Watching any pasta shape being extruded, be that through a small domestic machine or a vast industrial one, is hypnotic. Short shapes are particularly mesmerising, because the dough – made from durum wheat flour and water – emerges at speed from the bronze or Teflon-coated die, and is then chopped to size by a rotating blade. And then there are fusilli, whose helix form is created by an ingenious die that was invented and perfected in the early 1900s. Fusilli twist their way into being, the Syd Barrett of pasta shapes, emerging from the die in a psychedelic spiral.
The fusilli shape is an old one. In her Encyclopaedia of Pasta, Oretta Zanini De Vita traces the shape back to the fruitful Arab domination of Sicily and Sardinia, and the forming of the pasta by twisting dough around a thin reed known as a bus. The habit travelled and De Vita notes that fusillo became a southern Italian dialect term for any pasta made by wrapping or pressing dough around or into a ferretto, a thin metal rod with tapered ends, known as a fuso. As you can probably imagine, shaping pasta around a slender rod (or, alternatively, a knitting needle, bicycle wheel spoke or umbrella rib) and sliding it off makes for a particular form, sometimes like scroll of paper, at others canoes or even loose ringlets, all of which are still found in southern Italy. The industrial form, meanwhile, which took decades to perfect, is a helix or spiral and has since travelled all over the world. As with all pasta, the quality of the durum wheat used, and the way it’s extruded (through bronze, which gives texture) and dried (steadily, and with great attention) has a huge effect on the taste.
