A hundred years ago, Barcelona was booming, textiles factories were spinning, the well-to-do had a social round of balls, country excursions, racing. Women shopped for new furniture, fancy clothes, fine china.  Everyone socialized in restaurants and cafes that served French dinners and te anglaise, owned by migrants from the north of the Italian peninsula–the Swiss Ticino, the part belonging to Sardinia (historic ties to Catalonia), Genoa.

For a really fancy meal, they went to the Maison Dorée in Plaza de Cataluña owned by the brothers Pompidor.  And for the absolute latest dish, too time-consuming and complicated to make at home, you called ahead and ordered canelons.  The restaurant set to making the pasta, stuffing it, and coating it with bechamel.  Bechamel said that you understood food just like olive oil does today.

And here the story branches.  The first branch has to do with ladies learning to cook canelons.

Ladies who wanted to cook this kind of food (or more likely teach their cook to make it) attended the near-professional classes offered from 1924 to 1931 in the feminist Institut i Biblioteca Popular de Cultura de la Dona. We may not think of cooking classes and feminism as a natural pair, but to the founder of the Institut, Francesca Bonnemaison, they were, like libraries, part and parcel of improving women’s culture and competence.

The classes were taught by a professional chef, Joseph Rondissoni, an Italian Swiss, who during his career was executive for various hotels, opened a gourmet shop, and edited the journal Menage, very influential in Spain, designed to improve household management, particularly cooking.  Rondissoni was a disciple of Escoffier who prided himself on sending out well trained chefs around the world.  In Ma Cuisine (1934) Escoffier offers a recipe for canneloni stuffed with chicken, foie gras, game, or other meat (though he coats them with a demi-glace sauce with tomato).

And when Rondissoni published his Culinaria after the Spanish Civil War in 1945, recipes for “canalones” and other pasta are in one of the first sections.  This book is still in print.  The 6th edition was prefaced by Manuel Vasquez Montalban, one of the best writers on gastronomy not just in Spanish but in any language (though look him up–he was much, much more).

(A recipe for canelones Rossini had been published earlier by Ignasi Doménech, one of the founders of modern Catalan cuisine,.  Following the custom of associating the Italian singer and gourmet with truffles, these were to be stuffed with a mixture of chicken livers, bacon, pork loin, brains, grated cheese, tomato sauce, truffles, breadcrumbs, sherry, and egg yolks. (EDIT. Nestor Lujan, see below, credits Domenech with the popularity of canelons, an attribution that fits nicely with recent Catalan nationalism.  I tend to credit Rondissoni, just because he did so much to shape Catalan and Spanish cooking in this period.  But it would need more research to resolve the issue. )

The second branch of the story concerns the pasta.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, part of the great explosion of factory-made dried pasta, canelons were imported from a French firm called  La Poule (the chicken), 16 to a box. It tells you something about how prestigious (and presumably expensive they were) that they were separated by pink tissue paper.

Canelones el Pavo

Ramon Flo, who made industrial pasta in Barcelona from 1911 on, saw an opportunity.  After various efforts, he found ways to make these cylinders, now flattened out now round, selling them under the brand name El Pavo (the turkey) from 1914.

By the 1920s, canelons had become a modish dish for well-to-do Barcelona families to serve on December 26th, St Stephen’s Day, replacing the earlier rice dish made from leftovers from the Christmas soup.  The distinguished historian of Spanish cuisine, Néstor Luján, remembered that his family used El Pavo.

Sometime in the 1950s or 60s, as Spain began to recover from the Civil War, canelons became the common Catalan dish for St Stephen’s Day. And now they are omnipresent from the highest flights of fancy in famous destination restaurants of the region to humble take out places, besides being obligatory for St Stephen’s Day, made from El Pavo pasta, on sale in any little grocery in Catalonia.

Soon. A recipe.

For now, let me just conclude by saying that this is not just a shaggy dog story about a particular region of Spain.  So many elements of the story—the spread of French high cuisine by non-French cooks, the tangled relationship between feminism and women in the kitchen, the industrialization of pasta, the recent invention of national dishes, the difference that just one person can make—crop up time and again.

