You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

Guess what, Mango, what's that?

Well, you know I love numbers, so I'm going to start out with a big number here.

Did you know that there are over three hundred and fifty different pasta shapes?

Mango, I didn't know that, which means there are over three hundred and fifty different pasta shape names.

That's really what I'm getting at here, each with its own backstories.

So you want to hear one of my favorites.

Obviously I want to hear because this would have been.

A very short episode if you're like, no, not really really in the mood for one of those this today?

Not the carbs, Yeah, not carbs today.

All right, So this story is all about Kava Tapi, which is that long, loose spiral, and it turns out it was originally called Chillin' Tani after an Italian pop star, So tell me, what.

Does a pop star have to do with pasta?

So cell and Tani was originally created by the company Gorilla, but it was a mistake.

It happened because of a problem with aposthadize that they were using.

So those are the molds that you feed the dough through to give the final producted shape.

And so in the nineteen sixties, Brilla had some dyes that were supposed to have these very straight lines but accidentally ended up with curvy ones.

So workers fed the dough through and out came this new corkscrew shape.

Now, because the shape was springy, it reminded people of the company of the singer Andreano Cellantano, who was known for his high energy bouncy dancing.

So Brilla trademarked the name cell and Tani and they are selling it under that name today.

And the shape became so popular that other companies wanted to get in on this game, but they actually couldn't use Gorilla's trademark, so they called it Kava tapi, which comes from the Italian word for corkscrew.

But actually, here's a little bon this fact for you.

The most popular pasta shape in the United States is something much more straightforward than a corkscrew.

It's, of course, spaghetti, which can be translated as little strings.

Well, first of all, I want to say how amazing it is.

The Brilla tried to make a straight pasta and it ended up permed total.

Perm must have been a humid that day.

But I also love the idea that spaghetti translates as little strings.

Does that mean that like a single piece of spaghetti is actually a spaghetto?

That is absolutely what it means.

So now you can go to Italy and order a single noodle, just like all the locals do there.

I don't think anyone can stop at just one foodle But in addition to being delicious, all this pasta is packed with history, which is the best flavor of all.

So today on the show, we've gotten nine fact about Italian pasta.

So grab your fourth and that's not even an.

Hey, their podcast listener is welcome to part time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson Ennis Always.

I'm here with my good friend Mangush hot ticket here and over there in the booth dressed up.

It took me a minute, but he's dressed up like a Pizza Hut restaurant with a red roof hat.

It's really it's impressive.

Actually, it's our pal and producer Dylan Fagan, always surprising us.

I think that's from the Pizza Hut stunt where they claimed they were changing their name to Pasta Hut.

Do you remember I actually actually don't.

But is that a real thing?

Yeah?

It was an April Fool's joke and they talked about changing all their names, and people were outraged or excited, depending on how much they love pasta.

But I love that Dylan picked up on it.

That's pretty amazing.

So will are you a big pasta eater?

I love pasta so so so much, how about you?

So much that every time I go for a business lunch, I tell myself I'm gonna order the salad, and then I just end up with like a bowl of bread.

It's too hard not to have.

No willpower for the stuff.

But here is my first fact.

So I want to address a question I know people would be asking, which is what is the difference between pasta and noodles.

Now I've heard some folks say that pasta is Italian and noodles are from other cuisines, like Chinese rice noodles or Korean sweet potato noodles.

But for the purposes of this episode, we are going with the Oxford English Dictionaries definition, and the OED defines a noodle as quote a string or ribbon like piece of pasta or similar flour paste, sometimes containing egg, typically cooked in liquid and served either in a soup or as an accompaniment to another dish.

So noodles can be a type of pasta, but they aren't always.

Yeah, So the oed goes on to define pasta as quote, especially an Italian cookery thin strands, sheets, or other shapes of dome made from Durham wheat and water, sometimes enriched with egg, usually sold dried and cooked in boiling water.

All right, So by this definition, spaghetti is a type of noodle and a type of pasta.

And something like pusilli obviously is a pasta, but not a noodle, is that right?

That's right?

And rice noodles are noodles, but they're not pasta because they're not Italian and they're also not made from this particular type of wheat.

Got it understood?

So we might get some emails about this, but that's where we stand.

And speaking of strong opinions, we ask people to tell us about their favorite pasta shapes.

And this is so much fun.

A lot of folks talked about sauce grabability as their number one factor in determining this.

