Early Spaghetti has its origin in an ancient, thin, and generally unleavened bread from the
Middle East. This was known under various names at different times, including Asian Bread in some texts of antiquity, and
lakhsha in the Persian
Sasanian Empire. The bread was flattened, sometimes by hand and at other times with a rolling pin, and was occasionally dried for preservation. Under the Sasanian Empire, it took on the name
rishta when cut into strips or strings before drying, the term possibly deriving from the Iranian word
risnatu, for which records of use exist as far back as the 2nd millenniumBC. Coinciding with this emerging tradition of drying pasta in Persia, pasta was eaten throughout
antiquity in Roman and Greek societies after arriving from the Middle East. There too, pasta was sometimes dried, most frequently the long, stretched
doughs. In the 7th century,
Arabs conquered Persia, and thereafter spread the dried pasta custom throughout the lands they occupied, which included
Sicily from the 9th century. There, the dried pasta practice became associated with the European traditions of making fresh pasta, and the name
itriyya entered the language, meaning "long-form dried pasta".
Arrival in the Italian peninsula By the middle of the 12th century, records exist of several farms in Sicily producing
itriyya at scale for local and export markets. Over the following centuries, this pasta appeared in Italian cookbooks, albeit infrequently. A precise description of the manufacture of "Sicilian macaroni" is given by
Martino da Como in the later 15th century: a ball of dough, stretched thin, cut with a wire as "thin as
spagho (string)", dried under the sun. The duration of this drying process varied with weather and humidity, but twelve days in the summer was typical. In another recipe for a
Genoese pasta, Martino employs
spagho for the first time in a culinary context when he says pasta ought to be cut "as thin as a
spagho". Several tools were employed for this cutting process, including
chitarra in areas of southern Italy, which consisted of a wooden frame strung with wires, lowered onto the dough. Pasta at this time was cooked for much longer than it is today; Martino recommends his Sicilian macaroni boil in water for two hours to achieve a desired, very soft texture. Contemporary ideas of how this pasta should be served was based on the ideas of physicians, who followed
Hippocrates and
Galen's principle of (). For a very soft pasta, this meant expensive accompaniments of dried spices and pepper. Cheese, particularly the drier, aged varieties, was another common pairing for the same reason, the most popular for the task by the mid-15th century being
pecorino and
parmigiano. The slippery texture and hot serving temperature of pasta facilitated the introduction of the
fork to Italy, replacing earlier practices of eating pasta and other foods by hand, and by the 14th century, the first descriptions of spaghetti being twirled with a fork were emerging.
Later ) In the 17th century, the region associated most with pasta moved from Sicily to Naples. Around 1630, Naples under Spanish rule was experiencing famines with a reduced supply of meat and vegetables due to poor governance. As technology permitting industrial mixing and extrusion dramatically reduced prices of output, pasta became a
staple food, no longer the domain of the elite. It is in this century that short cook times and firmer pasta textures emerged, although at first only for fresh pasta; it took until the mid-19th century in Naples for records of cooks taking a short cook time and firm texture for granted. Around this time, pairing tomato sauces with pastas was becoming established among the Naples populace, the first records of the combination having appeared at the end of the previous century.
Grated cheese remained an essential element in preparations, although unlike in modern servings, sauces were served over grated cheese. It was not until the 20th century that the inverse became established. By the 1920s food writer
Waverley Root could witness scenes in Naples of "home-made macaroni hung out to dry like the family washing—at the mercy of dust, dirt, insects and the depredations of passing pigeons, children and dogs". By 1955, annual consumption of spaghetti in Italy doubled from per person before World War II to . In that year, Italy produced almost 1.5 million tons of spaghetti, of which approximately 5% was
exported.
Marco Polo story Through the end of the 13th century, the Venetian merchant and adventurer
Marco Polo travelled into Asia, detailing his expedition in
The Travels of Marco Polo. Two centuries later, the geographer
Giovanni Battista Ramusio read Polo's accounts in preparation for a new edition. In one of his stories, Polo told of the preparations made by the people of Sumatra with
sago flour, likening them to the pastas and lasagnas he was familiar with in Italy, and described how he brought back samples to Venice. Misunderstanding this, in his 1559 publication Ramusio conveyed that Marco Polo had discovered pasta in
China and brought it to Italy. This legend persisted, and was developed further in a 1929 article in the American industry newsletter the
Macaroni Journal, where the author credited the invention of spaghetti to a member of Polo's crew named Spaghetti. In the story, Spaghetti made landfall in China in search of water. On shore, he encountered a farm woman stirring a batter which hardened in the hot, dry climate. Realising this would store well on long voyages, Spaghetti returned to the boat with some batter and kneaded it, formed it into long strips, and cooked it in the salty
sea water. ==Production==