qWhat unites Italian pasta and lepidopterans? Farfalles, you could say, farfalle which designates, in Italian, both butterflies and the dried pasta that resembles them. However, it is another large family of recipes from Italian cuisine that has recently brought together specialists in the evolution of lepidopterans, food sciences and the history of gastronomy: stuffed pasta. The article resulting from their work, published on July 12 in the magazine Discover foodproposes a new classification of the Italian varieties of these pastas, places their probable establishment in northern Italy and traces the kinship ties and local divergences that led to the diversity of current recipes.
The originality of this study lies in its methodological approach, inherited from evolutionary biology, consisting of applying phylogenetic and biogeographic approaches to cultural evolution. The researchers postulate that the evolution of traditional recipes occurred, as in living species, through small successive modifications (analogous to genetic mutations), then selection, disappearance of intermediate forms and finally fixation of culinary specialties specific to a locality, which which resembles speciation. .
two big families
His classification of stuffed pasta differs from previous attempts, based on purely morphological criteria: certain similarities in appearance blurred the links between recipes, in the same way that ancient naturalistic classifications were biased by evolutionary convergences. However, due to the lack of “prescription genes”, pasta taxonomy cannot be guided by the principles of molecular phylogeny, based on divergences between DNA sequences. For this, other classification criteria were selected: the method of folding the dough and the shape obtained, the main ingredients, the type of cooking, the accompaniment with sauce or broth, the use of olive oil or butter, as well as the character . of regional specialty, which would correspond to the distribution area for a species.
The new taxonomy highlights two large families of Italian stuffed pasta: some related to ravioli, recognizable by their flattened shape, the others affiliated with tortellini, which are distinguished by a three-dimensional folding. The set forms a branch of the largest tree of stuffed pasta recipes in Europe and Asia, which includes both Japanese gyozas and pelmenis Russians and wonton Chinese. With the exception of culurgiones From Sardinia, Italian stuffed pasta would come from a first establishment in northern Italy, playing the role of founding event, before its diversification.
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