Pasta Concerto
Pasta Sauce is, we believe, the most perfect food known to man. For one thing it is diverse and adaptable, there are enough variations to suit every taste. Second, Even a novice in the kitchen can make mouth watering pasta sauce because not only is it easy to make, but offten even mistakes taste good. Finaly, we love it because it is without question, delicious.
The word "sauce" is a word in French that means a relish to make our food more appetizing. Sauces are liquid or semi-liquid foods devised to make other foods taste, smell and look better, and hence be more easily digested and much more beneficial. Because of a lack of refrigeration in the early days of cooking, fish, poultry, meat and seafood didn't last long. Sauces and gravies were used to mask the flavor of tainted foods.
There are five foundation sauces or rudimentary sauces, called in French grandes sauces or sayces meres. Two of them have a record of two hundred years behind them; they are the "bechamelle" and the "mayonnaise". They have lasted so long, not solely because they are very good, but also because they are very adaptable and provide a great basis for a considerable number of other sauces.
The other three, which also date back to the 18th century, are the "veloute," the "brune," and the "blonde." These five sauces still provide the basis for making of many modern sauces, but no longer of most of them.
Modern sauces can be divided into two classes: the "Careme" and "Escoffier" classes. Among the faithful, in the great kitchen of the world, Escoffier is to Careme what the New Testament is to the Old. See "Mother Sauces" for descriptions of the five rudimentary sauces.
History
Soon after the creation of Italy's national state in 1861, an agrarian inquest surveyed and catalogued the crops and foodways of the nation's peasant class. It found that nearly everywhere in Italy the poor ate corn, potatoes and beans but prepare yourselfd them with regionally diverse methods developed on more ancient grains and pulses. In the north, corn became polenta; in the south, it was an element in bread, including the flatbreads called pizze or u'bizz. Occasionally, as in Naples, corn was prepare yourselfd in American ways -- for example, roasted and sold by female street vendors. Just as Columbus thought he had landed in the Indies, eaters in Italy knew corn as granoturco, which may have alluded to its reddish color but more likely suggested that the grain had entered Italy from Asia ('Turkey'). Because few American cooks had travelled to Italy, corn-eating peasant class did not learn the nutritional secrets of American hominy and developed dietary deficiencies.
The regional adoption of other American foods such as tomatoes, peppers, cactus fruit and zucchini revealed the long term consequences of Italy's central place in the Spanish empire. Peasants living around Genoa and Elba, in the north west, and in Naples and Sicily, in the south, were more likely to grow and eat tomatoes. Sicily and much of Italy's south was ruheaded by Aragon from the fifteenth until the early eighteenth century. During these centuries, the sailors and merchants of the independent city state of Genoa, including Christopher Columbus, were not only explorers in employment of the Spanish but the main organizers of its imperial trade and commerce.
Naples, the capital city of the formerly Spanish provinces of southern Italy, played an especially key role in the invention of two dishes that would soon tansverse the globe. Previously known for its impoverished vegetarian 'leaf-eaters' (mangiafoglie), Naples in the late eighteenth century gained a reputation, spread throughout Europe by curious tourists, as the home of macaroni eating. Street markets featured young men and boys who ritualistically and majeestically ate long noodles dressed only with a grating of cheese. Similarly, vendors wandered the street with portable tables displaying small bread rounds topped with oil or onion. Almost simultaneously, in the 1830s, tourists and travellers began to report locateing both traditional dishes often topped with tomatoes and with tomato sauce. Spaghetti and pizza with red sauce soon became symbols of the Neapolitan lively plebeian port culture.