Noodles are a type of food typically made from unleavened dough which is rolled flat and cut, stretched, or extruded into long strips or strings. Noodles are a staple food in many cultures and made into a variety of shapes. The most common noodles are those derived from Chinese cuisine or Italian cuisine. Italian noodles are generally referred to as pasta. In Chinese cuisine, the overarching term for noodles is 麵 (miàn in Mandarin), which refers specifically to dough-based noodles made from wheat or other grain-based dough. Chinese noodles also include another category, called 粉 (fěn), which are not made by kneading dough but from a starch slurry, such as rice noodles (mǐfěn, 米粉), and cellophane noodles (fěnsī, 粉丝 / 粉絲). These are not made from wheat dough, but are still regarded as noodles in English due to their physical form and culinary role. While long, thin strips may be the most common, many varieties of noodles are cut into waves, helices, tubes, strings, or shells, or folded over, or cut into other shapes. Noodles are usually cooked in boiling water, sometimes with cooking oil or salt added. They can also be steamed, pan-fried, deep-fried, or baked. Noodles are often served with an accompanying sauce or in a soup, the latter being known as noodle soup. Noodles can be refrigerated for short-term storage or dried and stored for future use.
Etymology The word for noodles in English was borrowed in the 18th century from the German word Nudel (German: [ˈnuːdl̩] ). The German word likely came from Knodel or Nutel, and referred to any dumpling, though mostly of wheat. Colloquial uses for noodle to refer to someone's head, or to a "dummy" are unrelated, and likely came from the older English word noddle.
History
Origin The earliest written record of noodles is found in a book dated to the Eastern Han period (25–220 CE), and describes a noodle soup dish called "tang bing". Noodles made from wheat dough became a prominent food for the people of the Han dynasty. The oldest evidence of noodles was from 4,000 years ago in China. In 2005, a team of archaeologists reported finding an earthenware bowl that contained 4,000-year-old noodles at the Lajia archaeological site, made by the Qijia culture. These noodles were said to resemble lamian, a type of Chinese noodle. Analyzing the husk phytoliths and starch grains present in the sediment associated with the noodles, they were identified as millet belonging to Panicum miliaceum and Setaria italica. However, other researchers cast doubt that Lajia's noodles were made from specifically millet: it is difficult to make pure millet noodles, it is unclear whether the analyzed residue were directly derived from Lajia's noodles themselves, starch morphology after cooking shows distinctive alterations that does not fit with Lajia's noodles, and it is uncertain whether the starch-like grains from Laijia's noodles are starch as they show some non-starch characteristics. Serventi and Sabban, in Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food, noted that wheat-based pasta traditions were established in China long before they had appeared in Europe. Food historian Gil Marks documented that the practise of boiling strips of dough in water originated in China and that this tradition did not take hold in Europe until the medieval period. Previously, European dough recipes were generally baked or fried rather than boiled, with Moorish Spain being the exception. Marks wrote that noodles spread from China along the Silk Road to Central Asia and reached Persia by around the fourth century. The noodles through Arab influence spread westwards to Sicily and Spain from where they spread from Sicily to mainland Italy sometime after the tenth century. A homogenous mixture of flour and water called itrion was described by 2nd-century Greek physician Galen. The Jerusalem Talmud describes itrium among Jews between the 3rd and 5th centuries; itriyya (an Arabic borrowing from Greek) referred to string-like shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking, as defined by the 9th-century physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali. According to National Geographic, many Italian writers have insisted pasta was enjoyed in pre-Roman Italy because implements found in a tomb dated to the fourth century BC show some resemblance to pasta-making equipment. However, many food historians dispute this interpretation, point out the scarcity of Roman-era references to anything resembling pasta, and believe that the dish instead first arrived in Italy as a "result of extensive Mediterranean trading in the Middle Ages". References to pasta dishes only became increasingly frequent across the Italian peninsula starting in the 13th century.
Historical variations
East Asia
There are over 1,200 types of noodles commonly consumed in China today. They vary widely according to the region of production, ingredients, shape or width, and manner of preparation. Due to the vast diversity of Chinese noodles, there is no single Chinese word equivalent to the Western concept of "noodles," nor is the notion of "noodles" as a unified food category recognized within Chinese cuisine. In Standard Mandarin, miàn (simplified Chinese: 面; traditional Chinese: 麵) means "dough" but can be used to refer to noodles made from wheat flour and grains such as millet, sorghum, and oats. Similarly, fěn (粉) means "powder" but can be used to refer to noodles made from other starches, particularly rice flour and mung bean starch. Wheat noodles in Japan (udon) were adapted from a Chinese recipe as early as the 9th century. Innovations continued, such as noodles made with buckwheat (naengmyeon) were developed in the Joseon Dynasty of Korea (1392–1897). Ramen noodles, based on southern Chinese noodle dishes from Guangzhou but named after the northern Chinese lamian, became common in Japan after World War II.
Central Asia Kesme or erişte noodles were eaten by Turkic peoples by the 13th century.
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