Our friend Doug Mack, who writes the Great Snackstack Newsletter which everyone should subscribe to said he loves fettuccini because you can wrap it around a fork, but unlike spaghetti, it's flat, so sauce sticks to it better.

Over on Blue Sky, someone with the user named gravel Influencer, which I also really love, describes themselves as a hardcore fan of Jammelli.

Again for sauce reasons.

Stacey chose Campanelle, and I have to admit I'd never heard of that one.

It is a cone with ruffled edge and the name means little bells, but it's also known as trumpetti or trump bits and I actually have a picture of this.

It's amazing.

You can see how sauce would really get right down there in the horn part.

Man, I want to eat that, I know I want.

I actually want like a pasta Biles Davis, steady kind.

Another one I had to look up was Strozza Preete, which actually was mentioned by a few folks on Blue Sky.

Strotza prete means priest strangler.

Priest strangler, what?

Why does it mean?

That?

It is a long hand rolled tube shape kind of like cavatelli.

Apparently the name reflects local opinions about greedy priest from a time when the Catholic Church owned most of the land and charge farmers high rent.

There's also the user ham Hawk, who shouted out cascatelli, which of course is the curved ruffled shape invented by Dan Pashman on his pcast.

And I love this response from Faisal, who said there is no best pasta shape.

They're all beautiful and it depends on the sauce.

And although we didn't ask about this, a few people did tell us about their least favorite pasta shape.

A listener named Oriole wrote to say that spaghetti is just too thick, angel hair and vermicelli are better, and over on Blue Sky, user l nk Joe said the worst shape is obviously rakeete or rackets, and he shared a photo and they literally look like tennis rackets.

Yeah, so even as a tennis fan, it feels like more like a gimmick than a proper delivery vehicle for all the red sauce I want, so I agree with them.

I'm looking at this now it actually reminds me.

I don't know, I haven't thought about this in a while, but like all the different shapes in the I probably shouldn't be admitting this, but I ate a ton of Chef Boyarty as a kid Mango.

You know, all the parents at were pull out those microwave Chef Boyardy all sorts of fun, crazy shapes.

I don't think I remember like a sports win, but this feel like it would fit right in.

Do you have a favorite shape of pasta?

I mean, my shapes are so boring.

I really love taglia and buccatini because they are just from times in my life when they were comfort food, you know, like when we started Metal Flass, I was working at this Italian restaurant in Durham called Tusca, and the chefs used to make me this incredible Spanish tagle itally and it was just really wonderful.

And so I think about that a lot.

All right, mego, since you cleared up the noodles versus pasta controversy, I'm going to open up another can of worms here, which sounds like an avant garden noodle dish, But I'm going to tackle the question of where noodles originated and how they came to be associated with Italian cuisine.

So for a long time, there was this myth that persisted that Marco Polo brought noodles from China to Italy.

This was back during the thirteenth century.

Now, this story spread after it was published in nineteen twenty nine in the Macaroni Journal, the United States official trade journal for pasta manufacture.

I can't believe, after all our years of magazine publishing, we'd never heard of the Macaroni Journal.

I know, I both want to see a copy of the Macaroni Journal, and I also can't believe that the distinguished Macaroni Journal made an error.

I guess they didn't have a strong fact checking team.

But weirdly, the Marco Polo story is pretty easy to disprove.

Decades before Marco Polo embarked on his journey, Muslim geographer Ali Dresi wrote about pasta being made in Sicily.

Also, noodles and pasta have been eaten for thousands of years, so it's impossible to say for certain who invented them.

They hold an important place in cuisines across Europe, Asia and North Africa.

However, the oldest known direct evidence of noodles does come from northwest China, where in two thousand and five archaeologists found a four thousand year old bowl of noodles.

They were made of millet and had been miraculously preserved in a sealed bowl.

How cool is that.

I love that they found this like ancient tupperware with like lunch leftovers in it.

But tell me, if all these people are eating pasta noodles, how did it become Italy signature dish?

Well, Southern Italy grows a lot of Durham wheat, this high protein wheat that makes dough that's easy to shape, and pasta with a nice chewy bite to it.

So by the Middle Ages, pasta was an important part of Italian cuisine, and Sicily was one of the world's largest producers of dried pasta, But it was really a delicacy for wealthy people.

It was served at things like banquets and festive meals.

This changed by the seventeenth century, when machines like the dough press made pasta easier to produce, so at that point pasta became food for more common people, especially since it was cheaper than meat.

