Mediterranean world long before Marco Polo.
Noodles in China Despite the fact that wheat
was grown in the Mediterranean region long
before it arrived in China, the northern
Chinese appear to have been the first to
develop the art of noodle making, sometime
before 200 BCE. Around 300 CE, Shu Xi wrote
an ode to wheat products (bing) that names
several kinds of noodles and dumplings,
describes how they’re made, and suggests
their luxurious qualities: poets frequently
likened their appearance and texture to the
qualities of silk (see box, p. 572). In 544, an
agricultural treatise called Important Arts for
the People’s Welfare devoted an entire
chapter to dough products. These included not
only several different shapes of wheat noodle,
most made by mixing flour with meat broth
and one made with egg, but also noodles made
from rice flour and even from pure starch (p.
579).