Pasta was brought to Italy by Arabs. It was the occupation of Sicily in 827 by an Arab army that brought hard durum wheat, the main ingredient in pasta to Italy.
Noodles known as ristha were eaten in ancient Persia and are mentioned in the cookbooks of medieval Islam.
In twelfth century, Arabs founded a pasta industry near Palermo, using grain from fields planted earlier by the Romans. They describe a concoction called itriya, from their word meaning ‘string’ which currently known as pasta and was the same as it is made today.
Spaghetti in Italian means ‘little strings’. Boiling pasta may well have originated in Arabic cultures, especially since couscous, a product similar to pasta, was already being boiled in Palestine in the second century.
Islamic geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi mentioned boiled noodles as a prize of civilization a hundred years before Marco Polo got back from the Far East. This is the first written account of the production of dry pasta, which spread from Sicily throughout Italy.
He mentioned about the pasta to be produced on a commercial scale in a survey of Sicily that he wrote at the request of his Norman master, King Roger II.
From these tenuous origins, Italians learned to make many pasta by hand, but mostly strings, tubes, and ribbons. Eventually, pasta became a huge industry, feeding masses of Italians since the mid-nineteenth century.
History of spaghetti
