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.
- "From Latin pistus (“crushed, pounded”), from Latin pīnsō (“to pound, beat, crush”), whose frequentative also gave Italian pestare (“to pound”)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta
Evidently it is a young word relatively speaking.
Earliest use as an English word: 1830:
J. P. Cobbett Jrnl. Tour Italy 214 Maccaroni, like vermicelli, is only one of the forms into which the Italians make what they call ‘pasta’ or paste. It requires a particular sort of wheat, a brittle, flinty grain, to make this pasta.
Earliest mention in English (i.e., as an Italian word): 1820:
W. A. Cadell Journey Carniola, Italy & France II. 152 The Italians prefer that [sc. Macaroni] which is fresh made, and made at home, and called pasta di casa, household paste.*
Even if the correct date is 1830 or even 1820, it is a distinction without difference. It misses the middle ages by more than a hundred years.