And finally, thanks to Jeff Koehler who xeroxed for me the introduction to 100 Recetas de Canelons (1990) by the famous Catalan gastronome and historian Néstor Luján from which part but by no means all of this story is taken.

They are everywhere.  Butcher’s shops have foil boxes of gratineed canelons ready to be cooked at home. So do grocery stores and the many take out stores that dot the city of Girona in Catalonia, Spain where I am spending a few weeks.  They are a staple of the fixed-price midday restaurant menu.  And there are even whole stores devoted to them.

Cannelonia

There’s a filling to suit every fancy: mushrooms, spinach, vegetables, duck, beef, pork, chicken, fish and seafood, and (you guessed), another local favorite the salt cod, bacalao. Almost as popular are lasagne and macaroni.

Canelons were brought to Barcelona, 40 miles or so away, by Italians and Italian Swiss who began arriving in the eighteenth century. Or so says the book Catalunya a la Cuina, published by the Diari de Girona in 1997, edited by Llorenc Torrado, citing the well known Spanish food historian, Nestor Luján.

My own guess, for what it is worth, is that Catalan canelons didn’t really enter the repertoire until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.  Anything made of wheat flour, topped with bechamel, and baked in an oven whispers–actually shouts–late nineteenth century in my ear.  So I’d peg it as part of the creation of Italian cuisine in the greater Italy of emigrants who quickly became wealthier than all but a tiny minority in Italy itself.

In any case, its now a festival dish for the festival of Nadal in Barcelona, attesting to its thorough integration into the regional cuisine.

Spelling.  Canelon is the Catalan spelling. I think the name of the takeout store has the double n for greater Italian-ness but can’t do a double ll because it would be pronounced a bit like y.  Just a guess.

I´m an Argentine architect, living in California. I´ve just opened a blog to leave our recipes to my daughters. Regarding your article about Spaghetti and meatballs, we prefer the meatballs fried and served as an appetizer.

Spaghetti comes with marinara sauce (tuco) or bolognesa sauce (marinara plus grind meat).
The bread crumbs in the meatballs would spoil the pasta and sauce, if you understand what I mean, if we want meatballs in sauce, we make a different recipe, without bread crumbs. It´s completely different the way Americans eat them. And we´d never put them in a sandwich.
Lasagna, after boiled, we fill it and put it in the oven, with sauce.
Almost everybody in Buenos Aires had an Italian  or Spanish ancestor. We learnt a lot from them, and it is a shame for a woman not to know how to cook. We really appreciate good food, Spanish, Italian, then French cuisine. Served at a nice table, the finest, the better.

Here´s the post that prompted all this,  an Argentinian recipe for lasagne in response to a reader’s request.

I’ve been on line looking unsuccessfully for a description/recipe which we’ve been making in my Italian family for 3 generations called Rovellini (sp?). It’s very thinly slice round or flank steak, pounded, then egged, breaded, and fried. It’s served either dry with lemon, or baked in a seasoned tomato sauce. Could this be a regional name/recipe? Would like any info you could give me.

Bonna, the technique and the way of serving are typical of the group of “milanesa” or “schnitzel” and “cutlet” dishes that shoot around the world in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, cropping up in Europe, Argentina, Mexico, the southern United States (chicken fried steak), parts of the Middle East and India and the tonkatsu of Japan.

If I were asked to guess, I’d say they mark a move away from “wet” one-pot soups and stews to a drier way of cooking, particularly where ovens have not come in.  They presuppose a supply of fresh butcher’s meat that can be bought in small quantities, leftover newly inexpensive white bread obviously, some kind of newly inexpensive cooking fat, and a pan for frying in addition to the soup pot.  They are economical, tasty, and stretch a small amount of meat.  I’ve talked about them before here.  And there’s an earlier discussion here.

The name rovellini is new to me though.  Any readers have any thoughts on that?

