Learning to Make the World’s Rarest Pasta

San Francesco may be linked with a bandit, but he’s venerated by an island, and almost every Sardinian you talk to today has a story of how this saint and his sacred host have somehow touched their lives.

Ladu, the shoeless pilgrim I followed from Nuoro to the sanctuary, made a promise to San Francesco when his mother was on her deathbed forty-seven years ago. “She had already received her last rites. The doctors told me there was nothing they could do,” he said to me, an hour after trudging up the crumbling hillside. “I prayed to San Francesco and said, ‘If you save my mother, I will walk in your name twice each year, barefoot.’ She lived for thirty-five more years and died at ninety-one, and I’ve maintained my promise.”

Hours earlier, during a mid-pilgrimage bonfire break fueled by flowing mirto and a yellowish egg liqueur called Vov, I had met Francesco Calledda, an eighty-five-year-old man carrying a biblical staff who has walked ninety-six kilometers from his hometown of Aritzo to the sanctuary for the past forty years because, as he said, “Filindeu and San Francesco belong to all Sardinians.”

And the day before the pilgrimage, I went to the home of eighty-eight-year-old Badora Piredda, a mother of ten, who started cooking the su filindeu broth for the feast after she claimed San Francesco helped her son recover from leukemia.

“As a girl, I remember going to Rosaria and even her mother’s to watch them make filindeu,” Piredda told me, looking out the window of her Nuoro apartment and flashing a toothy smile. “I would watch them work and say to myself, ‘How can this be?’ I can make most every Sardinian food. Su filindeu is the only thing that always escaped me. But perhaps before I die, I will finally learn how to make it!”

Since my previous article, there have been greater calls from within Sardinia to ensure su filindeu’s survival. But with the dish’s primary custodian now unwilling to teach those outside her family, people have recently started looking to other women in the family to divulge the dish’s secrets.

A short walk from Abraini’s apartment, I met her two nieces, sixty-year-old Raffaella Marongiu Selis and fifty-four-year-old Rosaria Musina (the youngest filindeu heir). Sitting in Marongiu Selis’s kitchen, I watched as the two bonnet-clad sisters shaped the threads of God from thin air, stretching and pulling the strands in a sweeping motion before laying them on the circular frame.

As they prepared the remaining hundred kilograms of filindeu needed for the feast, Marongiu Selis—a soft-spoken woman with smooth olive skin, red-rimmed glasses, and short black hair—explained that she and Musina learned to make filindeu as girls from their mother, Gavina (Rosaria’s daughter). Like Abraini, the sisters began by taking a small piece of dough and imitating their mother. And like Abraini, it took them years to master it.

“My daughter, Chiara, is learning, but today girls are much more busy. They’re on their phones. There were no cell phones when we were kids. At six in the afternoon, we were home. It’s a different world,” Marongiu Selis told me, as Musina continued weaving the circular filindeu canvas. “I’ve said, Chiara, you have to learn! Not just for you, but for your family. She doesn’t have this great passion for it. And filindeu, for the work that it requires, you need to have a passion for it.”

For years, Gavina told Raffaella that if she ever taught filindeu, it would create bad blood between her and Abraini. But as Gavina’s health—and the sisters’ own health—declined, Raffaella had a change of heart. “I’m sixty years old. I’ve survived two tumors. Rosaria has sclerosis and Paola isn’t getting any younger. At a certain point, I thought, if I don’t pass this on, no one will carry it,” she said.

Recently, Maria Antonietta Mazzone, who runs La Cucina delle Matriarche, an organization that aims to “spread awareness and pass on the ancient culinary traditions of Sardinia to avoid the extinction, commercialization, and commodification of our traditions” approached her with a proposal. “When I contacted Raffaella, I asked her if she thought any of the daughters or nieces in her family would carry this on,” Mazzone said.

I told her that this tradition would surely die if they didn’t and that it would be a great loss for humanity if that happened. So, I asked her, if we were to do this in the correct spirit, would you be available to teach a few select people the secrets of filindeu in order to keep this tradition alive?

To Mazzone’s great surprise, Marongiu Selis said yes. After receiving requests from all over the world and interviewing applicants to ask why they wanted to learn to make su filindeu, Marongiu Selis selected six participants that she felt would have the best chance at learning the technique and honoring its legacy—among them, an Australian chef, a cook working for the Italian food chain Eataly, and a young man from Cagliari.

The participants all converged at a small farm stay in Sardinia, and after Fancello explained the dish’s winding historical path from Arab pirates to Sardinian pilgrims, he handed the floor over to Marongiu Selis.

“I told the students, there was no recipe. I learned this from my mother and no recipe has ever been written down, so I will try to transmit it through my hands,” she said.

