Transcription
All over the world, from Beijing to Berlin, Sicily to San Francisco, billions of people share one thing in common: a love for noodles. And why not? This is one of the world’s great culinary traditions. One of the few things ever created that’s been equally favored by kings and peasants, beloved in its humblest form and at Michelin restaurants. But while so many cultures share this in common, what they don’t share is any kind of agreement about where it came from, how it started, and why it’s caught on in so many forms and in so many places. So today, well, we’re diving into one of the most complicated and controversial topics in global cuisine. Trying some of the world’s great dishes. Talking to master chefs from three different continents, and making our best attempt at doing something that’s never been done before—unraveling the incredible true story of the history of noodles. I picked the wrong day to wear my tightest jeans. (Laughs) (Title Cards)
In the last decade of the 13th century, just before Marco Polo was set to return home for the first time in twenty years, he was sailing along the southern coast of China on a diplomatic mission for the emperor Kublai Khan. His ship was running low on food, so needing provisions, he sent a young sailor to the shore. A few hours later, First Mate Spaghetti returned carrying baskets of something fascinating and exciting. Polo was so impressed he went ashore himself and learned the recipe, and when he finally made it back to Italy, he would bring with him the technique that created pasta. Now this story is not from Polo’s travelogue or any history book. It was actually from a pasta advertisement in the 1920s, published in a trade magazine and meant to promote an Italian-themed brand of spaghetti. And yet, this is now the story that’s most widely repeated as fact. Look, I get fact-checking was harder back then, but within a decade it was in books and articles and academic texts and even made it into a Marco Polo movie starring Gary Cooper.
But here’s the thing—you can almost understand how this could happen, because there was no other explanation for how the same thing seemed to come from everywhere. And it is the same thing, at least in recipe and technique, made by cooks in China and Italy. And Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of South America. The foundation for dishes as diverse as Dan Dan Mian and Spaghetti Bolognese. Vietnamese Pho and American Mac & Cheese. There’s Thai Khanom Jeen, Central Asian Lagman, and a thousand other dishes using a thousand types of noodles. You can find noodles stir-fried on street corners and sold in the world’s best restaurants. Described in ancient stories by Jews, Buddhists, and Catholics, and part of the cuisine from the island tropics to the highest villages in the Himalayas. They’re democratic—a food for everyone from Chinese emperors to Bedouin Nomads—but if they were not spread by Marco Polo, then what actually happened? The truth is the story of noodles is actually far more interesting than the common myth, with all respect to Mr. Macaroni. And while this is going to take us to pretty much every corner of the planet, there is always a beginning. So let’s start there. (Title Card)
About 4000 years ago, someone was making dinner at a campsite high up on the Tibetan plateau. The cook was a member of a nomadic tribe, but maybe not nomadic in the most common use of the word. Their people built towns and planted crops, but every few months they’d tear it all down and move to new grassland so their animals—horses, sheep and yaks—could find better grazing. They lived primarily on what they could grow, relying on grains that matured quickly since they were constantly starting again. And the fastest and most efficient was something called millet. This was their staple. It’s drought-resistant, suited for the dry Tibetan highlands, and flourished in the rich soil along the Yellow River.
Now at the time of this dinner the people of this vast landscape were from a culture known as the Qijia, whose ancestors had lived across the region since at least the fifth millennium BC, having migrated from the Caucuses through central Asia. The Qijia were famed potters; noted Bronze Age craftsmen, but their contributions to food were unknown until very recently, when the contents of this dinner would unexpectedly turn up perfectly preserved. In 2002 at a dig site in what today is China’s Qinghai Province, archeologists found evidence of an ancient earthquake, so intense that it opened a hole in the ground and was followed by a massive Yellow River flood. Together these two natural disasters sealed one of those elaborate Qijia bowls in perfect condition; a bowl that contained something immediately recognizable. So well preserved was this find that it almost looks as if it could be rehydrated and served today, a boiled dough made from milled, cut into 10 centimeter long strands. This would be the oldest noodles ever found, and it is in what today is China. But it’s important to mention that back then it wasn’t; and over the next 4000 years this part of the Plateau would be a part of countless kingdoms and empires. It would change hands back and forth between the Tibetans, the Uzbeks, Mongols, and Chinese before officially becoming a part of China as recently as the 18th century. So who gets credit for this invention is complicated.
