In a rather old-fashioned book I found a reference to “Italian paste” in a context that clearly indicated pasta. I wondered if it was a typo, but checking the OED (updated June 2005) I learned it was an old-fashioned expression; under paste A. I. “A mixture of ingredients or components” we find:
c. Pasta. […] Now rare.
1673 J. Ray Observ. Journey Low-countries 405 Paste made into strings..(which if greater they call Macaroni, if lesser Vermicelli) they cut in pieces and put in their pots as we do oat-meal.
1753 Chambers’s Cycl. Suppl., Macaron, the name of a sort of vermicelli, a paste made of flour and water, and formed into the shape of the barrel of a quill, or the guts of small fowls.
1843 Civilian & Galveston (Texas) City Gaz. 5 Apr. 1/2, 2 boxes ass’d Italian Pastes.
1861 Jrnl. Soc. Arts 9 129/1 The manufacture of ‘paste’ (or vermicelli, as it is called in England) continues to be one of the most flourishing trades in Genoa.
1957 Encycl. Brit. XIV. 544/2 Macaroni… The same substance in different forms is also known as vermicelli, pasta or Italian pastes, spaghetti, taglioni, fanti, etc.
In the 1861 quote, I would have assumed that ‘paste’ represented the Italian plural (and thus a pronunciation PAHS-tay) if the OED weren’t around to tell me otherwise. Is anyone familiar with this archaic usage? And is vermicelli still commonly used in the U.K.?
Yes, I’ve seen this in old cookbooks, though I couldn’t at this moment immediate tell you which ones or which eras they are from.
When I buy pasta, I see vermicelli on the shelves all the time. Paste seems a very reasonable anglicization of pasta, and it’s kind of a pity we dropped it.
Paste seems a very reasonable anglicization of pasta, and it’s kind of a pity we dropped it.
Well, dough!
When I buy pasta, I see vermicelli on the shelves all the time.
Yes, of course, as a particular (long, thin) variety of pasta. The implication of “‘paste’ (or vermicelli, as it is called in England)” is that it was then used for any kind of pasta, and that is what I was wondering about.
I don’t think vermicelli ever had such a broad sense in English. What does the current OED have sv “vermicelli”? NED has “1. A wheaten paste, of Italian origin, now usu. made of flour, cheese, yolks of eggs, sugar and saffron, prepared in the form of long, slender, hard threads, and used as an article of diet. Cf. Macaroni”.
Probably the 1861 article was simplifying by referring to the type of ‘paste’ best known to its readers. Unless Genoa specialised in vermicelli, leaving other pastas to other cities…
No, you’re quite right, and I should have thought to look it up (d’oh!). The online OED has: “A kind of pasta made in the form of long, slender, hard threads, and used as an article of diet.” First citation a1668, W. Davenant Man’s the Master (1669) i. i, “Vermechulli shall my Palat please, Serv’d in with Bisques, Ragous, and Intermets.” (Nice evidence for the pronunciation of please as, more or less, “plays.”)
Dutch speakers of English with whom I converse repeatedly call such things as Nutella “chocolate pasta”, I can only presume because in their language pastes are also called pastas or something.
I would think that vermicelli and elbows were the first two pastas to get any grip on wider American culture.
I think of spaghetti as the Platonic ideal of pasta in America.
“Enderby wondered why such glamour surrounded the Italian cuisine. After all, it consisted only of a few allomorphs of paste, the odd sauce or so ….” — Joseph Kell [pseud. of Anthony Burgess], “Inside Mr. Enderby” (1963)
My 1948 edition of “the way to a man’s heart” Settlement Cook Book (first copyrighted in 1901) has no mention of pasta or paste in its index. Chapter 19 lumps together dumplings, noodles, macaroni and spaghetti in a single 12-page chapter.
The text at the link says two million copies of the book had been sold by 1991. Not shabby.
Wordnet has ‘alimentary paste’ as a gloss for one of the senses of ‘pasta:’
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=pasta&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=&o3=&o4=&h=
Did you notice a couple definitions up that paste also means pastry? Also in, for instance, puff-paste.