I love watching how food filters down right, like peanut butter was fancy and served at these elegant cafes and things like that, And now everyone survives on peanut butter.

It's for the masses.

But you know, pasta might be easy to make, but it doesn't grow on trees.

And yet in nineteen fifty the BBC convinced a whole lot of people that it does.

So on April first of that year, the TV channel aired their flagship news program Panorama.

But this broadcast was pretty unusual.

It showed a family in Switzerland doing their March spaghetti harvest where they were pulling these strands of spaghetti from trees and according to the voiceover of reporter Richard Dimbleby, this was a great year for Swiss spaghetti harvesters thanks to a mild winter and the disappearance of the spaghetti weavil.

Wow, I think it's just so funny.

Eight million people watched this phony broadcast and it said to be one of the first times TV was used to play in April Fool's Day prank.

That is wild, but really, like, did anybody actually believe this was real?

So many people, like hundreds of people called the BBC to ask if they could buy a spaghetti tree, which you know sounds ludicrous, But Richard Dimblebee was one of the UK's most prominent reporters, so having his voice on the broadcast gave it this real credibility.

And the show's producer, David Wheeler put it this way.

Dimblebee had quote enough gravitas to float an aircraft carrier.

So it's kind of like having Walter Cronk tighten on your prank exactly.

And people also weren't eating a lot of spaghetti in the nineteen fifties in Britain.

When they did, it often came in a can, so they didn't spend much time thinking about where it came from.

Plus the broadcast looked really incredible.

The BBC went all out.

They sent a cameraman to Switzerland.

He got great shots of like fake spaghetti trees and people gathering the crop to put in their wicker baskets.

It's really amazing.

But not everyone found the hoax funny.

David Wheeler actually explained that some people were embarrassed when they believed it, and their friends and families made fun of them.

Other viewers, of course, thought it was hilarious either way.

It has since become one of the most iconic April Fools pranks ever.

I love it all right, Well, we have to take a quick break but when we come back, here's what we've got in store.

We've got his prison escape, we've got the world's rarest noodle, and Italy's pasta purity law, so don't go anywhere.

Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're counting down nine facts about Italian pasta.

But we do have some exciting non pasta related news, which is that we have a limited quality of official numbered Part Time Genius membership cards and we are going to send one to you for free if you send us your name, mailing address and one fun fact.

The fun fact is important.

You can send us a DM on Instagram or blue Sky.

You can email High Geniuses at gmail dot com.

That's Hi Geniuses at gmail dot com.

Or you can leave us a message at three oh two four oh five five nine two five, and we will probably share your fact on an upcoming episode, but we will not share your contact infus.

So that is a promise we can make to our listeners and it's just between us and the post office.

All right, Well, that's pretty exciting stuff.

And actually what do these membership cards do?

Well, First of all, they show you a member.

They also look cool in your wallet, on your bulletin board or in a frame over your couch.

I mean, the options are so many options, and all that for zero dollars.

I mean it's a real bargain, all right, Mega.

Now that the self promotion is over, I think it's time to get back to.

The PASTA great, what do you have, Froze next?

I've got one word.

Casanova said, you know much about this guy?

I just know you know this modern meaning as kind of a ladies man.

Well, I think that's true of many people.

And that's a shame, because before Jacomo Casanova got reduced to his dating life, he was really interesting.

He was born in Italy in seventeen twenty five, went on to have these crazy adventures.

He traveled all over Europe, worked for Frederick the Second, was a spy, introduced the lottery to Paris, and created a notable translation of the Iliad.

All along the way he hobnobbed with Voltaire, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin.

I mean, this is kind of a wild background.

He's often described as an adventurer, which is a descriptor we just don't see enough in modern times.

But I should copy out that most of what we know about Casanova comes from his own writing, and so experts say some of it might be just a tad embellished.

I mean, it sounds like he genuinely had this impressive life.

It's weird that he was like gilding his stories.

The point is this next anecdote comes from Casanova, so take it with a grain of salt.

But here is what he tells us.

It was seventeen fifty five, he was thirty years old, and Casanova was sentenced to five years in a Venetian prison for being a con man, slash astrologer, slash gambler, slash a bunch of other disreputable stuff in the eighteenth century worldview.

So a lot going on here.

But luckily, in prison he has access to a sharpened iron bar, which he then uses to start chipping a hole in the wall of his cell you know, Shawshank redemption style and everything.

But as he's about to finish, he gets moved to another cell.

