Look pasta the obvious

Italy isn’t the only nation with a long, complex pasta tradition. India has much older regional variations, as do many parts of Central and East Asia. Dig in, it’s all delicious

- VIR SANGHVI

What do you think of the Indian pasta tradition?

If your response is one of bewilderment, then join the club.

That's what I would have said too —at least until a week ago. “What rubbish! There is no such thing as an Indian pasta tradition,” Twould have confidently asserted.

Then, I caught the writer and food historian Kurush Dalal on Kunal Vijaykar’s podcast. Kunal looked as befuddled as you and me when Kurush went on about Indian pastas and how our tradition dates back centuries.

Iwas startled enough to call Kurush. Did he really believe all this stuff about ancient Indian pasta dishes? It turned out he did and he regaled me with examples from nearly every part of India.

But before we go much further, here's a little historical perspective. All of us think of pasta as being Italian, and we are not entirely wrong. Except that the Italian pastas we know today do not have deep historical roots. There has been some outrage in Italy recently over a book published by the food historian Luca Cesari (The English translation is called A Brief History of Pasta), which argues persuasively that Italians only started eating the pasta dishes that Italy is famous for during the modern period.

On the other hand, it is clear that while the dishes may be of recent origin, macaroni or some form of dried pasta did exist in medieval Italy. There is a reference to macaroni dating back to Genoa in 1279.

This is important if only to dispose of the myth that Marco Polo introduced Italians to Chinese noodles, which they appropriated and called pasta. The early references to macaroni predate Polo's return from China, and in any case, the story about Polo was invented in 20th century America as part of an ad campaign by a US pasta company.