An ah ha moment.  I was re-reading the best book we have on the history of pasta, Pasta The Story of a Universal Food, by Silvano Serventi and Francoise Sabban when I ran across this sentence.

What was generally called . . .  “Italian pasta” was actually pasta from Genoa and Naples; pasta from other Italian regions was virtually unknown outside Italy.

Between 1550 and 1850, according to the many pages these authors spend on the matter, the centers for dried durum wheat pasta were these two towns (the centers for egg pasta being Alsace and Bologna).  Also important were Sicily and Sardinia.

So why ah ha?  Well, let’s remember that Italy was not unified as a country until the late nineteenth century.  And let’s rethink the geography of Europe in these centuries.   Naples, Sicily, Sardinia? All part of the Spanish Hapsburg Empire along with all of what is now Spain.  The Republic of Genoa?  An ally of the Spanish Hapsburgs.

In short, the political home of dried durum wheat pasta was the Spanish Empire, even if it’s geographic home was the Italian peninsula and nearby islands. And that is crucial for understanding who ate vermicelli or fideos as they are called in the Spanish speaking world.

What we have, I propose, is two global expansions of dried durum wheat pasta.  The first was with the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth-eighteenth century and consisted of fideos, vermicelli, made by machine in small workshops.  (We’ll leave tallarines to one side for a moment).  The second was with Italian out-migration 1880-1920 and consisted of the spaghetti family made and dried by machine in small factories.

The delightful and informative illustration of a fine pasta (vermicelli or fideo) maker in from Paul-Jacques Malouin’s Description et dètail des arts due meunier, du vermicelier  (1767).   On the right, a man is working the “brake” the lever for mixing and kneading the dough.  On the left, his companion is pushing the pole that moves the screw press that extrudes the vermicelli or fideos.

Compare my photo of a Mexican fideo press.

It’s in the huge and stunning sixteenth century fortress monastery in Yuriria in the south of the state of Guanajuato, the entry point to the rich agricultural region of central Mexico (the Bajio) for the Spanish.

1. The big Italian pasta company Barilla is taking on traditional Mexican pasta.  Of course for ages the Wal-Mart chain has been selling Barilla Italian-style pastas.

But now they have ever-larger quantities of traditional Mexican-style pastas made by Barilla such as fideos, municiones, coditos, letras that used to be the stronghold of Mexican companies such as La Moderna.

Can the Mexican companies possibly withstand this corporate powerhouse?  I wait to see.

2. Mexican meat packers are offering more and more pre-seasoned meats.  Arrachera and fresh cecina have been in the grocery stores for years.  But I think yesterday was the first time I had seen carne al pastor ready-packaged along with the other two, this time from RYC, a company in Puebla a hundred miles south west of Mexico City.

Ready-prepared carne al pastor neatly packaged  will doubtless be snapped up by the all small street stand owners and comida corrida proprietors who stock up at these box stores. In fact there’s a great essay to be written on how changes in street food follow changes in corporate marketing strategy.  I don’t have the knowledge to do it but someone should.

3.  Sam’s in León (our local shopping town, booming shoe manufacturing center) improbably carried flour tortillas made in the suburbs of my little colonial town, Guanajuato.  Now may be that’s just a gesture to the local.  But it means that one family here is right on the ball and making out.  After all, we are not in flour tortilla country.  So this family got the machinery, started making them, sold them to Wal-Mart.

Wait for further updates. I’m going to try to get an interview on how this all happened.

My family is from Zacatecas and they would slaughter a pig twice a year. The skin and extra fat bits were always fried and served the day of the slaughter. So it was a very festive, and delicious, treat with some promise of the meat to follow.

Chicharrones are a very male dish, it is one of those dishes I always associate with men cooking. In fact, my father has his very own chicharron contraption, a metal drum gassed by a propane tank with a huge aluminum pan on top for frying. My brother is an engineer and made him a very sophisticated press for extracting all the fat, this results in a very dry and crisp chicharron.