For the next two days, Marongiu Selis taught them what she could, and at the end of the course, she asked each participant to agree to three fundamental points:

1) every time you prepare su filindeu, you must explain that this is a sacred Sardinian dish;
2) you recount the history of where and how it was born; and
3) you must not alter the traditional preparation or recipe of it.

As Marongiu Selis picked up another cylinder of dough and whisked it through the air with the speed and precision of an orchestra conductor, I asked her, “If it took you and the other women in your family years to master su filindeu, did any of these chefs actually learn to make it in just two days?”

“Well, no,” she said.

It’s not that these people left knowing how to make it well, absolutely not. What I told them was, “I’ll show you the steps, but then it’s up to you.” I did the lesson, but they need to do the work, to study it and practice it in continuation. That I know of, none of them have succeeded in mastering it, but if they do one day, I’d feel incredibly proud. Yes, I would have brought su filindeu outside the family, but I would have saved it too.

A week before I returned to Nuoro, Gavina Selis, the woman who had warned her daughter to never teach su filindeu outside the family, had passed away. With her death, the number of living filindeu makers shrank once more. But contrary to her fears, her daughter’s lessons didn’t create any bad blood with Abraini, who attended the funeral to console her two sisters-in-law.

“Su filindeu isn’t something I own. I didn’t invent it, so if Raffaella wants to teach lessons, who am I to prohibit her from doing what she wants?” Abraini told me.

For me, it’s a matter of principle, of tradition. What I have always said is that as a custodian of this tradition that has been passed down from mother to daughter, I will respect that. My daughters know how much of an undertaking this is for me, but they know how much I love it, so as long as the good Lord gives me health and life, I will continue to make it. I remain hopeful that one of them will one day take it on, but if they can’t, then I will be sad. So many things in this world that once were no longer are.

Abraini’s parting message felt like a prophecy, a pressing reminder to cherish the beautiful, gentle customs that make the world glimmer while warning us not to blink. I tried to push this idea from my mind as I walked blindly through the night toward the sanctuary, following the glint of headlamps as they rose and fell against the lush, black landscape—but it consumed me.

As much as I would hate to see su filindeu fade away, I understand why Abraini doesn’t want to teach it to any Canadian or Greek chef who calls her out of the blue. Sure, after several years, she may succeed in passing on the skill, but as she told me, when you take something that is so intertwined with a specific place, a specific event, and a specific pastoral code, and you present it in a different context, “it’s no longer the threads of God; it’s just pulled pasta.”

It would be like serving communion wafers at a ball game.

At the same time, I can’t fault Marongiu Selis for trying to save this tradition from disappearing completely. But what feels even more devastating than the thought of these threads vanishing is the unraveling of a festival and way of life they hold together. It’s one thing to put in years of

practice to master this craft, but are any of Marongiu Selis’s disciples willing to then travel to Nuoro twice a year to prepare hundreds of kilograms of filindeu in the name of San Francesco?

Maybe so.

Of all her students, Marongiu Selis told me that the best was a forty-two-year-old chef from Nuoro named Roberto Ruiu. After working in restaurants around the globe for eighteen years, Ruiu had recently returned to the Barbagia when Marongiu Selis accepted him into her workshop.

Perhaps because of his intimate familiarity with Sardinian pasta, Ruiu took to filindeu immediately, but as soon as the class was over, everything fell apart. “I went home and I could no longer make it. The threads ripped. It just didn’t work,” he told me. “So, I went back to Raffaella’s home, and she walked me through it again and again. Since then, I’ve kept practicing and calling her. I can do it pretty well now, but I know it takes years to learn this art.”

Ruiu said his dream is to split his time between New York City, where he last worked abroad, and Nuoro so that he can introduce filindeu to the world while keeping it alive at home. “Food helps you learn the roots of a place. It’s sharing,” he said.

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel and have learned Mexican food from Mexican chefs and Polish food from Polish chefs. My hope is that I can introduce this food, this beautiful tradition, to those who can’t travel, and in doing so, bring a little bit of my home with me.

Every food tells a story, and like any good story, it’s the details that matter. There’s a fine line between preserving a tradition and altering it. The engineers at Barilla couldn’t commodify the secrets of filindeu, but they did succeed in mass-producing Sardinia’s beloved malloreddus pasta, which they now sell across Europe with the Italianized name gnochetti sardi.

For years, I felt guilty that my story had altered the natural trajectory of filindeu—that against my best intentions, I was just another outsider, coming to Sardinia and poking my nose where it doesn’t belong. But I suppose Ruiu and Abraini’s point is really the same: no one owns food, or filindeu, for that matter.

So, if I can somehow honor it with a depth and dignity worthy of an island and its people who have forever changed me, and share this tradition with those who can’t travel to an impossibly remote mountain sanctuary, then maybe that’s my grace.

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Excerpted from Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.