Homemade Pastas

Trahana is the most important Greek version of pasta. Scholars have studied the origins of this staple food, common in the Balkan countries as well as Turkey, but its origins are lost in antiquity. We know that the word trahana comes from the Turkish trahana, which is a similar homemade pasta. Trahana is made with flour, semolina, or bulgur and milk or sour milk, with some other additions.

In a paper delivered to the 1989 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, food historian Maria Johnson states that trahana might have come from China, brought to Greece by Turkish peoples in the tenth century. Others think that it is a Turkish invention. But food historian Charles Perry insists that the word tarkahana was first found in the works of a Persian poet of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and meant a kind of barley bread.