Pasta and its cognates is a real ball of culinary-taxonomic mud so that's a pretty unlucky first choice I think. The word pasta and etymological relatives are

Pasta and its cognates is a real ball of culinary-taxonomic mud so that's a pretty unlucky first choice I think. The word pasta and etymological relatives are also the words for all dough, sausage (pâté), porridge, pastry (pâtisserie), pesto, etc etc in different european cuisines and that's just what I know off the top of my head, in use in the last few decades. If you expand it out a couple hundred years who fucking knows what will have been known by that word or its variants. I'm not even sure how long that usage dates in english either. Even as recently as mid-late 20th century american cookbooks referred to all noodles as macaroni and used that word generically the same way we use pasta now.