Anyway, what is not complicated is what would happen next. When noodles show up again in the archeological record about a thousand years later, we find them downstream, further east along the Yellow River, showing up in so many dig sites that we know they’d become an essential part of every day cuisine. This would be the real start of the story of the spread of noodles; a place in China’s Gansu Province that is still today the namesake of perhaps the country’s most famous noodle dish. Lanzhou La Mian, from, of course, the city of Lanzhou. (Title Card) (Music Playing)
The sight of someone stretching noodles like this, accompanied by the smell of stock pots of beef seasoned with cinnamon—well, for people all across today’s China, it means it’s time for lunch. Today this dish is the domain of Gansu’s Hui Muslims, but their specialty has long gone mainstream. There are more than 100,000 Lanzhou La Mian—or Hand-Pulled Noodle—shops just in that country alone and more showing up overseas, like here in Bangkok, where the Chef, Mr. Zhao, arrived straight from Lanzhou city to teach his technique to local staff. (Subtitles on Screen) TO BLACK
Making noodles in the Lanzhou way is an ancient technique. It’s actually exactly the same way historians guess these were made 4,000 years ago. It requires no equipment at all, just an incredible amount of strength, patience, and practice. But even that’s not enough. If you try to make a dough just like this into noodles at home, you’re going to fail. It’s almost impossible with a standard dough of flour and water. But maybe the secret—the reason why the dough used for bread everywhere else was made into noodles along the northwest Yellow River—well, that’s because there’s a secret ingredient. An alkaline powder made from an endemic local plant; one that allows the dough to stretch. (Subtitles on Screen) (Music Playing)
It’s really toothsome. Like, you can probably tell just by looking at it that it doesn’t have the same texture as what you’d expect if you see—this looks like spaghetti if that’s your frame of reference, but it’s not, it’s really thick and chewy and springy. That’s the thing about pulling it the way that they do—and you see them beating it against the counter—all of that is just to work the gluten to get it to have this amazing texture. (Music Playing) Mmm. How many bowls of noodles do we have to eat today? Seven? Seven? (Laughs) Alright, well…I’m going to finish this anyway. (Title Card)
Alright. We’ve already talked about the oldest archeological evidence of noodles, but after those finds in Qinghai and Gansu, it would take another few hundred years before they show up anywhere else, and when that would happen, in the capital of the first Chinese Empire, well, the noodles had taken on a very different form. This time what we find were made not by stretching by hand; I mean, further from the Plateau there was no Penghui, but instead by the much simpler technique of making a bread dough then cutting or pinching off small pieces directly into boiling water. The name in old Chinese for this was “tangbing,” which literally translates to “soup bread.” And by the way, just like Lanzhou La Mian, this also still exists—and is sold across the northwest as “mian pianr”—or basically, sliced noodles. There was also a method of roughly cutting long strips of dough, a dish today called Biang Biang Mian, famous for it’s thick texture and also the most complicated character in the entire Chinese written language. Anyway, noodles in these forms would catch on in Xi’an—the seat of Chinese power—and from there, it wouldn’t take long before the idea of boiling dough in water would spread far and wide.
The years of the Han Dynasty, from about 200 BC to 200 AD, can be considered the glory days of the explosion of noodles across the country, especially in the northern regions where wheat was the primary staple and bread dough was already well known. As a unified Chinese culture began to take shape under the Han, noodles were very much a part of it, spreading from Xi’an to all major cities, each place making their own out of whatever they were using for flour. If you had flour, you made noodles, and that’s actually how we get the modern Chinese name—“mian”—the same character for both words. Mian was eaten across all social classes throughout China and as the Empire was expanding, fighting wars along the frontier, their army would be sustained with rations of noodles; in particular, according to ancient records, a hearty type of thick noodles made from millet or buckwheat. This dish, called Laomian, would spread across a vast stretch of East Asia through military conquest, and before long Laomian would become the Lagman of Central Asia and the Lo Mein of Guangdong and your neighborhood Chinese restaurant.