Further evidence that it probably isn’t the Italian plural can be seen when it’s the English plural, “Italian pastes.” In, for instance, old vegetarian (!) cookbooks, here and here.
It also covers what we’d term dough today, as in Jefferson’s description of a macaroni machine..
Further evidence that it probably isn’t the Italian plural can be seen when it’s the English plural, “Italian pastes.”
I certainly didn’t think it was always, or often, the Italian plural; it was quite clear to me that it was the normal English noun paste. I was talking specifically about the citation “The manufacture of ‘paste’ (or vermicelli, as it is called in England) continues to be one of the most flourishing trades in Genoa,” where the quote marks and the fact that Italy was under discussion made it seem plausible that the Italian plural was being quoted.
In France, Italian pasta is known officially as les pâtes alimentaires, and colloquially as les pâtes as opposed to other kinds of pâtes (dough, toothpaste = la pâte dentifrice, modeling clay or playdough = la pâte à modeler, and probably others of similar consistency). Whether you are having spaghetti, macaroni, noodles or other kinds of pasta (some of which have French names), you are cooking and eating des pâtes. Vermicelli (le vermicelle) is not used as a dish but is often added to soup.
talking specifically about the citation
Apologies. Here is the quoted report. There aren’t other instances of foreign vocabulary and it’s just paste later in the paragraph. I suppose the quotes indicate that it’s technical cookery terminology.
MMcM: puff-paste
Is this the dough, or the finished pastry? In France one of the types of pastry dough is la pâte à choux, used to make les choux à la crème ‘cream puffs’. There are many other kinds of dough, all called la pâte plus an indication of its kind or purpose.
I believe that puff-pastry and formerly puff-paste cover the same semantic space, which is between the dough and the finished pastry. Specifically, I do not think that English has a term for the just the dough proper, the détrempe, without the oil or before being folded into pâte feuilletée. Of course there are plenty of names for particular finished pastries. But in the supermarket,as far as I know, you buy puff-pastry, not puff-pastry dough or dough for puff-pastry or something like that.
I see the Wikipedia (s.v.) has “water dough.” I assume this is what real chefs say and I’d probably have heard it on a TV cooking show if I watched more of them.
Interesting that “pasta” was anglicized, but “vermicelli” (“little worms”) was not.
Vermicelli was certainly a common word when I was growing up in the UK in the 60s, though now I think about it I had no idea what it was (until today I thought it was a kind of salami).
Dutch speakers of English with whom I converse repeatedly call such things as Nutella “chocolate pasta”, I can only presume because in their language pastes are also called pastas or something.
They are; “tandpasta” is toothpaste; “chocopasta” is such things as which Nutella is an instance of. Peanut butter, however, is “pindakaas” (morpholiteralogically “peanut-cheese”), presumably because it rhymes better with “helaas” (“alas”).
I once had a seriously broken conversation with a Canadian Francophone while grocery shopping together where he asked me repeatedly to get ‘date pasta’, and I looked for it, again and again, even asking a perplexed employee about it. I finally got a look at the recipe he was attempting to make, and there it was: ‘date paste’.
I guess AJP and I grew up in different milieux in the UK in the 1960s (or else I’ve forgotten), but I don’t remember ever meeting the word “vermicelli” at that time. About the only sort of pasta we knew was macaroni. Even spaghetti would have been regarded as impossibly exotic. I did meet ravioli, though, as one of Heinz’s 57 varieties, but so unlike anything I’d call ravioli today that it was hardly pasta at all.
As a child of the 70s, I am sure I remember vermicelli in soup, but much less sure I knew the word. (And entirely sure I didn’t connect the two(2)).
As far as I know, no generic term for pasta existed in Russian until about 1990s (now the word паста is very much in use, though might still feel somewhat pretentious). Instead, there were different words – mostly borrowed from Italian too – for several major categories:
– anything thick and hollow would be макароны (macaroni);
– anything thin would be вермишель; and
– anything flat would be лапша (noodles).
