Two of my favorites from 15th C Italy are butter, cheese, and fresh herbs.
Another is butter, cheese, and spices (cinnamon, ginger, clove, sugar,
nutmeg).

toodles, gretchen

--On Saturday, January 22, 2005 11:07 AM -0800 "Dr "
> wrote:

>> 1. A great number of lines on this newsgroup have been dedicated to a
>> debate over the role of the tomato in Italian cooking. While staying
>> out of that debate, nobody can deny the tomato is an honored and
>> frequent companion to pasta. By conservative estimates (again,
>> unconfirmed; I'm sadly without any access to sources beyond popular
>> television shows), pasta has been in Italy since the twelfth century.
>> What was going on the pasta for those four hundred years? Of course, I
>> know the answer, sort of. My favorite pasta sauce is tomato-less: a
>> simple aglio-olio (garlic-and-oil) with, of late, two anchovy fillets
>> dissolved. Certainly there were other sauces?