Staple carbohydrates, the foods that actually fill you up, tend to occupy a deep-rooted place in the minds of those who eat them. Rice is the central sustenance of Thailand, the basis of many of that country's festivals and a synonym for food itself, just as the "daily bread" of the famous prayer is a metonym for the things that fend off starvation. Pasta enjoys a similar status for many Italians, but it's also a food growing rapidly in importance across the planet. Only this June Oxfam revealed the results of an international survey purporting to show it has become the world's favourite food, ahead of meat and rice.
The word means "paste" in Italian, which makes perfect sense. Dried pasta is just flour and water, a simple dough, and it evolved from the basic griddle cakes which were among the earliest things humans learned to make. Once you have a steady supply of cereals the most simple way of preparing the grain is to grind it, bind it with water, flatten the resulting paste and cook it on a hot stone. A sheet of lasagne is just the boiled wheaten version, while egg pasta merely uses a different, more perishable binder.
The food is ancient, then, though its origins are lost. Some people might still believe the now debunked myth that Marco Polo brought spaghetti to Italy when he returned from China in 1298, but 19 years before then the estate of a dead Genoese man included a basket of macaroni (this could have been any shape). An 11th-century Paris text mentions vermicelli – the source is French but the word is Italian. Wheat was domesticated about 11,000 years ago in the fertile crescent, and people likely started boiling pastes from it very early on. Arab traders could have taught the Italians to make pasta during the eighth century, or perhaps the Phoenicians did so hundreds of years before. Couscous, milled durum wheat, is essentially a miniature pasta.
The first noodles, however, were definitely Asian. In 2005 archaeologists excavated a 4,000-year-old bowl of millet noodles in Lajia, the "Pompei of China", settling the who-invented-spaghetti debate forever. The major difference between European and Asian noodles is in their texture. Wheat contains much more gluten than rice, soya or buckwheat, making European pasta sturdier, higher in protein and more interesting to eat than the slippery, pappy noodles of the east. The extra gluten means that western noodles take much longer to soften, making it possible to cook them al dente.
Regardless, the Italians fell in love with "macaroni" as all pasta was then known, and to a large extent built their cuisine around it. They wrapped sheets of it round iron rods or birch sticks to form cylinders and slid them off to make cannelloni, penne and the other tubular shapes. Naples became the centre of the Italian pasta industry because its climate, with considerable daily temperature fluctuations, was perfect for drying the food. Soon people developed machines to extrude pasta, speeding the process and reducing its costs, and by the 17th century pasta had become a street food beloved of urchins and the common people. Young English aristocrats who adopted Italian fashions following their grand tours became known as "macaronis" back home, the food by then having typified the country.
The British didn't truly start to appreciate pasta until after the second world war. Some of us fell for tinned spaghetti hoops, but the modern renaissance in English cooking was in large part an assimilation of Italian ingredients – pasta, olive oil, parmesan – promulgated by people like Elizabeth David. The average Briton now eats 2.5kg of pasta a year, less than one tenth of his or her Italian counterpart, and under a third that of the French or Germans. I can confidently say I eat a great deal more: in fact I was surprised the figure was so low considering the cheapness of the food and the fact that "midweek supper" now seems almost synonymous with pasta.
The figure is sure to rise, anyway: the global market for pasta grew from $13bn to $16bn between 2003 and 2010, and 22% of British households now buy fresh egg pasta. This is a shame: "fresh" pasta from the supermarket fridge is usually bulked out with a great deal of water, making it claggy, mushy and anaemic compared to homemade or small-scale egg pasta. The difference becomes particularly apparent in chiller-cabinet tortellini, with their gristly meats and curdled fillings. Pasta pushed through a bronze die is particularly good because its surface is somewhat roughened, meaning it catches the sauce rather better. The best brand I've tried was Pastificio dei Campi at Francesco Mazzei's L'Anima restaurant, but De Cecco is ideal for most purposes.
Even with unpredictable wheat costs profits can be made by pasta manufacturers, and its cheapness, convenience and long shelf-life commend it to manufacturers at least as much as consumers. Some children seem to eat little else nowadays and will likely carry a taste for it into adulthood, while student forums babble with dubious and depressing recipes for it, including the shamefully popular gastronomic joke of tinned tuna and sweetcorn let down with salad cream.
I sometimes think I could measure out my life in pasta dishes – the vat of bolognese I make about twice a year to portion and freeze, the crab linguines, the creamless carbonaras, the onion and anchovy, the ragù of sausage meat paled and thickened by mascarpone, the orecchiette with roasted garlic, purple sprouting and double cream, the pumpkin ravioli flavoured with nutty sage butter. One of the signs of a better cook, I reckon, is their ability to match sauce to shape. I never tire of it: pasta is infinitely amenable, a textural podium to flaunt flavour. What's your favourite pasta dish?