Now to make Laomian, the Han army would use available local supplies of wheat, buckwheat, or millet, but when they’d arrive in places that didn’t have any of those, they’d find a way to make due anyway. And that’s how more than 2000 years ago we see the first rice noodles; made by northerners sent to subdue the coastal south, and along the border with Southeast Asia. These rice noodles would, of course, come to define the cuisine in much of that region, leading to the stuff we know today from Chinese Changfen to Thailand’s Pad Thai to Vietnamese Pho. But I do need to point out that these rice noodles weren’t actually the first ever made; there was already an ethnic group based in what’s now Myanmar who’d been making their version for generations. Now I won’t spend too much time on that story because we covered it already in our video about rice. But the very short version is it was called Hanom Cin, a specialty of the Mon people, who made their noodles by extruding a dough made of rice into boiling water. They’d bring Hanom Cin to Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and as far away as Sri Lanka and Southern India; and today it’s still the basis of things like Khanom Jeen, Mohinga, and the Tamil Idiyappam. This was an ancient noodle that took a separate track from the Chinese soup bread, but the crazy thing is if you go back far enough, they probably had the same point of origin. See, the Mon People—before they settled Southeast Asia—well, according to genetic research, they came from the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau, in, of course, what’s now Qinghai province, following the river lands south, while their cousins headed east, both adapting their own noodle techniques to available ingredients. So if we put the pieces together, you could say that all of the noodles that today make up East and South Asian cuisine quite possibly trace their roots back to whoever made that first bowl of noodles, high up on the Tibetan plateau. So even though we have a long way to go—before we look to the west—let’s take a quick trip to the shadows of the Himalayas to find out what is still made there today; the noodles still beloved by the descendants of the people who made that very first dish. (Title Card) (Music Playing)
Alright, Thukpa—the noodle soup of the Himalayas. Tibet, which is what this restaurant is serving the cuisine of, but also—sorry, I almost hit you in the face!—Nepal and Bhutan, where this is one of the national dishes, and also the Northeast of India where you’ll also find versions of Thukpa. Today you don’t see the noodles made from millet quite as often; barley is the—the—staple grain of the Tibetan plateau, and that’s why I also ordered this stuff, which is a little bit more recognizably Nepalese/Tibetan/Himalayan, the legendary momos, and this, which is called tingmo, which is a steamed Tibetan bread, and Daria asked me what’s inside, and I don’t know, I just picked something off the menu. And the answer is…nothing! (Music Playing)
Here’s the thing about Thukpa. It’s a word that basically means noodle soup. Not basically, it’s a word that means noodle soup. So you look at this and you say, oh, that doesn’t look like the oldest versions that you’ll find if you’re traveling in the Himalayas, true, but by definition this is Thukpa, and the only real difference is that this is the version that is most well-known today and what people from Tibet and Nepal who’d come into this restaurant want. (Music Playing)
Alright. Let’s go back to the 2nd century BC. The Han Dynasty is in control of a rapidly expanding China, and while their conquests would stop just to the east of the Tibetan Plateau, their reach would extend as far as the other side of the known world thanks to the diplomatic missions of a man named Zhang Qian. Now Zhang was a military officer, one of those responsible for spreading Laomian to the Chinese borderlands on the path of conquest. But during one of those battles, he was captured and taken into slavery for the next thirteen years, deep in Central Asia in what’s now Tajikistan. Anyway, long story short, when he finally escaped he returned to Xi’an and explained to the Han Emperor that the vast lands to the west were not—as the Chinese had believed—a barbarian wilderness, but actually the home to thriving and advanced civilizations. So Zhang was sent away again, this time as a diplomat, where he’d travel with a large royal envoy from kingdom to kingdom, making contact with the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Indians, and establishing a network of trade and commerce that today we call the Silk Road.
