Pasta lovers celebrate! October is National Pasta Month, and October 17 recognizes National Pasta Day.
- 400’s – First mentions of Pasta. Pasta is produced in large quantities in Palermo.
- 1600’s – Pasta becomes a staple. In Naples, Italy, people became vociferous macaroni-eaters.
- 1740 – The first pasta factory is opened. Paolo Adami opened it in Venice, It
- late 1700’s – the First mention of red sauce. The first mention of tomato sauce was in a 1790 cookbook called L’Apicio Moderno.
- 1789 – Thomas Jefferson was the first person to bring pasta to America.
- 1877 – the Barilla Pasta Company is founded in Parma, Italy. the company will eventually become the largest pasta company in the world
- 1914 – Articialpasta during invented. The process of creating dry pasta allowed it to be widely available in Italy.
- The first written reference to pasta was in 1154.
- The first reports of pasta were in China, not in Italy. These reports go way back in history, with the first reports of individuals eating pasta as early as 5,000 BC.
- In Italy, names of specific pasta shapes or types vary with locale.
- Example: Cavatelli is known by 28 different names depending on the region and town.
- There are over 600 types of pasta, some with over 1300 names.
- There are approximately 350 shapes of pasta
- 16th Century AD – First pasta maker in Italy. Beginning at the court of Ferrara and then adopted by the Neopolitans, the pasta maker Christoforo Messisbugo documents what he refers to as the ”macaroni invention
- The three most popular pasta dishes are macaroni and cheese, spaghetti bolognese, and lasagne.
- Italy produces 2,700,000 TONS of pasta per year. The US produces 1.9 Million tons.
- Pasta manufacturing machines were made in the 1600s across the coast of Sanremo.
- Spaghetto is the singular word for spaghetti
- Because pasta dough is so tough, workers would walk over large batches of dough to knead it and a single batch would take “a full day’s walking” to make.
- The average Italian eats 51 pounds of pasta per year. While Americans eat just 26 pounds a year.
- 24% of the global consumption of pasta is by Americans – the largest of any country in the world. Americans consume 6 billion pounds of pasta each year.
- The United States produces 4.4 billion pounds of pasta annually, making it the second-largest pasta-producing nation.
- According to studies, spaghetti is the favorite pasta for Americans. Second place is penne and then it is rotini.
- Macaroni Hair Style. In the mid-eighteenth century, “macaroni” referred to an overblown hairstyle as well as to the dandy wearing it.
- The first pasta factory in the U.S. was built in Brooklyn. Zerega was founded by a French immigrant (Antoine Zerega) in 1848 and is still making pasta today. [Philadelphia Macaroni bought Zerega’s in May 2020]
- To cook one billion pounds of pasta, you would need 2,021,452,000 gallons of water – enough to fill nearly 75,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
- One billion pounds of pasta is about 212,595 miles of 16-ounce packages of spaghetti stacked end-to-end — enough to circle the earth’s equator nearly nine times.
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