There is an obvious mistake in the article that could be misleading for readers not well versed in 20th century Italian culture and politics.
In the article, it is written :"The essay [Manifesto della cucina futurista] was one of many fascist-leaning Futurist manifestos published in the early 20th century that called for the destruction of the old in favor of the new in fields such as poetry, painting, and cinema".
It is important to keep in mind that Futurism as an artistic, much more than political, movement--but some might say that all art is political anyway--"officially" started in 1909 with the publication of the "Manifesto del Futurismo" in the Figaro, the French newspaper. Fascism, on the other hand, as an organized political movement, started in 1919, after the end of the First World War. The Manifesto della cucina Futurista was written in 1931, but it was, overall, forgettable: much more relevant for art and politics were the pre-WWI manifestos.
Futurism, as a movement of some influence on the Italian cultural life, was already in decline in 1919, in part because some of the best known and liveliest futurist representatives were killed during WWI (Boccioni, Sant'Elia, Erba).
Despite all the problems associated with some of their message--unfortunately those were the most visible and the signature of their political and artistic position--, Futurismo was an avant-garde that saw most of their prediction, or desires, come true. Not many artistic or political movements could say the same.
Side note: the reason pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch is that the water taken out from the canned stuff is done with a vaccum evaporizer: it’s able to boil out the water at a temp of 140F vs 212F on a stove top. Less heat == more flavor
Tom Colicchio, Thomas Keller, Paul Bertoli and many other chefs have their version of "precious tomatoes", a tomato confit. None of these recipes scale. After many years of struggling with home dehydrators, I bought one of those full sheet pan carts you see in bakeries, enclosed it in nice plywood, added a 1500W wall heater, brewery temperature regulator, and a crawl space fan that looks like it belongs in a stereo rack. The top and bottom sheet pans serve as buffers and spares, but the middle six sheet pans (lined with silpat) can process 60 lbs of heirloom garden tomatoes at a time. We often grow twenty plants and supply family and friends, so this scale is necessary.
We skin, slice, spread onto oiled silpat, salt, and partially dry tomatoes till "gooshy", about 25% of original wet weight. We then vacuum pack 220g or so to a pouch, and store in a chest freezer till needed.
This equipment also makes great southern Italian concentrated tomato paste, "estrattu". My favorite tomatoes for these are dry-farmed Santa Cruz Early Girls, which I'm put up in a blind taste test against any tomato grown in Italy.
Cleanup is pretty easy, on the lawn with an electric pressure washer. This is a good time to give one's molcajete a cleaning too, if the coarse stone has been trapping food.
I can't eat canned tomatoes; I have to avoid tomato dishes in even the fanciest Italian restaurants. It baffles me why no one is doing what I do on a commercial scale to supply their restaurants, selling the extra through Eataly.
I've heard from pretty much every cooking source I follow that the reason canned taste better than fresh is because nearly all US tomato varieties sold fresh have been bred for their ability to be picked early, be transported long distances, hit with ethylene gas, and look good in the store. Taste isn't a factor in those tomatoes, in fact the grainy thick inner walls and small flavorful jelly sacks help in transportation. Fresh tomatoes in other country tend to be far better with much bigger jelly sacks.
Canned tomatoes don't have an in store look to worry about and are different varieties. The canning process might help in sauce creation but isn't the main factor in the US
> pasta sauces made with canned tomato base taste so much better than pasta sauce from scratch
That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something.
I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.
As an Italian I find your post quite wrong for so many reasons, most importantly because there's an endless amount of recipes and because in Italy alone we have hundreds of different tomatoes in color, size, sweetness, acidity taste and methods of preparation.
Pasta made with fresh tomatoes is absolutely great and it is ridiculous to even think the opposite. The boiling is only done for some kind of tomatoes and it is done to peel it, heat does not make it lose any flavor.
… And that's why my grandma insisted on an all-day (and sometimes all-night) low temperature simmer for such sauces instead of trying to "boil the life out of it" as she used to put it. You can totally taste the difference though. There's a "richness" to a slow-simmered sauce you just don't get from a hurried boil or any sort of quick thickeners.
There's huge variation in taste of both canned tomatoes & passata between different brands, and I've made much better pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes than a can. When they've been good, in-season local tomatoes. I've also made worse pasta sauce with fresh tomatoes in winter.
I'm fairly sure the quality of the ingredients will have a much bigger impact than temp.
That said, cooking on a low heat for as long as possible does give you the best results.
> ...He wanted to wean Italy off of foreign wheat imports, which were becoming increasingly difficult to acquire amidst international sanctions and a suffering domestic economy. Rice grew well in Northern Italy, so Mussolini sent free rice samples throughout the country and bombarded Italians with pro-rice propaganda.