Вермишель being of course vermicelli.
Here’s a nicely period-flavoured quote to the point:
До Великой социалистической революции макаронная промышленность вырабатывала около 30 тыс. т продукции в год. Ассортимент ее до недавнего времени ограничивался тремя видами однотипных изделий (макароны, вермишель, лапша). В 1938 г. макаронные фабрики Советского Союза дали 277 тыс. т разнообразных высококачественных изделий: “неаполитанские макароны”, “итальянскую соломку”, “вермишель в бантиках”, “фигурное ассорти”, “прессованную лапшу в бантиках”, “ушки” и др.
— Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище, 1939
Prior to the Great Socialist Revolution, our industry produced about 30 thousand tons of macaroni a year. The product mix was until recently limited to the three types of same-type products (macaroni, vermicelli, and noodles). In 1938, Soviet Union’s macaroni plants have yielded 277 thousand tons of varied, high-quality products: “Neapolitan Macaroni”, “Italian Straws”, “Bow-tie Vermicelli”, “Fancy Variety”, “Pressed Bow-tie Noodles”, “Ears”, etc.
— The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, 1939
I reckon it’s the ur-pasta in the UK too. The Italian restaurants of the 1950s were “spaghetti houses”, and some retro places are so named today.
Sergio Leone did not direct Vermicelli Westerns. Yankee Doodle’s macaroni is a red herring.
The first three usages seem to be describing what goes into the pot before cooking it, so the English paste is right, viz. dough (as long as it is fresh not dried). I think the others are accounted for by grammatical error transformations that sometimes occur when importing lexical items from one language to another. For example, consider “spaghetti” that is used in English. We may be surprised to learn that it is the plural form in Italian. One strand of spaghetti is “un spaghetto” and if you have two “due spaghetti” and so on. Note that this implies that it is a countable noun. This aspect is completely lost in English, where spaghetti is uncountable, yet has the Italian marker “i” for countable plurals. This in turn sometimes causes Italian native-speakers to double-plurify and say “the spaghettis were good”. As you pointed out, “paste” in Italian is the plural of “pasta”, and would normally be used to refer to “types of pasta”. So, it seems reasonable to me that the use of “pastes” (to be pronounced pah’stes) in the Ency. Brit. entry is best explained as an English plural marker being added to the Italian plural (again, double-plurifying).
When I was growing up (1970s, Virginia) some of the “spaghetti” we had at home actually came from boxes labeled “vermicelli”.
Dmitry, I wonder what the difference is between bow-tie vermicelli and pressed bow-tie noodles. I can imagine calling farfalle “noodles” but calling them “vermicelli” seems odd.
Keith: no idea, no picture is provided. Noodles might have indeed been twisted farfalle style, but as for vermicelli… I wonder if they could actually tie it into a bow?
Yes, I meant to add that it was called “spaghetti” though it was usually vermicelli.
It’s not just English speakers who don’t recognize an Italian plural when they see one. Spanish has “espaguetis”, for example.
>Athel
Actually “espaguetis” is already a Spanish word. Also we have, for example, “talibán” and “talibanes”. On the other hand, “campus” is invariable.
The French also say les spaghettis.
As far as I can recall, there was no English word that covered all of pasta when I was growing up (NYC, 1950). We had spaghetti, (elbow) macaroni, and noodles, each so referred to. Our Italian neighbors, probably feeling the lack of a word to cover the field covered by pasta, used “macaroni” as inclusive of spaghetti etc. which seemed odd to us.
I think I’m right that if pasta (plural paste) is used as a count noun in Italian, it means a pastry. You can order a cappuccino and una pasta.
Sergio Leone did not direct Vermicelli Westerns.
Without Clint Eastwood, “One Upon A Time In The West” seemed pretty thin.
I think I thought until today that vermicelli was those chocolate things like hundreds and thousands.
VinnyD: The French also say les spaghettis.
