The origin of pasta is one of those debated yet unresolved topics: who cooked the first plate of spaghetti, Sicilians or Chinese? Similarly but with a different flavor, it is believed that Italian noodles and Chinese noodles have spread in parallel and independently.
While in the West, noodles made exclusively from durum wheat flour and water proliferated, in the East, people preferred cultivating a particular cereal, rice, which still remains the foundation of Asian cuisine today.
In the 19th century, according to the Arabs, they revolutionized the concept of pasta and began to promote dried pasta as a direct consequence of the territory they inhabited: desert and lack of abundant water reserves for producing fresh pasta. This marked the beginning of the experimentation with this dried product, which later spread throughout Italy following the Arab conquest of Sicily.
Handmade and then eaten with a fork, produced fresh and later dried, pasta has now taken different shapes depending on the region where it is cooked. One dish now deeply rooted in Italian culinary tradition, especially regarding pasta and tomato. But where does the union of spaghetti and tomato come from? The marriage took place in 1800 in Naples, officially recognized in 1837 when the first recipe for "vermicelli al pomodoro" was published, signed by Ippolito Cavalcanti.
Today, pasta fully represents Italy’s gastronomic identity, and each region personalizes its pasta dish according to its form, from elbow macaroni to fusilli, and sauce, from pesto to meat sauce.
