Another way of using durum wheat is to make noodles from it. The Arabic word for noodles is itriyya. The term only began to appear in Arabic dictionaries in the 14th century, although it was already to be found in cookbooks and medical works in Arabic in the preceding century. We may safely assume that these noodles were made from durum wheat. Some form of noodles are thought to have been in use in Arab kitchens from as early as the 9th century, though it is impossible to say with any certainty whether these were made from durum wheat.

There has been much speculation about the origins of noodles. The old legend that it was Marco Polo who brought this method of using grain back to Europe has now been thoroughly debunked. There is also general agreement among scholars that the ancient classical world did not know about noodles. However, it is hard to determine exactly when noodles did finally fetch up in the cooking pots of the Near and Middle East. According to medieval Arabic cookbooks, there were two distinct types of noodle. On the one hand, long, thin, spaghetti-like noodles were referred to in cookbooks from Baghdad and Damascus, but also in Iran, as rishta. This same sort were called itriyya in Andalusian and North African cookbooks. The Catalan word for noodles, aletria, derives from this. In the northern Italian region of Liguria, they are known simply as tria. The second type comprises shorter, extremely thin noodles, which in the east of the Arabic-speaking world were given the name sha‘riyya, from the Arabic word sha‘r for hair. In the western Arabic region they are called fidaush, the root of the Spanish word fideos and the Italin fede- lini. The German cultural historian Peter Peter informs us that noodle makers in Genoa in 1574 referred to themselves as fidelari. Long before that, the Arab geographer al-Idrisi (1099–1161), in his work Nuzhat al-mushtaq (‘The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands’), which he devoted to King Roger II of Sicily (1095–1154), had written: ‘To the west of Termini there is a place by the name of Trabia. It is an enchanting place whereat to stop a while, with its constantly flowing water and many mills. There is a broad plain there with extensive estates, where they produce large amounts of ytria (from the Arabic itriyya) and export it far and wide.’

This adoption of Arabic words to denote various sorts of noodles certainly does hint at a direct Arabic provenance for this Italian staple foodstuff. Yet only few recipes for how to make or use noodles can be found in medieval Arabic cookbooks. Instead, they tend to appear mostly in the context of comparisons: for example, one recipe instructs the user to slice courgettes ‘as finely as rishta’. In modern Near and Middle Eastern cookbooks, the talk is chiefly of vermicelli; combinations of noodles and rice are especially popular in this region.