I think that in my family of origin we say (or used to say) des spaghettis like des nouilles (noodles), and also des lazagnes (referring to the wide strips), but du vermicelle, probably because the strands of vermicelli are too thin to ever be counted, or picked up individually.
Growing up in Tampa in the 1960’s, we ate spaghetti and macaroni that my mother managed to boil into oblivion. An Italian exchange student who ran track with my big brother came over to our house, saw what crimes my mother was committing in the kitchen and showed her how to cook real “pasta,” a word I had not heard before. He also demonstrated to us little savages how to twirl it properly on a fork. For his efforts, he earned the nickname “Pasta” from us and all his teammates. The name stuck to him so completely, I cannot now recall his real name.
I now have a picture of les spaghettis being eaten by Catherine de Médicis.
Catherine de Médicis, coming from Florence to marry the king of France, brought a considerable retinue with her as she (or her family) did not trust that country of savages to provide her with the necessities of a civilized life (such as forks, among others). As a result, more Italian than French was spoken at the court.
I’m still in favor of boiling into oblivion (that is, well past al dente to soft).
Me too! I can’t abide Al Dente and his assorted Paste!
It seemed to me, in the 70s-80s, in my twenties, that one of the minor ways in which my generation rebelled against our parents was by making sure not to overcook the vegetables the way our mothers had. Somebody told us that they were better with a little crunch left in ’em, so we all started lightly steaming (or pan-frying, or what have you) our broccoli and our carrots and our zucchini and so on. But of course many people took it too far and left a laughable degree of crunch. The same applies to pasta. I like it a little chewy, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel a little nostalgia for the old Chef Boyardee canned ravioli.
My friend and former student from Croatia talks nostalgically about a food of his childhood: a kind of very cheap pate (?) called pastet (sp?).
Pašteta (dialectally pasteta) is defined by my SCr-Eng dictionary as “1. meat paste …; 2. filled pastry, patty.”
The Croatian pasteta 2 sounds like the equivalent of a Cornish pasty.
That’s done in Polish.
German uses Nudeln, except in Switzerland (says Wikipedia), and tends to translate the names for the specific shapes except [ʃ]paghetti and Makkaroni (into which penne are lumped): vermicelli = Fadennudeln (“thread noodles”) or just Suppennudeln because they’re only eaten in soup, fusilli = Spiralnudeln (a sort of default), tagliatelle = Bandnudeln (“tape noodles”) or, in Switzerland (says Wikipedia), just Nudeln. Lasagne and Spätzle are not included, but are included in the more bureaucratic term Teigwaren “dough wares”.
In France too, les nouilles is often used as a near-equivalent for les pâtes, although les nouilles refers more specifically to the long flat types.
Here in France, a very thin variety of le vermicelle is called cheveux d’ange – angel’s hair. Presumably because it looks similar to a type of Christmas decoration of the same name.
In Russia before the 90-s, besides makarony, vermishel’ and lapsha, there were also rakushki – shells, which must be a calque of conchiglie.
And of course the pasta pantheon is incomplete without клёцки, similar to gnocchi and known throughout Central-Eastern Europe under varying names, kluski, galushki, knödel. You just mix some flour with an egg or two or three and drop a dollop into the saucepan with bouillon. Depending on the thickness of your mixture kletski come out dollopy or smooth like dumplings.
“Angel-hair pasta” exists in America too.
Catherine de Medici – Caterina de’ Medici in current Italian – is Catherine de’ Médicis in French? Why? It sounds a bit German. Is it a genitive that I never learnt?
What’s known as macaroni & cheese in the United States is called macaroni cheese in England.
Athel: I guess AJP and I grew up in different milieux in the UK in the 1960s (or else I’ve forgotten), but I don’t remember ever meeting the word “vermicelli” at that time. About the only sort of pasta we knew was macaroni. Even spaghetti would have been regarded as impossibly exotic.
