Spaghetti Day

What the day is

Spaghetti Day is observed on January 4. The name is a diminutive of the Italian for string, and the dish carries more myth than almost any other everyday food.

Origin and background

The story that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China is false, and its origin is embarrassingly recent. Dried pasta was already being made and traded in Sicily well before Polo was born. A geographer working at the Norman court there described a thriving industry around 1154 producing dried strands for export, using a word borrowed from Arabic. Sicily had the durum wheat, the Arab-introduced technique and the dry climate the process needs. The Marco Polo tale appears to trace to an American pasta trade publication in the 1920s and spread because it made a better story than a supply chain.

Tomato sauce is genuinely late. Tomatoes arrived in Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century and were treated with suspicion for a long time. The first known Italian recipes pairing them with pasta date from the end of the eighteenth century, so the combination everyone thinks of as timeless is roughly two hundred years old.

Spaghetti and meatballs, meanwhile, is an Italian-American creation rather than an Italian one, born from immigrants encountering cheap meat in quantities they had not had at home.

The technique that most improves home pasta is one step. The starchy water the pasta cooked in is an emulsifier, and finishing the drained pasta in the pan with the sauce and a ladle of that water binds the two into something that clings, instead of sauce sitting on top of a heap of noodles. Salting the water heavily matters; adding oil to it does not help and stops sauce adhering.

How to take part

• Save a cup of the cooking water before draining, every time.
• Finish the pasta in the sauce for a minute rather than plating and pouring.
• Salt the water until it tastes seasoned. This is the only chance to season the pasta itself.
• Cook it a shade under, since it continues in the pan.
• Make a sauce with four ingredients and see how little it actually needs.