonassisi dismisses the notion, insisting instead that pasta is “a way to rebel at the table against a lifestyle that oppresses humanity at every turn,” that a dish of…
