Every PlateTales food history story tagged Italian, newest first.
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The meatless Christmas Eve supper is southern Italian and in print by 1847. The name and the fixed seven are Italian American, and nobody has found them in print before 1983.
Tiramisu is younger than most of the people who eat it. The best evidence points to a Treviso restaurant around 1970, but Friuli has a 1959 bill and a Baltimore baker has a story.
Marco Polo came home to Venice in 1295. Sicilian mills were exporting dried pasta by 1154, and the tale of his sailor named Spaghetti comes from a 1929 American trade journal.
For years the best answer was American bacon and powdered egg in liberated Rome. Then a 1939 Dutch newspaper turned up with carbonara already on a Trastevere menu.
Almost every ancient Roman recipe we have comes from one late cookbook, Apicius. It is a book of honey, pepper and fish sauce, and it was not written by the man whose name it carries.
The tomato reached Italy from the Americas by the 1540s, but it spent about two centuries as a garden curiosity before it became the red sauce we call Italian.
The word pizza is on paper in Gaeta in 997, but the tomato pie came centuries later in Naples. The famous Margherita story of 1889 is the weakest link.
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