Answer One. Whole grains are hard on the system.

Today we don’t eat many grains or grain dishes. They are just one element in the diet along with fats, sugars, vegetables, fruits, meats and fish. The recommended amount in the US is six ounces for a 2000 calorie a day diet.

In the past people ate huge amounts of grains.  Wheat bread provided 40% of the calories of Americans, almost certainly the most lavishly fed population ever in the history of the world, as late as World War II.  Through most of history, farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of us would have been) probably consumed between  70% and 90% of  their calories in the form of bread, porridge, or other grain dishes.

That means between one and two pounds of bread a day, or one to two average loaves of sliced white bread, between three and six times as much as we eat.

One pound of white bread

Except that these were whole grains. Only half the British could afford white bread in 1800.  It was 1900 before the whole population could afford it. And Britain was the earliest European country to go over to white bread.  They were chewing or swallowing their way through one to two pounds of oatmeal, oatcakes, barley bannocks, rye bread, or some mixture of grains and beans every day.

Without a bit of butter, jam, olive oil, or lard to lubricate the grains, chewing and swallowing are laborious.

Worse, digesting such a lot of whole grains is a difficult, energy-consuming business ( we spend about 10% of our energy intake on digesting).  Because of this whole grains  pass through the system quickly.  The laxative effect of a small serving of whole grains is great for us sedentary modern urbanites. For manual workers the laxative effect of a couple of pounds of whole grains was a pain.

Those who could afford them, therefore preferred processed grains with more of the bran removed. It’s even possible that they yielded more calories, perhaps even more nutrition, per unit weight because they were easier to digest.

Answer Two: Our Ancestors Thought Processed Food was More Natural and More Healthful

We tend to think of cooking as messing up.  We want fresh, natural foods that taste of themselves.  We like lightly cooked green beans, rare steaks, and the US government tells us whole grains are better for us than white bread, cakes, and pie crusts.

For most of history, the majority view was the exact opposite.  Raw meat, vegetables, whole grains were just the raw materials.  they had to be processed and cooked to get at their natural, healthful essence.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but eating whole grains was regarded a bit as we might regard eating oysters, shell and all.  We just don’t do that. We process the oyster (shell it) to get at its real briny oysteriness inside. Our ancestors thought about grains the same way.  They had to be processed to get rid of the husks, hulls, and bran and get at the pure white inside part.  The outside parts, like oyster shells, were impossible to chew, caught in the throat, and were thus not natural (in the sense of being the grain itself) and not healthful either.  And of course we still don’t eat the husks either. Or put another way. There is not a sharp distinction between processed and whole grain. It’s a question of where you stop taking off the inedible layers or the germ.

In short, in the past most people thought of processing and cooking as perfecting the rough and contaminated raw materials that were harvested or slaughtered.  Only in the past century have we done a complete about-face, coming to believe that processed grains (or sugar, for example) are neither natural nor healthful.

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Thanks to Maria Speck for the question that prompted this post. There are still things about grains that Maria can’t figure out.  A couple of weeks ago she sent me an email.  “What about the ‘white food’ preference of earlier humans?  After years of researching whole grains, that’s the  one question that I can only partially answer to this day,” adding that she didn’t think it could be just status or the power of big corporations.  What’s above is my answer to her question.

The first time I met Maria Speck she was already on a whole grain mission. “They’re delicious,” she said, waving her cup perilously to emphasize her point. “It’s just a lucky coincidence that they’re healthy as well.”

Now several years after our chat in the coffee shop in the cavernous atrium of a New Orleans hotel, she’s published her Ancient Grains for Modern Meals to great acclaim, as you will see if you follow the link.  I’ve been reading it, thoroughly enjoying Maria’s essays about her appealing philosophy of cooking and eating, and thoroughly frustrated that so few whole grains are available in Mexico.  Roll on January and a trip to the States so that I can get my hands on some grains.

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.

For Adam.  When I read this recipe I wonder: Is it actually baked?  The nearest thing to a reference to an oven is the instruction to serve it hot.  But that could have been achieved by the assembly of the sheets of pasta and the sauce.  My impression based on two stints in two different apartments in Argentina is that ovens are not important elements in kitchens and would probably have been less important 60 years ago.  And if this is so, I wonder how many of these assembled pasta dishes were just ways of presenting the dish?

For Nick.  I’m not sure that we can asimilate these meat balls with the US pasta and meatballs.  Albondigas are a time-honored tradition in the Spanish world, so it would not have been a big jump for Italo-Argentinians to combine them with pasta.

More important, I’d like to invite you to reconsider the assumption underlying your response.  This is, I take it, that the Italian food of Italy is the ‘true’ Italian food and that of Italians in other parts of the world is a pale and often inaccurate imitation.  The point of my post was that as Italian food in Italy was being formed a huge proportion of the population was overseas. Moreover there was constant to and fro between Italy, Buenos Aires, New York, Toronto, San Francisco.  What about thinking of these overseas communities as just more regions of Italy?

I could go on.

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I’m going to post comment here as well as in the comments area.  Have lots to say about this but later when I’ve done my work for the day.  So wait for edits.

This from Australia from Adam Balic of the Art and Mystery of Food.

Lasagne/Lasagna refers to the pasta, as well as the dish, so there are many variations. Even in modern Italy there is a huge amount of variation, I had never seen ricotta in a Lasagne until I went to the USA, where it seems quite common, maybe reflecting southern Italian roots.

