Sicily is the birthplace of pasta

Not everyone knows that pasta has its origins in the land of Sicily. In 1154 the geographer al-Idrisi wrote a text on behalf of King Roger in which he described a place that was already called Trabia at the time, where there were vast lands and rivers that fed mills and testified that so much pasta was produced in this place that it was even exported. 

Muhammad al-Idrisi recounts in his book: "To the west of Termini there is the town of Trabia, an enchanting site, rich in perennial waters and mills, with a beautiful plain and vast farms where pasta is produced in such quantities as to supply, in addition to the villages of Calabria, the Muslim and Christian territories, where substantial loads are shipped".

This passage shows that Norman Sicily (1061-1198 A.D.) continued to occupy, even after the Arab domination, a central position in the manufacture of dried pasta, thus managing to enhance its large production of durum wheat which was its indispensable raw material. It seems, in fact, that it was the Muslims who created, in the early years of the tenth century, in Trabia, the first plant for the production of "ytria" or spaghetti, which in Sicilian dialect are still called "tria" today.

For a long time, history has told us that pasta was imported to Italy by Marco Polo on his return from China (and surely Marco Polo must have brought it with him) but this happened at the end of the thirteenth century while the Sicilians at that time had been eating spaghetti for three hundred years and exported them as well! In fact, in Norman times pasta was exported "in Calabria", an expression that indicated not only Calabria, but also Puglia, Basilicata and Campania. One of the oldest typically Sicilian pasta shapes are the busiate which are bucatini "al ferretto" typical of Trapani and widespread throughout Sicily.

Some scholars claim that they are the oldest homemade Sicilian pasta; There are, in fact, Arabic documents from the tenth and eleventh centuries that attest to the presence of dry pasta with holes in the island. The name originates from the term "busa", which indicates the stem of a typical Mediterranean grass that grows on arid soils. In reality, busiate (or masculine "busiati") well represent the typical pasta of Southern Italy, made by means of more or less thin and round canules, sticks or underwires. In fact, a reed with a diameter of three to four millimeters was used to roll up and pull the busiate and only in more recent times was replaced by knitting needles or the appropriate underwire. This pasta is prepared with durum wheat semolina, water and salt and from the dough obtained you get pieces of dough the size of a walnut that are pulled to form sticks at least ten centimeters long.

Each stick is then placed on the underwire and rolled up on the pastry board, so as to obtain a spaghetti with holes in it that can be removed with a sharp stroke of the hand. There are long busiate that are not divided when the underwire is extracted and short busiate that instead become part of the large family of fusilli. If the industrial format has strongly characterized and distinguished the busiate, designing them in a narrow spiral, the products of home processing come in different formats ranging from the open spiral of the fusillo to the more closed one of the bucatino. A typical dish of the most classic Sicilian gastronomic tradition are the "busiate with pesto alla trapanese" or busiate seasoned with a raw sauce pounded with a mortar, prepared with extra virgin olive oil, basil, peeled tomato, garlic, adding pecorino cheese or toasted breadcrumbs on top, and finally ground almonds, an essential feature of the Trapani culinary tradition.

More on this topic: https://www.appuntidistoria.net/la-pasta-nasce-in-sicilia/