For anyone who grew up eating semolina pudding served with a bleeding blob of jam, there is a nostalgic (or traumatic) moment when making ears of pasta, known as orecchiette. It is when, having poured the warm water into the volcano crater of flour, you begin pinching the two together and the smell released is the same as that which rose from the bowl in the school dining room in 1988, a mix – and it has taken me a while to pin this down – of wood chippings, malt, tobacco, almond and custard. The same smell rushes up when you pour boiling water on a pile of instant couscous or simmer Turkish semolina halva.
All of these things – pasta flour, couscous, semolina – are made from the same thing: triticum durum, or durum wheat – grano duro in Italian, duro meaning hard. And amber-coloured, high-protein durum is hard, the hardest of the wheats; it has a glass-like quality and shatters when milled, a completely different behaviour from common wheat, which is known as grano tenero (meaning soft).
