Who invented spaghetti noodles

Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. See disclaimer. Who Invented Spaghetti? Explore this article All Parties Get Credit. About the Author Maya Black has been covering business, food, travel, cultural topics and decorating since In fact, it was the creation of one Italian in particular: Nicola de Cecco.

De Cecco ran a flour mill at Fara San Martino in Abruzzo — he was dissatisfied with the sun-drying of pasta as it gave unreliable results, and the pasta often warped, which made it difficult to package for transport. In , he developed his method of drying pasta in cool, dry conditions and founded the De Cecco company.

He later adopted a logo of a young country woman carrying a sheaf of wheat and went into mass production. The company is still operating in Fara San Martino, and a second factory was built in the nearby town of Pescara in the s. Edrisi arrived at Palermo in , and was soon commissioned to research a work of global geography.

The content of the resulting opus, known to us as The Book of Roger , encompassed not only Sicily but other regions as well. It yielded a global map created in silver , now destroyed, and the book itself. Some of the book's statements were revolutionary for their time, things like "the earth is round like a sphere.

Praised by Sicily's Muslims, Jews and Orthodox "Eastern" Christians, it was not generally appreciated by the medieval popes or the Roman Catholic clergy, and for that reason its knowledge was sometimes suppressed in western Europe. Like Marco Polo, Edrisi was a traveler who wrote about what he saw, but his work was much more scientific, and generally more objective, than Polo's.

More importantly, it survives in its original manuscript form; Marco Polo's writings exist primarily as later transcriptions which were often altered. A casual observation in the Book of Roger mentions that in the Sicilian town of Trabia the inhabitants made a form of pasta from hard wheat, and that this product, shaped into long strands, was manufactured in large quantity for export to other regions. Edrisi does not speculate about the origin of this "spaghetti," but the fact that he considers it noteworthy, and that it was widely exported to a thriving market, may indicate that it was not known outside Sicily at that time --at least not in the Mediterranean.

In those days, hard wheat of the African variety probably was not raised in the more humid northern regions of Europe, yet Edrisi wrote about England, Scandinavia and Russia, describing albeit possibly based on secondhand knowledge England's rainy weather and Scandinavia's seasonal endless days and nights. Only a few years ago did Sicily's tourism promoters rediscover this obscure reference to Sicilian spaghetti, and they've attempted to capitalise on it by referring to it in promotional publications.

Their message seems to have been lost on the owners of the Chinese restaurants in Palermo and Catania. Trabia's vermicelli from the Italian word for the "thin worms" it resembled represents, at the very least, what may have been the earliest "industrial" production of pasta.