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The Great Noodle Debate

Like so many North Americans, I love pasta.  I really don't care whether it was invented first in China or Italy, although I've had friends who came down strongly enough on one side or another that I have had to plead along the lines of America's Fifth Amendment. If, however, I'm required to take some sort of stance, I'm all for the wide-spread acceptance of the theory of independent invention if only to end the great debate so that we can all just get on with enjoying our noodles.

We humans take ownership very seriously, and a great deal of the concept of ownership is wrapped up in the package of invention.  While Marco Polo may indeed have brought back a sort of noodle from his Oriental travels in the 1200s, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that the product he brought back is in any way more likely the father of modern Italian pasta than doughs previously noted by Apicius in the first century A.D.  Certainly, the relatively recent discovery of 4000 year-old Chinese millet noodles establishes a fairly fearsome timeline of Asian noodle consumption, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the Italians did not independently invent their own type of noodle as a natural outgrowth of their assorted doughs used for wrapping, cover, or layering various dishes.  Nor, I'm afraid, does the pre-existence of doughs and grain products that could evolve into modern past mean that their evolution was not influenced by foreign products introduced at any number of points through trade and travel, (including good old Marco).  The oldest noodle-samples that we have excavated may be Chinese, but Italian pasta is highly enough esteemed to be sometimes credited with contributed to the unification of Italy ("It will be maccheroni, I swear to you, that will unite Italy." - Giuseppe Garibaldi, c. 1860).

Event with the element of origin in the Great Noodle Debate at least uneasily resolved (or roundly ignored), we face the raging polemic of intrinsic worth: namely, whose noodle (or noodle culture) is superior?  Fortunately, this is a no-win contest, because it is inherently governed by personal taste, which is inculcated to some degree by culture, and additionally governed by preconceived notions about the relative level of sophistication of either or both parties.  As for why that's a good thing - it allows those of us who have no particular reason for bias to enjoy our noodles ecumenically, without any attendant moral stance.

It amuses me to find that I was raised on something of an unintentional hybrid of traditions.  The main pasta dish of my childhood, and one of the first suppers that I learned to cook, was baked spaghetti in a beefy tomato sauce, covered at the last moment with melting slices of mozzarella cheese.  It was a favourite dish then, and it remains a favourite dish now, but all was not what it seemed.  The difference was that instead of using regular semolina pasta in the Italian style, my mother used a soy noodle obtained from the local health food store.  I have no idea why this was - perhaps it was the beginning of the soy craze in the early 70s, and she figured it was a more likely way to get soy into us that blocks of tofu (which would, in fact, have been the case).  Perhaps the soy noodles were less expensive - although since Italian style pasta is hardly a costly item to begin with, I rather suspect that was not the driving force.  In any event, to my child's mind, the word "spaghetti" was conclusively linked with this one particular oven-baked dish of tender soy noodles  and meaty sauce.

With my firm mental definition of spaghetti coming from utter lack of exposure to anything different, I was deeply shocked to attend a friend's twelfth birthday where spaghetti with meat sauce was the dinner of choice.  Spaghetti for a birthday dinner was no shock, of course, as it was a frequent birthday request for all of the kids in my family, but what ended up on my plate left me stumped.  A great plate of long, slithering, firm yellow noodles (the much shorter soy noodles baked up tender and extremely white, despite absorbing a lot of the sauce) with a modest dollop of red sauce in the centre, crowned with a trio of meatballs.  I was puzzled by the fact that there was no way to get the small amount of sauce to coat all of the noodles, I was delighted by the meatballs (unheard of at our house) and I was utterly daunted by the quantity of food on my plate.  I was suddenly face to face not only with  a vast difference of noodle, but also a completely foreign application of sauce.

I watched, fascinated, as my friend and her brother (on whom I was contemplating a crush at the time) demolished their meatballs and only the portion of pasta that had come in direct contact with the sauce, handing their plates back for more sauce and more meatballs, and then repeating.  My friend stopped after "seconds", abandoning many untouched, still naked noodles on her plate, and her brother stopped after "thirds", with fewer gleaming strands of red-spackled noodles.  I wrestled with my understanding of acceptable dinner table etiquette, gamely eating my meatballs first (following my friend's lead) and then trying to stir as much sauce into the noodles as possible.  My last, heroic bites of pasta were bland and unseasoned, and landed on top of a fairly full stomach, when cake was announced.  I was both overly full and a little grossed out by the taste and texture of actual unsauced spaghetti noodles, and greatly relieved when the actual eating of cake was deferred until after the opening of presents and the sing-along blowing-out of the candles and exclaiming over birthday wishes (which, I suspect, were at least partially related to boys) and by which time I had digested enough of the spaghetti to be able to eat a small piece of cake without keeling over.  I left that evening feeling quite bewildered by the whole spaghetti ritual, partially because I didn't understand why there wasn't enough sauce to cover the noodles, and partially because of the amount of wasted food.  It may have been that the family dog was given the scrapings from the plates, I don't know.  Our family (sans dog) was very good at cleaning our plates, and only then going back for seconds (if need be) and any food left uneaten on the plate was subject to disapproval at the very least, if not something of a lecture on our "eyes [being] bigger than our stomach."

I was, of course, at the time blissfully ignorant of the battlefield of endless wrangling as to the dressing of a plain noodle: was the sauce to be a condiment, just lightly bathing the noodle, or a substantial player in the dish to the point of leaving a moist pool behind to be sopped up with bread?  Should the pasta be cooked in the sauce, or sauced just before serving?  Do you call it sauce or gravy? Does olive oil count as a sauce, or does it merely facilitate a sauceless dish?  What about Asian sauces? Is it impolite to drown your chow mein in soy sauce?  My vote is yes, if the operative word is "drown."

Occasionally, as I grew older, there would be other pasta dishes at our house: homemade macaroni and cheese was always a favourite, if not a frequent flyer, and my mother went through a brief manicotti phase that saw us giggling our way through attempting to stuff the shells with, variously spoons of a wide assortment of shapes and sizes, fingers 9a messy proposition to be sure), and even an icing syringe (by far the best delivery system, but which fiddly little parts required much attention to detail during the clean-up phase).  Spaghetti, however, never changed.  Even with the introduction of mottled brown whole wheat pasta, which should by all rights (and my mother's whole wheat imperative) have ended up in our cupboards, the soy noodle continued unchallenged.

It has been a long time since I made spaghetti in the "old" way; the recipe makes too much for just two people, and it doesn't freeze very well.  When I moved to the city, I began to learn about other types of noodle - soba, ramen, somen, rice noodle and rice pasta from the Asian community, and gnocchi, tortellini, spätzle (spaetzle) and galus(h)ka from the European traditions.  I continue to make a lot of different noodle dishes, as pasta and rice have long since supplanted the (almost) daily potatoes that I grew up with.  I am entertained by the endless variety of flavourings - squid in linguini, or tomato flavoured soy noodles - and I continue to look forward to different types of noodle, from any culture or cuisine, either to play with in my own kitchen or to admire in the open kitchens where accomplished noodle-chefs spin, twist, pull and slice noodles of an astonishing variety of textures, lengths and compositions.

My world has plenty of room for all types, although I remain unconvinced as to whether the alleged health benefits of whole wheat pasta actually outweigh the flavour demerits.  You can get noodles to suit almost any dietary requirement (lingering low-carbohydrate fads notwithstanding): egg free, gluten-free, high fibre, made from rice or corn or spelt in the Italian style alone, along with the seemingly endless variety of Asian noodles.  How could anyone, therefore, possibly elevate the significance of one noodle over another?

January 2007