How did pasta get so popular if they had to import the wheat? Seems they cannot produce enough for the whole population without imports even now, I would think that would make it expensive over staples thay they can grow themselves.
East Asia imports loads of wheat, yet wheat noodle dishes and breads are still popular.
In peacetime, it’s usually better to just import cheap things like grains and focus more on making high value foods. Italy probably makes good money selling their cheese worldwide—they and France are basically synonymous with good, expensive cheese. Nobody will pay a premium for Italian wheat though.
Now, this is just a guess not backed up even by a google search, but being that Italians have been eating pasta since the Middle Ages, I would guess that it has something to do with Northern Italy being part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Wikipedia says that the population of Italy nearly doubled between 1861 and 1936, this despite the fact that there was massive emigration of Italians to places like the United States and Argentina over the same period.
Fun fact, most italian pasta brands use american and canadian grains. We just don't have much wheat, never had it even in ancient times. With EU we produce even less of it as we have benefits to focus on farming other specialties or produce cheese and meat.
Wheat had been the staple food of the Italian peninsula since at least the days of Rome, though the Romans ate bread rather than pasta. It was the staple they could grow themselves.
The article mentions the Futurist Cookbook. Wikipedia has more info about it [1], including a link to the freely available Italian text. There is an English translation [2], but that one is not free.
In a sense, espresso coffee is the ultimate Futurist hot drink: made with electricity, high-pressure water and stainless steel, giving energy and the will to perform great deeds. It is no coincidence that it became popular in Fascist Italy.
> Prepare the potato water. Boil the potatoes in a pot of salted water until soft. Remove them from the pot and reserve the water, which will be used to thicken the sauce. The potatoes can be used for a different recipe.
later on...
> Add parsley, a spoonful of tomato sauce, and a few spoonfuls of the potato water to the pan. Let the sauce reduce.
> Pour the sauce into a blender and add the anchovies and capers. Blend until thick and smooth. Return the sauce to the pan, adding more potato water if too dry.
This is somewhat upsetting. My dad, a professonial cook, would always deride recipes for their use of thickener -- just cook it longer, or add less liquid to begin with! That could apply here... but the second use for the potato water is to thin the sauce! I'm somewhat skeptical of some cooks' generic advice against adding water to a dish; it's perceived to thin the flavor or whatever. But this? It's just potato water! The flavor is nothing to write home about; just use some freaking water!
And what are we going to do with those two potatoes? Oh, set them aside for some other dish. Here's an idea, don't put this on pasta, make some freaking gnocchi and don't wind up with a pair of moldy boiled potatoes in the back of your refrigerator. And we're making a whole pot of potato water for, what, two or three spoonsful? Why not boil it down, and keep the powder for ready us? Or just... use corn starch, dance on my dad's grave. It will be okay.
And don't even get me started on wasting time to peel the potatoes. Quarter, boil, and the skins slip right off.
Starches thicken sauce in a way that's quite different from reducing.
Most Italian sauces end up adding some of the pasta water back in at the end. This is starchy water which has two purposes: both to loosen (thin) the sauce, making it spread out to cover the whole dish, and to thicken the sauce by giving it a slightly gluey texture (unappetizing description, I know) that helps it bind together and stick to the pasta.
These two purposes sound like opposites but are not. A tomato sauce that has simply reduced will be both dense and not bind well to the pasta.
(To be sure, reducing also builds flavor, which is why you first reduce and then add starch water.)
You can also generally buy potato starch if you are absolutely insistent on it being potatoes, it's not particularly hard to source. (Most Asian grocers will have potato starch, as a baseline.)
If you cook anything for long enough, it will dry out. If you cook tomato sauce with potato water, you will eventually evaporate the water out of the potato water and end up with a mixture of potato starch and water. Potato water was used as a thickener before cornstarch became prevalent.
Secondly, this recipe was made for an audience that largely did not depend on refrigeration. Cold cellar storage, yes, but not refrigeration. So they'd have been using those potatoes for something else.
If you watch Youtubers who do cooking, Ethan Chlebowski recently did a really interesting comparison video [0] between different types of canned tomatoes, mostly to compare San Marzano across brands. As someone who's not much of a cook it was enlightening to see how different tomatoes can have pretty vast differences in taste/texture.
> Marinetti imagined a world in which Italians absorbed nutrients through pills, freeing mealtime to become a form of performance art enhanced by technology, perfumes, and music.
Marinetti was way ahead of his time, and most probably also out of geographic place. The Silicon Valley of the late 2010s would have been a much better fit.
> The Silicon Valley of the late 2010s would have been a much better fit.