Even still, my father is 78, at every family gathering he will start his preparations at dawn in anticipation of the arrival of his 8 children and their brood. I was hoping to inherit said contraption but, as is the tradition, it is intended for my only brother.

Oh, do you know the Italian equivalent? While in Fanano, above Bologna, years ago I went to a traditional food fair. There I came across someone selling pork from two large cakes. Both were comprised of bits of fatty pork bits spotted with meat, though one was dry while the other moist. They tasted just like chicharrones, salt and all!

I just love new technology being applied to a centuries-old product. And please, I’ve never seen anything like this about Italy.  Anyone have any more comments on Italian-style chicharrón prensado?

And check out Sonia’s blog at at www.saffronpaisley.com

There are also lots of people who love to throw around their culinary authority as in this discussion.  Always a dangerous thing to do, in my opinion, because I think attempts to dictate or police taste are tricky.  Yes, the grading of textures in pasta al dente is pleasing.  But it’s not handed down from heaven.  And there were periods in Italian history (can’t find the reference right now) when people liked their pasta meltingly soft.

Well, that off my chest, how interesting that a pasta box in Italy in the 70s would suggest boiling the pasta for a few minutes and then leaving it off the boil to finish cooking.  Seem to me the whole issue of the range of methods of cooking pasta is worth more investigation.  Adam, I can see you coming up with one of your long pieces on this.  I suspect it was a much more varied matter than culinary gurus now would have us believe.  After all, a lot of experimentation must have gone on after the invention of (say)commercial dried spaghetti.

I’ll try to look in my Mexican cookbooks to see how they dealt with the larger pastas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Well, until very recently (like the arrival of water and gas in pipes, say a hundred years ago in Europe for the first, and much more recently for the second, except in cities with coal gas) this is quite outrageous.   Bringing water to the boil and then making soup that you eat is one thing making good use of liquid and fuel.  Bringing it to the boil to cook spaghetti for a small family and then throwing it out is plain silly.

There is something terribly, terribly wrong with the idea that ordinary Italian families would have made pasta like this.  Or perhaps they didn’t make it at all. We know that dry pasta and tomato sauce is the product of the Industrial Revolution and did not become widely available in Italy until the late nineteenth century.  And that it remained a luxury for many Italians until well after World War II–that is at most a couple of generations ago–by which time most of Italy would have had running water and (perhaps) cheap fuel.

In Mexico many villages have no water.  A truck (“una pipa from its shape”) and people line up with buckets and bowls to get their water. Many people look for or buy firewood to cook, expensive and time consuming.

So the Mexican (and older European) method of cooking pasta by first frying it in a little oil and then cooking it in a small amount of water until the water has been absorbed makes much more sense in terms of domestic economy.

Or don’t even fry it. For years, decades actually, I have happily disregarded the instructions about huge clumsy pots of boiling water and cooked pasta in the smallest amount of water I can get away with.  I have never found any problem.  And the leftover water is easily used up in soup.  I’m obviously not Italian and haven’t grown up with strong beliefs about exactly how pasta should turn out.  But it’s always seemed fine to me, family and guests.

And now along comes Harold McGee to give his blessing to the minimum water method.  I’m delighted.

In the 60s and 70s she and her husband Arturo, the two of them pioneers in consumer awareness and protection, traveled from one end to another of Mexico investigating the food. Lila’s been a journalist for years.  She’s also been one of the movers and shakers who has transformed the food scene in Mexico City, giving Mexican food a prominent place.

It is Lila’s firm belief, once volunteered and later confirmed in a second conversation, that it was an Italian dairy farmer who migrated to Oaxaca in the 1950s, who, with government encouragement taught Mexicans to make mozarella.  Over the years this gradually transformed into what is now called queso or quesillo oaxaca.  For those of you who don’t know this famous Mexican cheese, here’s a photo.  I’ve unraveled the cheese a bit so you can see the texture.

This claim, it need hardly be said, it apt to produce apoplexy in those who hear it.  All I can say, is Lila is someone I really trust and someone who would have no reason to make up such a story.