Noodle

• 1. Introduction

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  Noodles are eaten in more than 1,200 commonly recognized varieties in China alone, and yet Chinese cuisine has no single word that means noodles. It does not treat them as one unified category of food either. The idea of a noodle, it turns out, is largely a view from outside.

  The two best-known families come from Chinese and Italian kitchens, and the Italian branch goes by the name pasta. A ramen bowl, a plate of spaghetti and a Korean dish of cold buckwheat strands look nothing alike. So what makes all of them noodles?

  Then there is the matter of origins. A bowl from a prehistoric site, a Han dynasty text, a Greek physician and a famous legend about Marco Polo all compete for a place in the story. Some of those claims survive scrutiny, and some do not.

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• 2. Words for Noodles

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  Two Chinese characters do most of the sorting. The first is 麵, pronounced miàn in Mandarin. It literally means dough, and it covers noodles made from wheat or from grains such as millet, sorghum and oats.

  The second is 粉, pronounced fěn, which literally means powder. It covers noodles made from a starch slurry rather than kneaded dough, especially rice flour and mung bean starch. Rice noodles are mǐfěn, written 米粉, and cellophane noodles are fěnsī. None of these start as wheat dough. English still calls them noodles because of their shape and the role they play at the table.

  Waves, helices, tubes, shells and folded pieces all exist, so the long thin strip is only the most common form. Boiling water is the usual way to cook a noodle, sometimes with oil or salt added. Steaming, pan-frying, deep-frying and baking are all possible. A noodle may be served with a sauce or in a broth, and the broth version is called noodle soup. Fresh noodles keep in a refrigerator for a short time, while dried ones can be stored for later.

  English borrowed its word in the 18th century from the German Nudel. Calling someone's head a noodle, or calling a person a dummy, is unrelated. Those uses likely come from the older English word noddle. Nudel itself likely came from Knodel or Nutel, which named dumplings of nearly any kind, though mostly of wheat.

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• 3. The Bowl at Lajia

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  In 2005, a team of archaeologists announced an earthenware bowl of noodles about 4,000 years old at the Lajia archaeological site. The Qijia culture had made them. The team said the strands resembled lamian, the hand-pulled Chinese noodle. Husk phytoliths and starch grains in the surrounding sediment were identified as millet, from two species named Panicum miliaceum and Setaria italica.

  Other researchers doubted the claim, and they gave several reasons. Pure millet is difficult to turn into noodles. It is unclear whether the residue analyzed came directly from the noodles themselves. Cooked starch shows distinctive changes that do not match the Lajia strands. Some of the grains also show non-starch traits, so it is uncertain that they are starch at all.

  The written record stands on firmer ground. A book dated to the Eastern Han period, which ran from 25 to 220 CE, describes a noodle soup called tang bing. Noodles made from wheat dough became a prominent food for the people of the Han dynasty, and the dish on that page was a soup.

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• 4. Itrion and Itriyya

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  Galen, a Greek physician of the 2nd century, described a smooth mixture of flour and water that he called itrion. The word traveled. The Jerusalem Talmud describes itrium among Jews between the 3rd and 5th centuries. The Latinized form itrium referred to a kind of boiled dough.

  The Arabic borrowing itriyya is defined by the 9th-century physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali. In his definition it meant string-like shapes of semolina that were dried before cooking. Dried dough had a practical use, because Arabs adapted noodles for long journeys in the fifth century. That is the first written record of dry pasta.

  Persian Jews also knew itriyya, first in the early Persian period when they spoke Aramaic and later under Islamic rule. For them it was a small soup noodle of Greek origin, made by twisting bits of kneaded dough into shape. It resembled Italian orzo.

  Muhammad al-Idrisi wrote in 1154 that itriyya was manufactured and exported from Norman Sicily.

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• 5. Italy's Contested Pasta

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  Horace, writing in the 1st century BCE, mentioned fried sheets of dough called lagana. The cooking method he describes matches neither fresh pasta nor dry pasta as we define them today.

