Everyone instantly thinks of Italy when they think about pasta. And so it is no wonder when you look on the recipe websites, you see mostly Italian recipes or dishes that are based on Italian style cooking including pasta. As a matter of fact, pasta with plenty of meat and tomato sauce is basically a characteristic connected to the country of Italy. But tomatoes weren’t popular in pasta sauces until approximately the nineteenth century, and there might be a possibility that pasta came from China. But centuries of Italian writings refer to pasta dishes, so even if pasta was not invented there, it was introduced quite early in Italian history and was wholeheartedly adopted.
Various areas in Italy have always created different kinds of food, and this is part of the reason that Italian recipes for pasta are very different. Recipes that came from the northern areas will bear the influence of early German and Roman cultures, whereas Arab trade spread Mediterranean influences far and wide and had more influence in the south. The recipes from the northern regions involve more pork, fish, sausage and cheese. Recipes from central Italy involve more ham, sausage, tomatoes and tortellini. In the southern regions, there are tomatoes, as well as olives, peppers, garlic, artichoke, zucchini and capers.
The E Rcps website includes Italian recipes as well as some Middle Eastern recipes. It has a section called “Pasta Recipes Listed by Region” that is totally devoted to Italy where you can see all these differences in the recipes that you select for the various regions. For instance, “Pasta with Cheese and Green Cabbage” is a recipe from Lombardy which is in the north; the cabbage reflects early Roman influences. “Vermicelli with Hot Pepper and Anchovy” is a recipe that you might find in Campania, which is to the south. Italian food is not very uniform, and tomatoes are not always the main ingredient.
People may not be aware that tomatoes were not included in Italian recipes until the early 1800′s, since tomatoes did not exist in Europe until after the exploration of the western hemisphere had occurred. Even though tomatoes were available in Europe, it took awhile before people accepted that they could eat them. However, the foods that were popular at that time in Italy were loaded with additional tasty ingredients. Pasta recipes with cheese sauces and no tomatoes may represent foods from an earlier chapter in the country’s history, when influences were likely to be Germanic, Byzantine or Arab.