So now in order to make his escape, he has to bring an accomplice, a disgraced friar who's willing to keep working on the hole in the wall.

But Casanova has to get him the iron bar somehow.

So first he tries hiding it in a Bible, but the book doesn't quite cover the ends of it.

So he fixes up this massive plate of macaroni, parmesan, cheese, and butter to put on top of the bible, and he hands the whole thing to a guard to deliver to his friend.

Now, the guard is so focused on trying to keep the pasta from spilling that he doesn't notice what's going on under the plate.

I have no idea how this would go unnoticed.

I know, instead of just asking for a bigger Bible, right right exactly.

I also love that, like inmates in Italian prisons are just making plates of pasta whatever they want.

As soon as I saw that, it was like, so, how did he have access to all this stuff?

I mean, if they didn't good solos, they might have been able to do it in the old days too.

But you know, like I said, we don't have the most reliable sourcing for this.

And whether or not the pasta story is true, it is true that Casanova and his friar were the only people ever known to escape that prison.

How ridiculous would you feel if you're the guard who got fooled by the old plate of macaroni truck.

Yeah under the macaroni.

Well.

Another important eighteenth century figure in the world of pasta is Francesco Leonardi, who gets credit as being the first person to combine pasta with tomato sauce.

Obviously genius, and this comes from his cookbook Lapicchio moden or No.

The recipe is called macaroni in the style of Naples, and in the first edition of the book, published in seventeen ninety, the recipe reads quote, cook macaroni with water and salt, and when it's three quarters done, grain and mix it in an earthenware terine with grated parmesan, crushed pepper, and a sauce of veal or other beef or a good broth from a stew, either plain or with cloves strained through a sieve.

Now centuries later, that still sounds delicious, but he doesn't mention tomatoes.

Yeah, so history was actually made with the second edition, which came out eighteen years later, and in that version of the recipe, after the cloths and before the straining, Leonardo added the groundbreaking phrase made with tomato sauce, So that note changed pasta forever.

We all owe him a great dead Now, as long as we're talking about noteworthy recipes, let me tell you about the rarest most challenging pasta recipe in the world.

It's called Threads of God.

I feel like they plagiarized that name from my fashion label that I'm starting, but I love how intimidating it sounds.

Well, it is intimidating.

So the dish comes from the village of Lula in Sardinia, where it's known as sufielin Deu.

Now, for three hundred years, only women in that region knew how to make this pasta.

The recipe was passed down from mother to for centuries.

As far as how it's made, it starts with semolina flour made from local Durham wheat, and they combine that with salt and water.

Then they stretch, fold, and loop the dough until it becomes two hundred and fifty six individual threads that are extremely delicate, even thinner than angel hair.

Now, after this time consuming process, the threads get layered to form a sort of a like a woven sheet.

Now, then the sheets get dried in the sun, smashed up, cooked in mutton broth, and served with cheese.

So I get where the threads come from.

But what is the religious significance.

Well, traditionally those noodles are only made for the Feast of San Francesco.

The dish was served to Christians who made the pilgrimage to Lula for these celebrations.

So it's a special occasion meal, which makes sense given how difficult it is to make.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering, how can I try this dish?

But the bad news is gorilla engineers once tried to build a machine that would produce the noodles commercially, and it was a total failure.

Remember back to when they try to just make a straight pasta ended up curly.

That was always a way too confusing.

So the good news is that the women who know how to make the threads of God have begun sharing their recipe so that it doesn't die out.

There's even a restaurant in West Hollywood called Stella that actually serves it.

Oh man, we need to make a trip.

That's right near the Daily Zeikai studio.

That's right, okay.

So I am glad you mentioned Semlina flower because my next fact is all about how Italy cracked down on pasta ingredients.

So as ladies in Lula know Semolina flower is ground from Durham wheat, and that ends up being the gold standard for pasta.

It's this coarse flower that's considered hard because of its high protein content.

But the truth is you can make pasta from other types of flour, and that's why in nineteen sixty seven, Italy passeda pasta purity law that required all dried pasta sold in Italy to be made with Durham wheat.

So it was literally against the law to sell any other kind.

Yeah, and this actually lasted until the late nineteen eighties when this German pasta manufacturer named three Glocan got hit with a fine for selling pasta.

Their pasta contained a mixture of Durham wheat and a common wheat, and they were selling it in Italian stores.