Now it would stand to reason that since we know Zhang himself had been a part of introducing noodles to the border regions as a military officer, he probably brought them along while he explored to the west as well. Which is another common story as to how noodles first arrived in Europe. Except there’s one problem with this theory. Which is that by the time of the Silk Road—hell, before the first Lan Zhou La Mian—well, we find evidence of the very same stuff 7,000 kilometers away, made by another civilization altogether. Which means if we want to understand the real story, we need to start again from the very beginning. (Title Card)
It’s the year 1000 BC, and the Greek Empire is just beginning to take shape, 200 years before Homer and 700 prior to the conquests of Alexander the Great. At the time, Hellenistic society was more a collective of warring states in the middle of an era called the Greek Dark Ages, with a changing culture and a new written language absorbed from the Phoenicians. And in some of that earliest writing, well, we find record of a dough made of flour and water rolled out into sheets and baked with vegetables. It was called Laganon, a name and meal that still survives today. And speaking of names, the dough they were using had one, too. It was called paste’. Now this is not a guess and it’s not a minor footnote of history, paste’ was a major component of the Dark Age Greek diet, left in the tombs of the wealthy alongside jugs of wine. And by the time of the rise of the Empire, we even know it was being served in noodle form, thanks, of course, to mythology, with Hephaestus, the son of Zeus, credited with inventing a tool to cut paste’ into string-like shapes.
In the 5th century BC, at the same time as Lanzhou La Mian first shows up on the other side of the world, the Greek playwright Euripedes premiered a story about a woman named Macaria volunteering herself for sacrifice to help Athens survive a brutal war. This was said to inspire a dish made from barley flour named in her honor and served at funerals, something called Makaria, another word that continues to the present. As the Greek Empire expanded, settlers ventured west in boats along the Mediterranean, sailing south of Sicily and building villages along the west coast of Italy, with their first mainland colony the city of Cumae, just outside today’s Naples. In Cumae and neighboring settlements, the Greeks began to trade influence with the local people, a group called the Etruscans; with artwork from as far back as 400 BC showing the process of rolling and forming pasta. And while the next 300 years of written history focuses more on the wars and battles that built a new Empire based in Rome, by the time we reach the first century BC, just as the Han Dynasty was introducing Laomian across China, pasta was spreading just as fast through Roman society. The Poet Horace, to show that he was a man of the people, wrote that every day he’d come home to enjoy a meal of laganum—the adapted name from Greek Laganon—served in a soup with leeks and peas. And Cicero, the famous Roman statesman, wrote of his own love for consuming pasta—in fact complaining of stomachaches from being unable to stop himself from eating too much. Which honestly reminds me of my own first trip to Italy, and is a perfect segue to the next part of this story, and more importantly, to our next meal. (Title Card) (Music Playing)
Welcome to heaven. Or at least this city’s best place for homemade Italian-style pasta. It’s a restaurant called La Dotta—an old nickname from the city of Bologna meaning “master.” Here, the master is a Chef named Francesco, who invited us not just to try some of his recipes, but to learn how Italian pasta has been made since the days of Rome. (Music Playing) (Subtitles on Screen) (Music Playing) (Subtitles on Screen) (Music Playing) (Subtitles on Screen)
I mean, how possibly see this and not get excited? Beautiful. One thing that I think is really interesting about pasta is that if you look into food history, there are a lot of things that were commoner dishes that eventually became accepted by everybody, and there are other dishes that were only served in royal palaces that maybe, in the 1800s or 1900s, you see start to filter out to the people. And then you have pasta, and there are very few other things that I can think of anywhere in the world that have always, since the beginning of time, at least as far back as we can find, been accepted by anybody. It doesn’t matter your social class—you can be the wealthiest family to the most humble peasants, pasta was the one thing that would connect different classes. Is that fair to say? (Subtitles on Screen)
Ok. Boris, who’s behind the camera, I promise you I’m going to be as fast as I can to give you tasting notes on these so you don’t have to sit here and just watch me. Daria—just sit. I know you—you haven’t had lunch yet, I’m on my, I don’t know, I’ve had a couple meals already. Been in Thailand so long I’m used to using the fork and spoon! Please, feel free. (Music Playing) (Title Card)
