How Gragnano pasta is born
How Gragnano pasta is born

Video: How Gragnano pasta is born

Video: How Gragnano pasta is born
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Anonim

In one of his famous lecture to Ohio college graduates, David Foster Wallace tells this story: “Two young fish swim together. They encounter an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. "Hello guys, how is the water today?" says the old man. The two continue to swim for a while longer, perplexed. Then one of the two says: "And what the hell is water?" ".

The skit helps him to explain that when we are immersed in a reality we cannot see what we have under our noses.

Who knows if in all the emphasis that tarnishes the world of food, young people realize that behind the recipes, the TV talents, the chef-system there is a productive world that is the backbone of everything that appears.

We are the country that produces the most pasta of durum wheat in the world, 3,316,728 tons per year, according to the data published on the occasion of the World Pasta Day in 2012, with a per capita consumption of 26 kilos.

We even have a municipality in the province of Naples, Gragnano, built as an immense open-air pasta factory, and it is Italian - of Gragnano - the only pasta to boast the IGP brand and which represents 14% of Italian exports.

We are immersed in pasta.

pasta from gragnano, lumaconi
pasta from gragnano, lumaconi

Also for all these reasons, when they tell you that the macaroni the Chinese invented them, rebel. Although Marco Polo on his return to Venice described Chinese spaghetti, mixing water and flour to obtain a mixture to be cooked is a practice attested since the Old Testament.

It is proven that almost all peoples have made an autonomous discovery of it.

For example, there is talk of pasta in the Book for the entertainment of those who delight in traveling the regions, written by the geographer al-Idrisi in the 12th century at the court of Roger II of Sicily. In fact, the spread of long-format dry pasta dates back to the Arab domination of Sicily, between the 7th and 12th centuries.

Even the word "maccaruni", with which all types of pasta were indicated until the nineteenth century, derives from the Sicilian dialect, in turn derived from the late Latin "maccari", meaning "to crush" (the grain).

The origin of the widespread use of pasta dates back to the eighteenth century. It was produced above all in Campania, in Naples, Torre Annunziata, Castellamare di Stabia and of course in Gragnano, by pasta factories that used gigantic and cumbersome presses for macaroni and vermicelli.

According to economic historians, the improvement of cultivation techniques, which produced a considerable increase in the cultivation of wheat in addition to the increase in yields, the technological progress in the manufacture of pasta and the consequent lowering of its cost made it accessible even to the miserable..

Gragnano pasta, rigatoni
Gragnano pasta, rigatoni

This overwhelming industrial development in the production of a staple food changed the fame of the Neapolitans.

If until the seventeenth century consumers of broccoli and cabbage ("leaves") were known, which is why the multitude of lazzari (ie lazzaroni and beggars) of the city was defined "leaf eaters" or "cacafoglie", in the eighteenth century they began to be defined "Macaroni eater" or simply "macaroni".

It is in the transformation from a leaf eater to a macaroni eater that we find one of the greatest junctions in the history of Italian food. In the eighteenth century, Naples was the most populous city in the country, with about 400,000 inhabitants, and as we know it was a fundamental stop on the Grand Tour, at least as important as Rome and Venice, more than Florence.

Between 1770 and 1780 Vesuvius erupted eight times, which made it the most spectacular and electrifying destination in Italy. In their diaries, which were often published and read throughout the Western world, travelers recounted the spectacle of the Neapolitans who ate pasta on street corners, buying it from the carts that sold it cheaply.

But it wasn't just the Lazzari who ate pasta: King Ferdinand IV Borbone, son of Don Carlos and known as “King Lazzarone”, was known for his passion for macaroni.

pasta from gragnano, penne
pasta from gragnano, penne

In the nineteenth century, in the poetic production of Neapolitan intellectuals there was a whole succession of odes and sonnets in homage to macarone. "Macaroni grease our esophagus, enemies of fever and the sarcophagus" wrote Jacopo Vittorelli, while Antonio Viviani, in his playful poem Li Maccheroni di Napoli listed the species:

"Among this class there is maccheroncino, / Riccio di foritana and tagliarello, / Cannarono di prete and fedelino, / Cappelluccio, spaghetti and vermicello: / Lingua di passera and paternostrino, / Di prete ear and rind of hazelnut, / Lagana, tagliolino and boot, / Big and small lasagna, and anelletto … // But, as I said, the first boast / Bring macarone among all of them; / Nothing else so good is found, how much / This one pleases all people, / And more than the others will please, as long as / That is found in men reason; / Because the flavor of this is so exquisite / That together it consoles the taste and appetite."

