Winner of the James Beard/ KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year 2000 and Winner of the Beard Award for the Best Writing on Food 2000.
 
 
May 31, 2023
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Mangia Bene

    Tagliatelle, tagliolini, pappardelle, tortellini, and lasagne are some of the pastas made from sfoglia, the "leaves" of egg-and-flour dough. Tagliatelle which simply means cut pasta is a filiform dried pasta wider than fettuccine but narrower than pappardelle. Legend has it that the tagliatelle shape--strips of pasta about a half inch wide, was invented in 1487 by Maestro Zafirano, a cook from the village of Bentivoglio, on the occasion of the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to the Duke of Ferrara. The cook was said to be inspired by the beautiful blond hair of the bride. Despite the appeal of this romantic notion, it seems likely that the invention of tagliatelle in Italy is earlier. Not only do we have pictorial representations of tagliatelle before this date in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, an eleventh-century Arab health manual translated into Italian that was first illustrated in the fourteenth century, but in the Compendium de naturis et proprietatibus alimentorum, a list of local Emilian nomenclature for foods compiled in 1338 by Barnaba de Ritinis da Reggio di Modena, the entry for something called fermentini indicates that it is cut into strips like tagliatelle and boiled.