The macaroni that Rossini didn't want to cook

Pasta with tomato sauce, a simple and tasty dish, a familiar symbol of our cuisine, was created in Naples in the mid-1800s and was initially known as maccheroni alla napoletana. In its modesty, this dish marked the birth of a new Italian cuisine based on pasta, boiled only in salted water, cooked al dente and seasoned with a variety of sauces. Before that, Italians used three main ways to eat pasta, both fresh and “dry,” i.e., air-dried: in broth or with butter and Parmesan cheese or in the oven (called pasticcio in this case). And this fits into the picture of an Italy that, since its inception, from Dante's time onwards, ate very little pasta. Take, for example, the ‘bible’ of our culture: ‘The Betrothed’. Written in the first half of the 19th century and set in the 1600s, it describes the characters' meals in detail but contains no mention of pasta as a food eaten by the population. Only in Naples, from 1600 onwards, as the standard of living of the population declined, did the diet shift from one based on meat and vegetables to one based on dairy products and cereals, among which pasta, due to its low cost, became the main food of the people. The new Italian cuisine was therefore also a Neapolitanization of the country.

And it was precisely the desire to discover the authentic Neapolitan recipe that caused, around 1840, a sensational rift between two great figures of nineteenth-century culture, who were friends: the Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini, author of The Barber of Seville and William Tell, and the French writer Alexandre Dumas père, creator of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas had spent five years in Italy, particularly in Naples, and had become familiar with many aspects of Neapolitan culture, including its cuisine, but he had never eaten pasta, which at that time was universally known as maccheroni. In reality, as a great lover of French cuisine, he did not like Italian food. So when his dinner guests asked him for the recipe, as he was a famous connoisseur of our country, Dumas, not knowing what to say, stalled and, in order not to make a bad impression, decided to ask his friend Rossini for help. The Italian composer, who also boasted of being a cook and gourmet, invited the Frenchman to dinner at his home in Bologna to taste his macaroni recipe, a rich baked pasta dish with truffles, meat broth sauce, mushrooms, ham, Gruyère cheese, cream, a bitter orange, two tomatoes, and a little champagne. Obviously, this had nothing to do with the new Neapolitan dish, but it was a great example of our previous culinary tradition. The French writer tasted it briefly and said to the composer, “Thank you, my dear Rossini, I know everything I wanted to know,” thus mortally offending him. So what were those Neapolitan macaroni like? It was the original pasta with tomato sauce, a true example of “poor” cuisine, made with tomato sauce fried in lard, the main fat used in Neapolitan cuisine. Then the pasta, which had previously been boiled, was thrown into the sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper. It was drained when it was very al dente. That's all, according to the first recipe we have evidence of, that of 1837 by Ippolito Cavalcanti, a Neapolitan nobleman. Almost half a century later, Palma's Neapolitan cookbook added onion to the sautéed mixture and enriched the sauce with plenty of Parmesan cheese and basil. This became the authentic recipe, but not the definitive one, because there was one last evolution. Pork fat, the condiment so characteristic and loved by the Neapolitan people, was replaced, here as everywhere else, by oil or butter, in order to gain the approval of the ruling class of united Italy, the bourgeoisie, united also in their aversion to strong, ‘intense and decisive’ flavors and smells . In my opinion, this was a loss of taste: if you have the chance to find artisanal lard, you will notice the difference from the ancient sweet smell that emanates from the pan when the fat melts.