Camillo Cateni, in the Cicalata in praise of macaroni, leaves no room for doubt:

"Macarone is synonymous with good, or rather three times good, and since in this world so depraved, mostly those who are three times good, finding themselves surrounded by bad guys, or good so-so, are forced by their modesty, moderation, loyalty, frankness, and honesty to stay behind everyone, to make the figure of the fool, so the thrice good, or both the macarone that sounds the same, has been usurped in the sense of a little man, full of a excessive gullibility, escaped, amazed, citrullo. So in this world you have to be Macaroni, but not so much as to be called such by Antonomasia ".

Pasta from Gragnano, Ruote
Pasta from Gragnano, Ruote

Even Giacomo Leopardi, who in a not so excellent poetic composition of 1835, The New Believers, had mocked the Neapolitans for their love for macaroni, was exhumed as the protagonist of Maccheronata by Gennaro Quaranta:

“And you were unhappy and sickly / O sublime Cantor di Recanati, / who, cursing Nature and Fates, rummaged inside you with horror. / Oh never did that dry lip of yours laugh, or your bright and sunken eyes, / because … you didn't adore maltagliati, / egg omelettes and pie! // But if you had loved Macaroni / More than books, which make the humor negro, / you would not have suffered bitter ailments … // And living among the fat bontemponi, / you would have arrived, ruddy and cheerful, / perhaps up to ninety or one hundred years old.

Arriving at the fateful 1861, it can be said with certainty that if the capital of the newly formed Italy was Turin, that of pasta was unquestionably Gragnano. In that year, as the anthropologist Marino Niola writes, "67 macaroni factories and 22 mills operated in Gragnano. The streets were literally flooded with long vermicelli ".

Gragnano is a city that seems made on purpose for making pasta. Indeed it is. In addition to the geographical vocation, the favorable climate and air, the proximity to the Valle dei Mulini where 30 water mills worked, there were those in Gragnano who decided that this would be the city of pasta.

Gragnano pasta, ziti
Gragnano pasta, ziti

The two archaeologists Domenico Camardo and Mario Notomista in Gragnano tell it, from the valley of the mills to the city of pasta: the architect Camillo Ranieri in 1843, designed Via Roma, the main street of the town, in such a way as to allow day the light and heat of the sun could invade the pasta left to dry on the street. San Sebastiano, the patron saint of the city, is the protector of all the pasta makers of Gragnano.

Today, to watch over pasta and pasta makers, more than the patron is the Gragnano Città della Pasta Consortium, founded in 2003 and which brings together 12 historic pasta factories. The annual turnover of the members exceeds 300 million euros. It was also thanks to the work of the Consortium that in October 2013 Gragnano pasta obtained the IGP mark, the first Community quality recognition awarded to pasta in Italy and Europe.

According to the regulations to be respected in order to boast the brand, the area of production and packaging of the pasta includes the whole territory of the Municipality of Gragnano in the Province of Naples.

The production process is divided into four main phases, the first of which is the dough:

the durum wheat semolina is mixed with water, in a percentage not exceeding 30%, until a homogeneous and elastic mass is obtained; the dough is then pushed into "dies" made exclusively in bronze and with shaped holes, which give the pasta a rough surface and determine its shape according to the imagination of Gragnano pasta makers: spaghetti, noodles, vermicelli, fusilli, ziti, rigatoni, snails, half sleeves and so on up to 'campotto', an original Gragnano pasta format produced by the Pastificio dei Campi and created by the designer Mauro Olivieri, which this year was the only edible product among the 110 awarded by the Compasso d'Oro, with an honorable mention for “the innovative relationship between form and use”.

Gragnano pasta, squid
Gragnano pasta, squid

After drawing, drying is carried out, the third stage of production, which varies according to the formats and takes place at a temperature between 40 and 80 ° C, for a period of between 6 and 60 hours. After cooling, the pasta must be packaged on the production site, within the following twenty-four hours, to avoid loss of moisture and any breakage or damage.

And the recipe?

The secret seems to be in the water, to return to Wallace.

Pasta di Gragnano PGI is obtained only by mixing durum wheat semolina with water from the local aquifer, no other allowed.

And while the pasta factories change - also of ownership - as in the case of the historic Pastificio Garofalo recently purchased by the Spanish multinational Ebro Foods, today in Gragnano more than 10 million portions of pasta are produced per day and 70% of the production is destined for exports for the kitchens of young "macaroni eaters" around the world.

There is only one thing that always remains the same and does not move: the water of Gragnano.

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