"Marinetti is best known as the author of the first Futurist Manifesto, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919."[1]
What about Filoppo instead of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti?
I am puzzled by the lack of rigor commonly observed in English writing when it comes to non-English names or non-English words more generally.
I am reading the book "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" about Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel, and 50% of the Italian words or phrases have errors. What are the editors for?
PS, Mussolini died in 1945, not technically. Technically, or to be precise, he was killed by a group of partigiani.
[+] [-] borroka|3 years ago|reply
In the article, it is written :"The essay [Manifesto della cucina futurista] was one of many fascist-leaning Futurist manifestos published in the early 20th century that called for the destruction of the old in favor of the new in fields such as poetry, painting, and cinema".
It is important to keep in mind that Futurism as an artistic, much more than political, movement--but some might say that all art is political anyway--"officially" started in 1909 with the publication of the "Manifesto del Futurismo" in the Figaro, the French newspaper. Fascism, on the other hand, as an organized political movement, started in 1919, after the end of the First World War. The Manifesto della cucina Futurista was written in 1931, but it was, overall, forgettable: much more relevant for art and politics were the pre-WWI manifestos.
Futurism, as a movement of some influence on the Italian cultural life, was already in decline in 1919, in part because some of the best known and liveliest futurist representatives were killed during WWI (Boccioni, Sant'Elia, Erba).
Despite all the problems associated with some of their message--unfortunately those were the most visible and the signature of their political and artistic position--, Futurismo was an avant-garde that saw most of their prediction, or desires, come true. Not many artistic or political movements could say the same.
[+] [-] burkaman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acalzycalzy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Syzygies|3 years ago|reply
We skin, slice, spread onto oiled silpat, salt, and partially dry tomatoes till "gooshy", about 25% of original wet weight. We then vacuum pack 220g or so to a pouch, and store in a chest freezer till needed.
This equipment also makes great southern Italian concentrated tomato paste, "estrattu". My favorite tomatoes for these are dry-farmed Santa Cruz Early Girls, which I'm put up in a blind taste test against any tomato grown in Italy.
Cleanup is pretty easy, on the lawn with an electric pressure washer. This is a good time to give one's molcajete a cleaning too, if the coarse stone has been trapping food.
I can't eat canned tomatoes; I have to avoid tomato dishes in even the fanciest Italian restaurants. It baffles me why no one is doing what I do on a commercial scale to supply their restaurants, selling the extra through Eataly.
[+] [-] Larrikin|3 years ago|reply
I've heard from pretty much every cooking source I follow that the reason canned taste better than fresh is because nearly all US tomato varieties sold fresh have been bred for their ability to be picked early, be transported long distances, hit with ethylene gas, and look good in the store. Taste isn't a factor in those tomatoes, in fact the grainy thick inner walls and small flavorful jelly sacks help in transportation. Fresh tomatoes in other country tend to be far better with much bigger jelly sacks.
Canned tomatoes don't have an in store look to worry about and are different varieties. The canning process might help in sauce creation but isn't the main factor in the US
[+] [-] giardia|3 years ago|reply
That's a matter of taste, to say the least. You could probably come up with all sorts of metrics that show that canned tomatoes have more of this or that, but pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes taste like tomatoes, canned tomatoes taste like imitation tomatoes or almost like ketchup in comparison. It sounds like you might've not reduced the fresh tomato sauce enough or something.
I won't deny that I use canned 99.99% of the time though. They win on every metric except taste.
[+] [-] epolanski|3 years ago|reply
Pasta made with fresh tomatoes is absolutely great and it is ridiculous to even think the opposite. The boiling is only done for some kind of tomatoes and it is done to peel it, heat does not make it lose any flavor.
[+] [-] blooalien|3 years ago|reply
… And that's why my grandma insisted on an all-day (and sometimes all-night) low temperature simmer for such sauces instead of trying to "boil the life out of it" as she used to put it. You can totally taste the difference though. There's a "richness" to a slow-simmered sauce you just don't get from a hurried boil or any sort of quick thickeners.
[+] [-] lucideer|3 years ago|reply
I'm fairly sure the quality of the ingredients will have a much bigger impact than temp.
That said, cooking on a low heat for as long as possible does give you the best results.
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcroixx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wodenokoto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sojournerc|3 years ago|reply
The key is a base of mushroom broth, with roasted garlic, and good tomatoes.
I don't disagree that a lot of home made sauces don't compare, but done right, traditional recipes are far better.
Don't repeat your thinking in Italy...
[+] [-] gabythenerd|3 years ago|reply
How did pasta get so popular if they had to import the wheat? Seems they cannot produce enough for the whole population without imports even now, I would think that would make it expensive over staples thay they can grow themselves.
