LTHForum.com

Gary Wiviott of Barn & Company smoking chicken on WGN's lunchbreak (video should be up soon)

Pasta, now a near-ubiquitous food throughout the world, has achieved global status after a long, complex history, involving multiple points of origin and several periods of rapid expansion of its popularity regionally. In the West one such period occurred in the late Middle Ages in the western Mediterranean. Given the paucity of early evidence for pasta consumption, many questions arise concerning where this food first became important in local diets and exactly who diffused it. Recent scholarship has asserted that Arabs played the central rôle in this development, crucially invoking linguistic evidence as support. In this paper, I demonstrate that the interpretation of the evidence has been superficial and gravely flawed and propose an account of the late medieval diffusion of pasta based on a new interpretation of the textual and linguistic evidence in full harmony with the broader socio-economic history of the medieval western Mediterranean.

Damn, but wouldn't I *love* to hear those papers!!

And BTW Amata, Antonius' historical talents are desperately needed in the "Chopped--New Orleans" thread, where an extremely tangled subject--the New Orleans pasta dish yaka-mein--is being aired. If you should see Mr. A sometime soon, pls mention my m'aidez, m'aidez call to him!

Geo