My mother had a café, and we ate very well for the time, but school food was quite crude: fried eggs, baked beans & chips and that kind of thing. On reflection, vermicelli can’t have been discussed very much. If it had been, I’d have picked up the meaning. I probably heard it in Soho.
Sashura: Here in France, a very thin variety of le vermicelle is called cheveux d’ange – angel’s hair.
I am not sure if I ran into that vermicelle. Is it not only thin but almost transparent? New varieties of pasta are made all the time.
“Elbow macaroni” are called des coquilettes in France, although they don’t look much like little shells (coquilles), but the name is very cute. In Canada the name is just translated from English as des coudes.
AJP: Catherine de Medici – Caterina de’ Medici in current Italian – is Catherine de’ Médicis in French? Why? It sounds a bit German. Is it a genitive that I never learnt?
Her name in French is Catherine DE Médicis. A later princess from the same quasi-royal Italian family also married a French king: she is known as Marie de Médicis.
The name of the family is a compromise between French and Italian. French de is very common among noble names, before the name of the family’s fief, so that many people think that it denotes nobility, which is not quite right. Since Medici is a plural word in Italian, the final s in the French version must have been added to indicate plurality. Unlike with most other French words (but often with foreign ones), the final s is pronounced, as [s]. So is the c.
oops: des coquiLLettes
>Sashura
The name “angel’s hair” or “cheveux d’ange”, used to speak about a kind of pasta, has attracted my attention. I don’t know its origin but, in Spanish, we used “cabello de ángel” to speak about a syrup made by sugar and pulp of a variety of pumpkin. Curiously, that cucurbit is so called “courge spaghetti” in French, and (it seems) “spaghetti squash” in English.
That apostrophe got left on by accident when I re-pasted the Italian – sorry. Thanks for the explanation, m-l.
Jesús,
Yes, spaghetti squash is what it is called in English in this part of the world, although I first encounteredl it as vegetable spaghetti, a name that is ambiguous as it could mean a kind of spaghetti made with wheat flour blended with vegetable flours, which make the pasta red or green.
We did not know the vegetable when I was growing up, but I have seen it sold in French grocery stores in the past few years. It is easy to cook and tastes delicious, much lighter than actual spaghetti. La courge is the word for “squash”, and it has a diminutive form la courgette which refers to a smaller vegetable with soft skin (called “zucchini” in North America).
‘Courgette’ is used in the UK to indicate what in North America is called ‘zucchini.’ The UK also prefers ‘aubergine’ to ‘eggplant.’
>Marie-lucie
Although I wrote our “cabello de ángel” is syrup, actually it’s made by fibers of that kind of pumpkin. It is not a result of extrusion like spaghetti. It’s used to make confectionery. Here you can see some pictures: http://www.recetaspasoapaso.com/2010/10/dulce-de-cabello-de-angel.html
Gracias por la receta!
The squash in the pictures is not quite the one I know, which is pale yellow outside, slightly orangey inside. Otherwise it is the same. After you cook it, remove the seeds and the inedible stuff they are attached to, you scrape off and lightly stir the cooked mass inside and it it comes apart in thin spaghetti-like fibers, but the texture is lighter than that of pasta and the taste is delicious, eaten like another vegetable with a little butter. I wouldn’t have thought of preserving it with sugar, but perhaps the Spanish variety is sweeter than the one here?
>Marie-lucie
I think sweetness is expressed by celestial references, angel in that case, and heaven in “tocino de cielo” (litt. fat of heaven), sweet made with eggs yolks and syrup.
I am not sure if I ran into that vermicelle.
Marie-Lucie, cheveaux d’ange are the same yellow colour as vermicelle, they are wonderful in bouillon with an egg scrambled on top.
Jesus thanks, I didn’t know about the Spanish origin of the courgette.
Spaghetti squash is a variety of C. pepo, which species includes zucchini and pumpkins. It originates in Japan.
Cabello de ángel is C. ficifolia, with names including fIg-leaf gourd in English. In Chinese, it’s 魚翅瓜, shark’s-fin melon, because you can make a much cheaper (and at least potentially vegetarian) soup from it.
