cooks concentrated on simple long noodles
and thin wrappers, prepared them fresh and by
hand, sometimes with great panache and just
moments before cooking, and served the soft,
slippery results almost exclusively in large
amounts of thin broth. More remarkably,
Chinese cooks found ways to make noodles
from many different materials, including
other grains and even pure, protein-free starch
from beans and root vegetables.
The History of Pasta
and Noodles
It’s a story often told, and often refuted, that
the medieval traveler Marco Polo found
noodles in China and introduced them to Italy.
A recent book by Silvano Serventi and
Françoise Sabban has set the record straight in
authoritative and fascinating detail. China was
indeed the first country to develop the art of
noodle making, but there were pastas in the