A&S
Classical Roman Pasta?
Note: A later version of this was published in Petits Propos Culinaires Issue 108, May 2017 p74-76 “The Lack of Evidence Regarding the Existence of Classical Roman Pasta”.
In some of my previous work I mentioned that Roman legions had pasta. This is a bit of a contentious subject and the traditional story is that pasta came to Europe via China, the other tradition is that it was introduced to Sicily by the Arabs in the 9th century. We had a discussion of this on the SCA Cooks Facebook page and so I looked into whether or not there was proof of pasta existing in Classical Rome and Greece.