The pasta that would spread from Ancient Greece would, of course, become forever associated with Italy and Italian culture. And that’s fair; while the Greeks might have created their version of the technique, the Italians perfected the art form and made it their national cuisine. But this was not the Greeks’ only pasta legacy. Among the foods of the early Greek Empire, one of the most well-known was a snack called Itrion. Made from honey and sesame, deep fried in oil and given to Hoplite soldiers as what’s often called an ancient energy bar. Itrion is widely recorded, and a recipe still well known today. But what isn’t as well known is that oil was extremely expensive and after only a short amount of time, Itrion would change into something else entirely—with the dough boiled instead of fried, served still with honey along with other sweet toppings. And just like any other pasta, the name would change to the plural form, with Itrion becoming Itriya. And this is very important because by the turn of the millennium, we see the word Itriya suddenly appear in a lot of surprising places. It was first recorded in Aramaic, the language of the Holy Land, referred to in the Jerusalem Talmud as a dish of boiled noodles. Itriya would also be the name of an Arab dish from around the same time, a pasta with cinnamon and raisins. The name of that dish, by the way, would quickly become the more-Arabic-sounding Al-Itriryya, which we see in ancient Syria describing thin noodles like vermicelli. The Arabs would spread the dish and the name wherever they would fight or trade—North Africa, the Middle East, and even as far as the Iberian Peninsula, where in Portugal, to this day, the word for a sweet pasta dish is Aletria.
Now the Arabs might not be as well-known for contributions to noodle culture as the Chinese or the Italians, but they would actually provide two innovations that rank among the most important throughout noodle history. The first was the use of Durum as flour, a grain native to North Africa and long used by a people called the Berbers, who were conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century, right before the Arabs would also take control of the island of Sicily. Durum, brought from Africa by the Arabs to Italy, would quickly become the most essential component in pasta—today known by the name of Semolina. And second, as Arabic traders along the Silk Road made long journeys through the hot desert, they developed a technique that would change food forever; the first-ever method for drying pasta for preservation. Now what this actually meant was that even though the Chinese created the Silk Road, the noodles that were spread throughout its cities were brought not from China but from the Middle East, using Italian techniques derived from the Greeks made from flour endemic to North Africa. Anyway, the dried noodles carried by Arab traders primarily took on two forms; long flat strips not unlike today’s fettuccini, and maybe most fascinating, as hollow cylinders, which is thought to be the origins of what we now call Penne. They would also pioneer another shape of pasta, this time created in Sicily during the years of occupation. This was made into small ovals, like grains of rice, known today as Orzo.
Today throughout the Muslim world, noodles might not be as famous as staples like flatbread and meals based on rice, but they are still there—one of the oldest surviving relics of the region’s ancient cuisine. Almost country-by-country there’s a noodle dish with a storied history, from Syria’s Roqaq o Adas, to the Lebanese Bedouin Rishta made with noodles and lentils. There’s the Beshbarmak of Muslim Central Asia, and from what’s now Iran, a Persian staple that first appears in the record just as pasta began to spread along the Silk Road. It’s one of the oldest noodle dishes found anywhere—a delicacy called Ash Reshteh—and that brings us to our next meal. (Title Card) (Music Playing)
I have this—sometimes I feel bad that we ask somebody, “Do you mind if we film here?” And my way of getting around that and not feeling so guilty is by over-ordering to show that we’re supporting the restaurant. We have, like—we still have—we still have a lot of food left to go. Man, this is—I’ve never had this before, I am so excited. (Music Playing) This—it’s unbelievable how good this is. Um, man, that tastes—how do I describe this? That tastes almost like…that’s not anything like anything else we’ve tried today. (Music Playing) Yeah, it’s like a springy wheat noodle in a soup that’s thick, it almost tastes like there’s some kind of dill, there’s pickled—I don’t know if it’s mustard greens, I’m clueless about this, this is such a completely different flavor profile for me. It’s somehow bright, a little bit acidic from the pickling, but it still has that depth of flavor and heartiness from all the different kinds of beans and, of course, the wheat noodles in this…mmm. It’s wild how good that is. So this comes with four sides that are meant to be mixed in. There’s a mint oil, there’s fried garlic, fried shallots, and this, which I’m going to try by itself—the chef told us it’s made from goat milk. Oooh! (Laughing) I don’t know how to describe any of this! (Music Playing)
Title Card - By the 8th century AD, dried pasta spread by the Arabs had become dominant along the Silk Road, with the Chinese still hundreds of years away from discovering their own method of that technique. But that doesn’t mean that Chinese “Mian” wasn’t also spreading abroad as well; in fact, this time period can be considered perhaps the second golden age of the expansion of China’s version of noodles. But not because of trade. This time, the trigger was religion.
