Marco Polo was credited with bringing noodles back from the far east, and then, the story goes, they became spaghetti and that became the food that Italy was most famous for. I started thinking about this when I was wondering how to utilise a packet of 'four-minute spaghetti'.
Nowadays some people say that Marco Polo didn't really visit all the places he said he did. He just laid up somewhere comfy and made half of his stories up. They say he used a combination of other people's accounts of their travels, rumours that he heard from people he met on the road and his rather fertile imagination to produce many of the accounts that made him famous. Sounds a bit like how I got through university.
I don't know. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. It would be a shame if he really had done all that amazing stuff, and now we doubt him, but then again, if he had ripped it off, who were the guys who really did it, and don't they deserve a bit of credit? But it was a long time ago. We'll never know what really happened for sure, and it will give the historians something to keep themselves busy. Whatever really happened, the noodles-to-spaghetti thing ( if it really did happen that way, and if it did, regardless of who was responsible for it) raises a couple of questions in regard to Italian culinary history to which I would like to know the answers.
For instance, what did the Italians put on their spaghetti before tomatoes were discovered in the new world? I mean, chronologically, there was a big gap in between the Italians picking up the habit of eating spaghetti and tomatoes appearing in the shops. Even after tomatoes were introduced into Europe, they were originally grown as an ornamental garden plant. Everyone was frightened to eat them; they thought they were poisonous.
One story I heard, which again, might be true, might not, but is nevertheless quite funny, or rather sad, depending on how you look at it, was that in England, eating tomatoes was avoided because they were thought to have strong aphrodisiac qualities and would make you uncontrolably horny. Now, I would have thought that was a good reason for eating them.
So, that's the first question, but I also wondered, if Marco Polo thought his compatriots would enjoy noodles, why didn't he think they would enjoy a good stir-fry to go with them and bring back a couple of recipes? Or did he? Maybe he did and the technique just didn't catch on. This is what I suspect might actually have happened. There's Marco, in the court of the Italian royals. He's just produced the noodles from under his cape, thrown them into a pot of boiling water, perched on an ornate brazier, set up in front of the throne. After four munutes, he's pulled them out, everyone's 'Ooh'ing and 'Ah'ing and the king's tasted them and thinks they're great. Bouyed by his success, Marco now replaces the pot of water with a rounded frying pan, turns the heat on the brazier right up, adds some olive oil to the pan and throws in a handfull of thinly sliced vegetables...and everything goes wrong. The oil smokes and splatters, the vegetables release water into the pan and go all soggy. It's a complete disaster, and our boy Marco is left feeling like a complete choob.
That's what I think happened. You see, Italians like their olive oil; they cook just about everything in it and quite right too. It's delicious stuff and very nutritious. But, it's no good for stir-frying. You see, you can't heat olive oil to the kind of temperatures needed for stir frying without it starting to burn. It smokes and goes all bitter-tasting. The vegetables tend to soak up the oil, too and they become soggy and form a gloopy heap on the bottom of the wok. Nae good.
It's a long way round, but here's where this has all been leading to. I thought, if we just change the type of cooking oil, but stay with a selection of vegetables and seasonings which might more properly be associated with Italian cuisine rather than Chinese, and then we apply the technique of stir-frying, we stand a good chance of creating an interesting, tasy dish which we might then reasonably label 'Italian-style stir-fry'. So, I tried it and it worked. And it went really well with the four-minute spaghetti.
Before we go ahead with the essentail methodology, I'd like to clarify one point concerning the relative quantities of each ingredient. I have stated that we need a small aubergine, but I am aware that in Europe and probably in some other regions, aubergines come in sizes from big to enormous. We don't need so much. A small aubergine means something about the size of a meduim cougette. If your aubergine is much larger, don't use all of it.
Ingredients
1 small aubergine
1 courgette
1 green pepper
1 tomato
2 cloves of garlic
A sprig of basil (chopped or torn up)
A pinch of dried oregano
A couple of teaspoons of capers
A few black peppercorns
A little grape-seed oil
Salt
Like all stir-fries, the quality of the final result depends on the preparation and cooking technique as much as the choice of ingredients. The key factors for success are: the use of a large frying pan or wok - something with enough room to really sling the ingredients about in, but also made of fairly thin metal so that it heats up quickly; keeping the quantity of oil to a minimum - a couple of dessert spoons are enough; the ingredients should be sliced thinly so that they heat through quickly and, finally, the cooking time should be kept short.
So, bearing all this in mind, let's prepare the veggies. The tomato is not really part of the stir-fry - you'll see what I mean in a minute - so we can chop it up any way we want, but I would suggest cutting it into four parts and scooping out the seeds before cutting it up into smaller pieces. Stick the pieces in a bowl, along with the basil, oregano and capers and leave them aside till the end of cooking time.
Cut the other vegetables into slices or strips. The best way to do the courgette and aubergine is to cut them in half along their length, lay each piece cut-side down and slice thinly and diagonally. It's best, as always, to do the aubergine at the last minute so it doesn't discolour when exposed to the air.
Heat the oil in the pan and as soon as it starts smoking, throw in everything except the tomatoes and stir-fry. Four minutes should be enough, then add a little salt and the tomato-herb mixture. Stir and after thirty seconds, remove from the heat and your Italian style stir-fry is ready to serve with either spagetti or noodles.