Lest you all think that everything I write is properly researched, it may come as a shock to learn that is not always the case. Take my recent post about marinara sauce, where I was explaining how the name came about. The Italian Chef claimed the sauce came from Naples and was made for sailors returning from the sea, indeed alla marinara or sailor style comes from the Italian word for sailor, marinaio.

So imagine my surprise when noodling around in Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking in which she gives a recipe for Tomato Sauce with Garlic and Basil, with the exact same ingredients for marinara sauce as given by Lidia.

In her introduction Marcella says that this sauce is called alla carrettiera by Romans, after the drivers of mule-driven or hand pulled carts that brought produce from the surrounding hills of the Apennines down into Rome, who fashioned their pasta sauces from cheap and abundant ingredients.

So now we have one sauce with at least two different names and there might even be a few other names as well. Why this is fascinating to me is that the name used for this one sauce would be a fair indicator of where you are from in Italy. It would be not to hard a stretch to say that Marcella is most probably from in or around Rome and Lidia's family probably hails from around Naples.

I wonder if the geneologists are onto that one.


I'd like to say thanks to everyone who responded to my last post - it meant a lot to me. Just to let you all know, I did call the people concerned.