On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta - Hardcover

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Prologue

The year after we married, Craig and I went to Italy for Christmas. It was
our first time in Europe together, a break from years of living and traveling
in Asia. After a week of hiking along precipitous cliffs on the Amalfi coast
that dropped into the sparkling blue Mediterranean, we drove to Rome. In
a neighborhood called Trastevere, full of winding alleys and couples in embrace,
my husband led me to a restaurant called Le Fate and surprised me
with a belated holiday gift: a pasta-making class. In the cluttered kitchen,
we stood before the chef and proprietor, a man named Andrea. With dark
espresso eyes and curly brown hair, the chef happily played the part of the
handsome Italian guy female tourists swoon over. He flirted, chatted, and
joked with guests as they arrived. But once class began, he cleared his throat
and surveyed the room with narrowed eyes. The room fell as silent as a
church before mass.

“Americans,” Andrea declared, “think that Italians use a lot of garlic.”
He placed a single garlic clove on the stainless-steel counter, whacked it
with the back of a cast-iron frying pan, and held up the flattened result.
“We do not use a lot of garlic. Delete this information from your brain!”

At the counter, Andrea began breaking eggs with bright yellow yolks
into a crater he’d made in a mound of finely ground, refined flour. After
working the eggs into the flour, he vigorously kneaded and flattened the
dough with a rolling pin, gradually stretching the pliable putty into long
sheets almost as thin as newsprint. He wound a sheet tightly around the
pin, then swung it to and fro, releasing the dough so that it folded over itself
in neat S-shaped layers. After cutting them into slivers, he shook the pieces
in the air like a magician, unfurling long, wide strands of pasta.

Over my years of learning how to cook in China, I’d come across many
pasta shapes that echoed ones in Italy. Chinese “cat’s ear” noodles resembled
Italian orecchiette. Hand-pulled noodles, a specialty of China’s northwest,
were stretched as thin as angel hair. Dumplings and wontons were
folded in ways similar to ravioli and tortellini. Even the more obscure
shapes of Italian pasta—handkerchief-like squares called quadrellini, for
example—had their Chinese counterparts. Each time I’d come across a
new shape, it seemed coincidental.

But at Andrea’s that morning, as I watched and mimicked the pasta-
making, it all seemed to add up to something more. Andrea’s movements
followed the textbook method for making Chinese hand-rolled noodles, a
dish I’d practiced countless times in Beijing. It was a revelation. With
eggs rather than water, a few extra-clumsy movements, and flour inadvertently
winding up all over my hands and face, I, like Andrea, could make
fettuccine!

Though the trip was meant to be a break from the Far East, my mind
couldn’t help drifting back to China as I tasted the food across Italy. In
Venice, the seafood risottos reminded me of my grandmother’s congee. I
learned that the Venetians had a history of sweet-and-sour dishes, thanks to
the city’s spice trade with the Orient, though many had faded with time. On
the Amalfi coast, as we sipped limoncello after dinner, a chef told us that
Italians, like Chinese, drank liquor infused with other ingredients in order
to relieve everyday ailments.

After that trip, I began to cook more Italian food. In an arrabbiata sauce,
I discovered that the balance of acidic tomatoes, hot chilies, and sugar
seemed to echo the flavor of spicy noodle dishes in western China. When I
drizzled olive oil and vinegar over my salads, I noticed the effect was similar
to the sesame oil and black vinegar in the cold salads of China’s north.
In the mushrooms, aged meats, and prodigious Parmigiano-Reggiano
cheese grated over pastas, I saw the Italian affinity for a flavor called umami
that the Chinese highly prize. As I ate the dishes, I realized that the two
cuisines also had common philosophies: they were both essentially humble
and rustic, elevating the essence of ingredients over fancy preparations.
And both were best home-cooked.

With all the parallels and similarities lingering in my head, I found myself
thinking about the familiar story of how Marco Polo brought noodles
from China to Italy. Even the Chinese knew the tale, but they liked to tell it
with embellishment: Marco Polo also tried meat-filled buns in China,
which he attempted to re-create when he returned home. But he couldn’t
remember how to fold the dough, and Italy ended up with a second-rate
mess-of-a-bun called pizza.

Both stories are myths—overwhelming evidence shows that Italians
were eating pasta before the birth of the Venetian explorer. Most experts
trace the Marco Polo story back to a 1929 issue of The Macaroni Journal, a
now-defunct publication of a pasta trade association. The anonymously
written article appeared in between advertisements for industrial pasta-
making equipment, and it reads like fiction: Marco Polo arrives by boat to
a place that sounds more South Pacific than Chinese and comes across natives
drying long strands of pasta. (In reality, Chinese wheat noodles are a
tradition of the northern hinterlands and are rarely dried before cooking.)
The story was intended to spur the consumption of pasta, back then a
novelty to most Americans.

Food historians have since produced an array of conflicting theories
about the provenance of noodles. Some credit the ancient Etruscans, suggesting
that pictures in caves depict pasta-making. Others attribute the invention
to the successors of the Etruscans: Romans flattened sheets of
dough called lagana, suggesting an early version of lasagna. Or perhaps the
first incarnation of noodles appeared with Arab caravan traders, who developed
dried ones that were light and easy to transport, predecessors of
the instant kind. But then maybe the staple originated in the birthplace
of wheat, in the Middle East, and traveled by divergent paths to
Italy and China, claims another camp. Still others credit the Uighurs, a
Turkic-speaking minority who straddle Central Asia and China.

The more research I did, the more confused I became; it seemed like
there were limitless theories about the origin of noodles and how they’d
spread. The topic was the subject of endless fascination. “Yes, you must find
out who invented noodles!” friends told me as I related my research—as if
it were as easy as establishing who’d invented the telephone. Then I came
across a report that seemed to debunk all the theories: scientists had found
a four-thousand-year-old noodle in northwestern China, confirming the
conventional wisdom that the Chinese had invented the staple, adding to an
impressive list of Chinese inventions that included gunpowder, paper, the
printing press, and the compass. But even that news didn’t explain how the
dish had traveled so many thousands of miles to Italy.

The theories were also intriguing for the wide swath of territory they
covered, a region bounded by the seven-thousand-mile-long network of
trade routes that connected Europe and Asia known as the Silk Road. It
was as much a concept as it was a physical entity. The “Silk Road” was a
term coined in 1877, long after the demise of the route itself, by a German
explorer and geographer named Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. Like
Marco Polo, the mythical path came with a story. Around the birth of
Christ, the Romans were first introduced...