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A Silk Road journey of noodles and family

JEN LIN-LIU, A US-born resident of China, was taking a pasta-making course in Rome when she began wondering whether the tale of Marco Polo bringing noodles to Italy from China was actually true.

Her curiosity led her along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route linking Asia and Europe, eating the different kinds of pasta she found and speaking candidly with women as they cooked together in kitchens along the way. Lin-Liu, who runs a Beijing cooking school and now lives in the city of Chengdu, spoke with Reuters about noodles, dumplings and her just-published book On the Noodle Road. From an interview:

Q: This got started in Italy?

At the pasta class, I was really struck by how similar the method of making fettuccine was to Chinese noodles. Not only that, but there are so many shapes of noodles that I’ve seen across China that reminded me of Italian shapes. A lot of the similarities were specifically things I’d seen with northern Chinese food and Italian food.

In northern China, they use fennel, a lot of eggplant, a lot of noodles. So it got my curiosity going: was there a connection between the noodles of China and pasta in Italy and was that myth about Marco Polo true? And if not, is there something else in its place that could explain all these coincidences?

Q: What was one of the most surprising things you found?

I found the similarities bet-ween the dumplings of the Silk Road to be the most striking element of the food — Chinese dumplings that evolved into a steamed dumpling in the Uyghur community called manta, which are stuffed with either pumpkin or mutton and served with a clotted cream. Those dumplings cross over into Central Asia as pretty much the same thing. Then as you cross the Silk Road into Turkey, that same dumpling is called manti. It gets substantially smaller, basically the size of the pinkie nail, and is filled with a little dot of beef and onion and cooked very quickly, served with a yoghurt sauce, with a drizzle of mint oil and paprika and crushed walnuts. Delicious. Then that same dish you see in Italy, with tortellini, where they become a little bit bigger. What connected the tortellini with the Turkish manti is that I heard the same story told about those two dishes — that daughters-in-law, when they married into a family, were judged by how well they made them. The more they could fit on a spoon, the better daughter-in-law they were.

Q: What impact has this trip had on your cooking and thinking about food?

I have a much greater appreciation for certain ingredients such as Chinese chives. It was an interesting ingredient that I saw quite far along the Silk Road, all the way to Turkey. I never really liked Chinese chives before, but it was used in Uyghur cooking, in Central Asia and Turkey.

Mung beans were another one. In Central Asia, they’re a savoury ingredient used to make a kind of split pea soup with, and they make a salad with it in Turkey that’s similar to tabbouleh. It’s interesting to see the different applications of ingredients, things that in China I would pretty much just associate with dumplings. To see them inco-rporated in different ways opens your way of thinking to “why does it have to be this one way”?

Q: So noodles really cross boundaries.

Yes, they can assimilate into so many different cultures, that’s what’s so different. They have inserted themselves into the flavours and cultures of every place they went.