Baked pasta dishes under various names (“pasta al forno”, “passtico”, “vincisgrassi” et al.) are vary common too, and not limited to Italy at all. However, there is a recipe that is similar to yours in the cookbook written by Ippolito Cavalcanti (duca di Buonvicino) in 1839 in Naples.

And this from Belguium, from Nick Trachet.

ah, the famous pasta and meat balls, an all American cliché. During my many travels in Italy (especially Rome, I used at a time to work for FAO), I have NEVER encountered meat balls with pasta. The kitchen of Italy remains very much ‘contadino’: peasant, and earth bound.
Lasagne is typical Bologna-kitchen; the North: pasta with egg, no garlic, no olive oil, vey little spices (nutmeg) and tomato but plenty butter (Bologna is nicknamed “la grassa”) “ragu” (meat sauce) and grana cheese.

italian recipes are usually much more specific on the quality of flour -sometimes mixtures of different grades expressed in a number of zero’s- idem for different cheeses. But egg dough, “flat” pasta (opposed to ‘tubular’ and meat sauce is certainly Northern Italian

And it was a time when the cuisine was in great flux.  New dried pasta. New canned tomatoes. Political upheavals in Italy. No reason to assume the cuisine followed the rules that we read today in Italian cookbooks.

So when I had a request from a reader in San Francisco who wanted to make lasagne like his mother made it using the early 20th century Argentinian cookbook, Doña Lola’s El Arte de la Mesa, it seemed a good moment to revisit the Italian cuisine of Buenos Aires briefly.

It’s not the first time I’ve talked about Italian cuisine in Argentina, nor about the varieties of pasta and pizza in Buenos Aires.  Doña Lola’s El arte de la mesa has a murky publishing history but one of my commentators told me the 6th edition was published in 1955, so the first was probably no later than the early 1940s.

There’s only one recipe for lasagne in this thousand-page book.  It occurs in the relatively short section on Pastas and Arroz, about 20 pages.   Rice gets 20 recipes, canelones 5, fideos (a broad category, roughly spaghetti) 5, macarrones 5, noquis (still a favorite in Argentina) 10, polenta 5, raviolis 10, tallarines (broader noodles) 9, and a miscellany of others.

So here’s the recipe for “lasagnas”.  In the original quantities are on the left, instructions on the right.  This is for 6 portions and the preparation and cooking time are listed as 45 minutes. Doña Lola moved fast than I do.

1/2 kilo flour

2 eggs

1/2 cup of salmuero (brine)

tuco (tomato sauce) to cook the albondigas (meat balls)

200 g of chopped meat

1 slice of bread

4 spoons of milk

1 egg

1 yolk

1/2 cup flour

1 cup grated cheese

First you make the dough with flour, eggs, and brine and you let it rest, ending up like a dough for raviolis.

On the side you prepare the sauce and in this sauce you cook some very tiny albondigas which you make with meat, salt, bread soaked in milk and well broken up and squeezed out, egg and yolk.  You make them the size of a nuez (probably walnut here) rolling them in flour and you put them to cook in the sauce over a slow fire.

You estirar (stretch, roll) the dough out finely, you cut redondeles (big rounds) or squares and you cook them in boiling water and salt. Once they are cooked you drain them carefully so as not to break them, you pass them through cold water, and you dry them on a linen, and you place them in a fuente) dish in camadas (layers) filling them like alfajor (roughly pastries with sweet fillings) with the suace in the middle and dusting them with cheese.  You continue until you finish, you should serve it really hot.

I’ve no idea if this is anything like my reader’s mother’s lasagne.   But the result must be layers of pasta with small meat balls, tomato sauce, and some cheese, we know not what.  I assume the pasta was cut to fit the shape of the dish.  It is less cheesy or creamy than we are used to.  And the fact that the author compares it to alfajores suggests that it was not that common at the time.

And many of the other recipes for pasta in the book are in fact what Americans might call casseroles: layered dishes of pasta, meat and sauce of some kind.  Was this common in Italy at the time?  In the US?  Comments?

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.

Duro de harina [chicharrón] (literally something hard of flour)

One quarter of flour, a teaspoon of salt, another of sodium bicarbonate; dissolve all this in a liter of water.  In another pot or vessel, pour another liter of water, when it boils empty it strained over the former, which will end up a thick paste, stretch it out on tin sheets or boards, put it in the sun, when it begins to dry out cut it in squares and turn them, then when they are dry fry them in golden lard.

Manteca dorada is the lard that has turned dark in frying or been rendered at a high temperature.  It would have given a richer taste to these sheets of fried pasta.

Fried pasta as “chicharrón” is very common indeed today.  Men sell it from big baskets along with hot sauce.   You can buy the sheets ready made from grain merchants from big sacks, tinted an odd kind of pinkish color, though I’ve never seen them in grocery stores. They turn  more or less chicharrón color when fried and look bubbly like chicharrón.

I’d always assumed that these were a cheap version of fried pig skin.  But who knows?  Does anyone know more about these in Mexico?  Or has anyone encountered deep fried pasta as a snack elsewhere?

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/03/pasta-meets-pigskin.html/feed 5 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/03/more-on-pasta-and-water.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2009/03/more-on-pasta-and-water.html#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:42:27 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=1008 Following up on Adam’s latest comment, here’s a link to the eGullet discussion on pasta since it’s sometimes complicated to find your way around eGullet.  If you don’t know eGullet, it’s worth getting to know as there are lots of knowledgeable people there.

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.