Something that took us surprisingly long to try is spaghetti squash and spaghetti. Both the tastes and textures contrast in interesting ways.
Sashura,
cheveux d’ange are the same yellow colour as vermicelle
I don’t know any yellow vermicelle, it is the same colour as other pasta.
the Spanish origin of the courgette
Did I miss something? Spaghetti squash is not a courgette (zucchini). For one thing, its skin is too hard to be edible, while courgette has soft, edible skin.
MMcM: Thank you for the botanical details.
<i.spaghetti squash and spaghetti : is this a dish? Do you cook them separately and then mix them up?
Spaghetti squash is not a courgette (zucchini).
Botanically it is. Cucurbitina pepo has been under cultivation for at least eight millennia, making it one of the oldest cultivated plants; unsurprisingly, it has a vast number of cultivars that look very different, including not only courgettes and spaghetti squash (a particular subvariety of vegetable marrow), but also acorn squash, pattypan squash, both crookneck and straightneck yellow summer squash, and even pumpkins. All varieties freely produce fertile hybrids.
JC, I would say they are cousins, rather than the same thing. But I was puzzled about the ‘Spanish origin of the courgette”, It seems to be the preparation described by jesus which is Spanish, not the vegetable itself.
C. pepo, like all cucurbits, originated in the New World. (Their nearest Old World relatives are cucumbers, originally from South Asia, and watermelons, originally from Africa.) The oldest known sites are in Mexico, but it is found in archaeological sites all over the Eastern U.S. as well. Bottle gourds are also included in this species. However, courgettes/zucchini specifically are a very recent cultivar indeed, first bred near Milan around 1800. Both the French and the Italian names are diminutives of words for ‘squash’ generally.
Yes, the hard-skinned relatives of the la courgette are called la courge.
@marie-lucie: “I would say they are cousins, rather than the same thing”.
Not botanically. ‘Cousin’ species (that is, species in the same genus) can sometimes produce hybrid offspring, but these hybrids are typically infertile. The different cultivated varieties of squash are fully interfertile; they produce offspring that is fertile in turn. A good comparison is with dog breeds: a Chihuahua looks very different from a German Shepherd, but they belong to the same underlying species.
@Jesús: “in Spanish, we used ‘cabello de ángel’ to speak about a syrup…”
That would be in Spain. In Argentina ‘cabello de ángel’ means exactly the same kind of thin soup noodles mentioned before.
Thanks for the precision, Alon. Of course I am a linguist, not a botanist.
Per contra, citrus fruits are generally considered to belong to multiple species despite being very widely hybridized. Here is a very oversimplified citrus family tree, showing four natural species (the pomelo, the mandarin orange, the citron, and the key lime) and a few of the better known hybrids. For example, Meyer lemons are a hybrid between sweet oranges and Rangpur limes. Sweet oranges are a hybrid of mandarin oranges and pomelos; Rangpur limes are a hybrid of mandarin oranges and lemons, which in turn are a descendant of citrons. (Ordinary limes are a hybrid of key limes and citrons, and so are not closely related to Rangpur limes.)
The Ellen Marriage translation of La Pere Goriot at PG calls the title character “a retired manufacturer of vermicelli, Italian paste and starch”. Is that the old-fashioned book in question?
Before his retirement, Goriot was a vermicellier, a manufacturer of pasta and similar products. I am not sure if this word is still in use.
>Alon Lischinsky
Well, actually Spanish dictionary has these both senses.
>John Cowan
It’s also interesting how oranges are called in different countries. For example, in Portugal they used “laranga” (from Sanskrit, as you know) but there are a lot of countries where the name of that fruit (really sweet variety) is related to Portugal: “portokal, portokalli, burtuqal” and so on.
>John Cowan
I’m sorry. “Laranja” in Portuguese.
Is that the old-fashioned book in question?
I’m afraid I no longer remember; I ran across it on Google Books searching for something else.