My first November in Naples was cold and wet. We lived in the basalt-dark center of the city. Our tiny apartment had no refrigerator to hold a turkey, no oven to cook it in, no American friends to invite us for a taste of home. I didn’t know how much I loved Thanksgiving until it was impossible. Maurizio, with loving persistence, found a restaurant that did offer turkey breast and although it was white meat (I like dark), and just there on the plate, no stuffing, no sweet potatoes, no nothing, well I had Maurizio and was thankful for that.

Soon, though, I got work teaching for the University of Maryland at a naval base. With this post came the right to shop in the PX for  turkey (large, hormone-enhanced), cranberries and orange sweet potatoes (the Italian versions are white), and so forth. Neighbors brought their children to see “the animal” defrosting in my refrigerator. We invited friends, pushed two tables together, and made a feast. And it was good. Still, if you look at the two images, it’s clear why for our Italian friends, Thanksgiving was culinary ethnography, an affront to the rules of la cucina italiana.

First, there’s the whole beast, roasted, in its nearly natural state, plunked down on a table. It must have seemed so . . . carnivorous. Then there’s the mixing of salty food (turkey) with clearly sweet food (cranberries) which just, well, isn’t done. And all those foods with different tastes and textures, the aforementioned salty and sweet, touching each other on the same plate. Not done. Then the fact that you see the whole meal right in front of you, no ceremonial presentation of course after course: the pasta course, the meat or fish course, the salad, all the delightful expectation gone. No eggplant in sight. All the time and confusion of passing serving plates back and forth until a  dozen people are served nearly a dozen items. So tedious, such a long wait  before the sacred words of grace from the hosts: Buon appetito.

Our friends were good sports, indulgent of my little fantasy. By the dessert course, all was forgiven, all culinary oddity overlooked with the appearance of pecan pie, a stunning revelation, soon to be affixed to every dinner invitation: “And could you bring a torta di pecan”? Within a few years, casual comments began in September: “So, Pamela, are you making that dinner again, the one with turkey and marmalade and torta di pecan?” Thanksgiving — it’s a portable feast.

Marco Polo’s claim to have imported the pasta concept from China is pretty much sauced with ego. For thousands of years, flour, water, salt and ingenuity have made pasta-like foods for the poor. In the first century BCE, Horace wrote of proto-lasagna, fried sheets of dough. The Jerusalem Talmud celebrates itrium, a boiled dough made in the Holy Land after the 3rd century ACE.
The illustration shows a 15th C Latin translation of an Arabic text, showing women making long pasta. As you see, it’s labor intensive. A solitary cook with a hungry family put hours into pasta-making. Culinary technology crept along.
Three centuries later, the great technician Thomas Jefferson drew a mechanism for making macaroni, which you see here.

Somewhat later (1906) in Cleveland, Italian immigrant Angelo Vitantonio invented the first hand crank pasta machine, cheap and easy to use in the home. Pasta no longer needed to be flattened and cut by hand, allowing a single cook to quickly produce large quantities of uniform pasta. From the Holy Land to Cleve-Land, pasta endures. Shapes change, sauces change, but flour, water, salt, sometimes a few other additives, and cooks’ ingenuity keep abundantly satisfying families.