On the Hunt for the World’s Rarest Pasta

My interpreter, Mavi, and I were shivering and walking with no end in sight. Then again, nothing was in sight—it was the middle of a dark night in the middle of a remote island in the middle of the Mediterranean.

They trudge 20 miles in the dark to receive grace within the sanctuary’s whitewashed walls. Since at the end of their pilgrimage, the weary are rewarded with two things: a footbath and a bowl of steaming noodles.

Paola Abraini is one of the last humans alive who has the skills to make the superfine, incredibly elaborate, nearly vanished su filindeu pasta. Now, in the run-up to the pilgrimage, Abraini prepares hundreds of pounds of the stuff.

The Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda alluded to su filindeu in her 1903 novel Elias Portolu , whose protagonist feasts on it upon completing the pilgrimage. Deledda acknowledged “the wild nocturnal solitude of the scrubland” and that “the climb was hard and dry.” But in real life we’d long since passed hard and dry, and the trek had gone from amusingly brisk to plain old grueling. Diana Markosian As we hiked, Mavi and I discussed the pasta, how long until we could eat it, whether anyone had ever died on this walk, and whether anyone would find us if we did.

At 4 A.M., my thoughts drifted to the pasta that felt so out of reach. Since its launch in 1996, the project has catalogued some 4,000 dishes and ingredients in jeopardy: brown beans from Sweden’s Öland island, Mirandaise cattle from Gascony, the Umqombothi beer of South Africa’s Xhosa people—and su filindeu .

What we don’t eat vanishes; humans will never again taste an Ansault pear, no matter how much they want to. “Eat it to save it,” the Ark of Taste dictum goes. Looking at the towering mass of problems, it’s hard to fret over something as theoretical as a pasta you’ve never tasted, made on a hilltop you’ve never heard of.

To make the pasta, thin strands are arranged in alternating layers like latticework and dried in the sun. Diana Markosian All at once I didn’t just care about the fate of su filindeu , I now possessed the key for caring about any crisis that might otherwise slip into abstraction: You can’t think about how sizeable it is.

I met a man in his 70s, so devout he’d hiked the 100-plus miles from Cagliari to Nuoro, a pilgrimage to this pilgrimage. The actual celebrity responsible for the bowl in my hand was elsewhere, Mavi and I learned. Talking to Abraini’s cousin, it was hard to gauge the sturdiness of the chain of succession.

Humans doing beautiful, irrational, gentle things, like hiking 20 miles in the dark in order to receive grace on a promontory overlooking a broad valley, and a woman cookery a strange, impossible dish to honor it all. I would wrap it in tissue paper and smuggle it out of Lula, out of Italy, back home to California where it now sits, in a drawer in my kitchen.

I don’t know what to do with it, except look at it now and then, and, by God, never let it disappear.