[+] [-] xeromal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|3 years ago|reply
It didn’t. The population increased and the country didn’t have the wheat-growing regions it would have needed to match.
And pasta is not the only wheat sink, bread and other doughs (e.g. pizza) are generally wheat based as well.
[+] [-] pigsty|3 years ago|reply
In peacetime, it’s usually better to just import cheap things like grains and focus more on making high value foods. Italy probably makes good money selling their cheese worldwide—they and France are basically synonymous with good, expensive cheese. Nobody will pay a premium for Italian wheat though.
[+] [-] juujian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy
[+] [-] epolanski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c3534l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanslub42|3 years ago|reply
In a sense, espresso coffee is the ultimate Futurist hot drink: made with electricity, high-pressure water and stainless steel, giving energy and the will to perform great deeds. It is no coincidence that it became popular in Fascist Italy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurist_cooking [2] https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/21/futurist-cookbook-...
[+] [-] klyrs|3 years ago|reply
> Prepare the potato water. Boil the potatoes in a pot of salted water until soft. Remove them from the pot and reserve the water, which will be used to thicken the sauce. The potatoes can be used for a different recipe.
later on...
> Add parsley, a spoonful of tomato sauce, and a few spoonfuls of the potato water to the pan. Let the sauce reduce.
> Pour the sauce into a blender and add the anchovies and capers. Blend until thick and smooth. Return the sauce to the pan, adding more potato water if too dry.
This is somewhat upsetting. My dad, a professonial cook, would always deride recipes for their use of thickener -- just cook it longer, or add less liquid to begin with! That could apply here... but the second use for the potato water is to thin the sauce! I'm somewhat skeptical of some cooks' generic advice against adding water to a dish; it's perceived to thin the flavor or whatever. But this? It's just potato water! The flavor is nothing to write home about; just use some freaking water!
And what are we going to do with those two potatoes? Oh, set them aside for some other dish. Here's an idea, don't put this on pasta, make some freaking gnocchi and don't wind up with a pair of moldy boiled potatoes in the back of your refrigerator. And we're making a whole pot of potato water for, what, two or three spoonsful? Why not boil it down, and keep the powder for ready us? Or just... use corn starch, dance on my dad's grave. It will be okay.
And don't even get me started on wasting time to peel the potatoes. Quarter, boil, and the skins slip right off.
The sauce does sound tasty, though.
[+] [-] SamBam|3 years ago|reply
Most Italian sauces end up adding some of the pasta water back in at the end. This is starchy water which has two purposes: both to loosen (thin) the sauce, making it spread out to cover the whole dish, and to thicken the sauce by giving it a slightly gluey texture (unappetizing description, I know) that helps it bind together and stick to the pasta.
These two purposes sound like opposites but are not. A tomato sauce that has simply reduced will be both dense and not bind well to the pasta.
(To be sure, reducing also builds flavor, which is why you first reduce and then add starch water.)
[+] [-] bobthepanda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|3 years ago|reply
If you cook anything for long enough, it will dry out. If you cook tomato sauce with potato water, you will eventually evaporate the water out of the potato water and end up with a mixture of potato starch and water. Potato water was used as a thickener before cornstarch became prevalent.
Secondly, this recipe was made for an audience that largely did not depend on refrigeration. Cold cellar storage, yes, but not refrigeration. So they'd have been using those potatoes for something else.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] riffraff|3 years ago|reply
I think this may be a remnant of the original recipe, using starch powder for cooking was less popular, I believe.
This is effectively home made potato starch.
[+] [-] wahnfrieden|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmountain|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spike021|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMMFUKibW-c
[+] [-] paganel|3 years ago|reply
Marinetti was way ahead of his time, and most probably also out of geographic place. The Silicon Valley of the late 2010s would have been a much better fit.
[+] [-] nl|3 years ago|reply
"Marinetti is best known as the author of the first Futurist Manifesto, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919."[1]
Shared without further comment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti
[+] [-] epolanski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Finnucane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonstewart|3 years ago|reply
Well, technically, -yes-, Mussolini* died in the 1940s… but it wasn’t exactly from natural causes in 1948 or anything….
*note that Atlas Obscura misspells Mussolini
[+] [-] borroka|3 years ago|reply
I am puzzled by the lack of rigor commonly observed in English writing when it comes to non-English names or non-English words more generally.
I am reading the book "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" about Michelangelo's painting of the Sistine Chapel, and 50% of the Italian words or phrases have errors. What are the editors for?
PS, Mussolini died in 1945, not technically. Technically, or to be precise, he was killed by a group of partigiani.
[+] [-] shever73|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xeromal|3 years ago|reply