Now three Glocan took the Italian government to court in what became known as the Pasta Wars, and in nineteen eighty eight, the European Economic Community's Court of Justice sided with three Glocken.

They ruled that the pasta purity law couldn't ban foreign pasta imports, though it could impose Durham wheat requirements on Italian pasta makers.

So in twenty twenty one, Italy doubled down with the Italian Presidential Decree number one hundred and eighty seven, which affirms that Italian made drive pasta must be made with Durham wheat semolina.

That's actually been a boon for Italy's wheat growers, because today Italian pasta contains about seventy percent domestic Durham wheat and only thirty percent imported.

I'll keep that in mind if I ever decided to open a pasta business in Italy, of course.

But we've got one last fact, and it involves food mascots, so you know, like the Jolly Green Giant, the kool Aid Man and mister Peen out of course, none of whom, unfortunately, are real people.

But there's one food mascot who was a real person.

Mentioned him earlier, Chef Boyrd.

So his real name was Ettore Boyardi.

His last name is spelled Boiardi, and you'll notice the emphasis on the middle syllable, not the last.

So Ettore, who went by the name Hector, was actually born in northwest Italy in eighteen ninety seven.

By age eleven, he already had a job working at a hotel, and after immigrating to the US at age sixteen, he got a job at the Plaza hotel in New York.

Within a year, he was the head chef there.

I mean, this is sixteen years old or seventeen, I guess by the time he had this Jesob It's crazy.

So he started incorporating Italian dishes into the menu, which was pretty unusual during this time when French food was considered the epitome of gourmet cuisine.

Because his career took off, Hector even catered President Woodrow Wilson's second wedding when he got married to Edith Glt in nineteen fifteen.

That feels like such an incredible success story.

So how did Chef Boyardi become Chef Boyardi?

Hector moved to Cleveland and opened a restaurant with his wife, Helen.

It was called Il Giardino di Italia or The Garden of Italy, and it was a hit.

So their signature dish was spaghetti with sauce and cheese, which customers loved so much that the restaurant started offering take home kits so people could cook it themselves at any time.

Now the popularity of their takeout business led Hector, Helen, and Hector's brothers to launch the Chef Boyardy Food Company in nineteen twenty eight.

Now, to make things simpler for American customers, they changed the spelling of their name to the one that we know today.

But when the family wanted to open a factory for their ready made Italian meals, they had a little bit of a dilemma.

So Italian food still wasn't very common in the US at the time, so they had to pick a strategic location in order to access the right ingredients.

They landed on Milton, Pennsylvania because there was a nearby tomato supplier, so they grew their own mushrooms inside the factory and in the nineteen thirties, shep Boyarty was the country's largest importer of Italian parmesan cheese.

So the brand grows and it grows, and in nineteen forty two, after the US military commission Boyarty for army rations, the Milton factory ran twenty four hours a day just to meet demand.

At its peak, the factory turned out two hundred and fifty thousand cans of Shepeoyardy every single day.

That would have made thirteen year old Will's mouth water so much.

Now.

After the war, the family sold the company to American Home Foods, but Hector continued to work for them as a consultant all the way until nineteen seventy eight.

He died a millionaire in nineteen eighty five.

And you know, not bad for an immigrant kid who just wanted to share his spaghetti.

Oh, I love it.

You know, I did not eat a lot of chefbardy as a kid, but I certainly lot the commercials.

And I loved that this brought you back to him before that.

I'm going to give you the trophy for today.

You know, I just wish I could share it with Hector.

He really did all the work.

I'm just talking about it.

Well, Hem and Dylan.

So that does it for us today.

If you enjoyed what you heard, be sure to subscribe, leave us a nice rating, and share the show with a friend, maybe even over a plate of pasta.

Today's episode was researched and written by our goodpal Meredith Danko, whose favorite pasta shape is brotini.

We will be back next week with another new episode, and in the meantime, from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary and myself.

Thank you so.

Much for listening.

Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

At His host by my good pal Will Pearson, who I've known for almost three decades now.

That is insane to me.

I'm the Utaco host, Mangeshatikular aka Mango.

Our producer is Mary Phillips Sandy.

She's actually a super producer.

I'm going to fix that in post.

Our writer is Gabe Lucier, who I've also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more.

Dylan Fagan is in the booth.

He is always dressed up, always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record and then mix the show after he does a great job.

I also want to shout out the executive producers from iHeart my good pals Katrina and Norvel and Ali Perry.

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That's it from us here at part Time genius, Thank you so much for listening