  Implements found in a tomb from the fourth century BC look somewhat like pasta-making equipment. According to National Geographic, many Italian writers have used them to argue that pasta was eaten before Roman times. Many food historians disagree. They point to how few Roman-era references describe anything like pasta. They believe the dish arrived as a "result of extensive Mediterranean trading in the Middle Ages".

  The first concrete information on pasta products in Italy goes back to the Etruscan civilization and a dish called testaroli. True noodles appear much later, in the 10th or 11th century. A popular legend says Marco Polo brought the first pasta home from China. Modern historians give that story little credit. They think the first noodles came earlier from the Arabs, in a form called rishta.

  Once pasta arrived, it took on many shapes, often tied to regional specialties. References to pasta dishes across the Italian peninsula became increasingly frequent from the 13th century.

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• 6. Noodles Take Local Form

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  Udon came to Japan as a Chinese wheat noodle recipe as early as the 9th century. Korea added its own twist during the Joseon Dynasty, which lasted from 1392 to 1897. Cooks there developed naengmyeon, made with buckwheat. Ramen has a more tangled lineage. It is based on southern Chinese noodle dishes from Guangzhou, but it was named after the northern Chinese lamian. It became common in Japan after World War II.

  By the 13th century, Turkic peoples were eating kesme, also called erişte. In Iran, ash reshteh is a thick soup of noodles and herbs, and it ranks among the most popular dishes in some Middle Eastern countries.

  German documents from 1725 mention Spätzle. Medieval illustrations are believed to show the noodle at an even earlier date.

  In Armenia, arishta is made from wheat, water and salt. It is thick, and it is usually eaten with matzoon, clarified butter and garlic.

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• 7. Beyond Wheat

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  Chow mein, lo mein, mie goreng, hokkien mee, yakisoba and pad thai all start the same way, with noodles stir-fried with meat, seafood, vegetables or dairy. Fried noodles are only one kind of dish. Baked noodles are boiled, drained and combined with other ingredients, as in many casseroles. Chilled noodles appear cold, sometimes in salads, such as Thai glass noodle salad and cold udon. Noodle soups include phở, ramen, laksa and chicken noodle soup. Plain noodles can also be served alone with a dipping sauce or oil.

  The main grains behind them differ as much as the dishes. Bánh phở is the thick fresh rice noodle in Vietnamese phở. Thin rice vermicelli goes by names such as mǐfěn, bee hoon and bún, and South India has its own version called sevai. Idiyappam is another Indian rice noodle, and khanom chin is a fermented rice noodle in Thai cooking.

  Soba is the Japanese buckwheat noodle. In Korea, memil naengmyeon is a buckwheat noodle slightly chewier than soba, and makguksu is a specialty of Gangwon Province. In Italy's Valtellina region, buckwheat becomes pizzoccheri, a tagliatelle usually served with melted cheese sauce.

  Egg noodles are made from egg and flour. They include lokshen in Eastern European Jewish cooking and Spätzle, associated with the southern German states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Tagliatelle, fettuccine and pappardelle are egg-based long pastas.

  The less usual ingredients are the most surprising. Korean acorn noodles, called dotori guksu, use acorn meal, wheat flour, wheat germ and salt. Olchaeng-i guksu, or tadpole noodles, are made by putting corn soup through a noodle maker straight into cold water. They are named for their shape and are mostly eaten in Gangwon-do. Chilk naengmyeon is chewy, semitransparent and made from kudzu root starch. Shirataki comes from konjac, and kelp noodles come from seaweed. Cellophane noodles use mung bean, potato or canna starch.

  In Indonesia, noodles are also made from corn starch, sago and cassava. The cassava version is sold as mie singkong or mie mocaf.

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• 8. Zacierki in Łódź

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  Zacierki is a type of noodle found in Polish Jewish cuisine. In the Łódź Ghetto, it was part of the rations the Nazis distributed to Jewish victims. Of the major ghettos, Łódź was the one most affected by hunger, starvation and deaths related to malnutrition.

  A young Jewish girl from Łódź kept a diary that records a fight with her father. It was over a single spoonful of zacierki taken from the family's meager supply. That supply came to 200 grams a week.

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