Now to tell this story, we need to start by going back one more time to the days of the Han Dynasty—and specifically the imperial court of the same man who sent Zhang Qian on that Silk Road mission all those years ago. The Emperor Wu. Now Wu was regarded as a tremendous leader; investing in arts and music, and establishing a groundbreaking code of laws. He was also a devout follower of Confucian teachings and said to be deeply superstitious. Among his beliefs was that you could tell how long a person would live by the size of their face, with a longer face indicative of a better lifespan. But Emperor Wu had a problem, which was that he himself had a depressingly normal-sized face, so he needed to find a way to change his destiny. Now in Chinese, the word for face is “mian,” which, as you’ll remember, is exactly the same as the word for “noodle,” with just a slight difference in the written character. So if Wu couldn’t have a long face, he’d ask his cooks to prepare impossibly long noodles for him to eat. Now this might sound crazy, but here’s the thing—the guy ended up ruling for 54 years, a record that would last until the 17th century. So his superstition went mainstream. Now, did this actually happen? Who knows. The story itself wouldn’t be recorded in writing until the Tang Dynasty, and it wasn’t the only similar account published at that time. There’s also a story about the Tang Emperor Xuanzong, whose most valued possession was a robe made of purple silk, which he traded in exchange for a magic bowl of noodles—or, rather, noodle—and that’s why not only would he rule for 44 years, but for a while seemed almost invincible—outlasting two attempted coups and a massive rebellion. Either way, by the 8th century AD, all across China, people were slurping up bowls of Shou Mian, or Longevity Noodles.
And the 8th century is also when something else would happen that would change China forever: the spread of Buddhism throughout the empire. Now we’ve covered this topic before on the channel, but as monks began to fan out across the region, we’d see the beginning of a new category of Chinese food, what we now call Jay or Buddhist Cuisine. This would be the genesis of things like Soy Sauce and tofu, and thanks to their association with a long life, noodles would become an important addition to a monk’s diet. It was through the spread of religion that we find the first evidence of noodles introduced to the Philippines; what we now call Pancit. To Korea; a dish known as Gugsu. And to Japan, which is where we find the next part of our story—and perhaps the epicenter of noodle mythology.
Now I’ll make this quick, but basically this involves a man known as Bodhisena, born in India in the year 704. A devout Buddhist, in his early 20s he received a revelation that he was to travel to China to meet the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva Manjusri. So he set off, traveling for three years to the sacred mountain of Wutai where he was told, “Sorry, wrong country, you’ll actually need to go to Japan.” Now not all was lost for young Bodhisena. See, this was, again, the years of the Tang Dynasty and Buddhism was sweeping across the kingdom, so the arrival of a scholar from India was met with celebration, and a spot in China’s imperial court. After several years teaching Sanskrit to the Tang Royal Family and learning Chinese Buddhist traditions, Bodhisena would finally get back to his mission, hitching a ride on a boat to Japan, where he’d disembark at Osaka and immediately recognize the man he was seeking; the reincarnation of Manjusri, personified by a local man named Gyoki. Well, this would immediately be brought to the attention of the Emperor Shomu, who was so impressed that he converted from Shinto to Buddhism and granted Bodhisena the highest of honors and a home at Daian-Ji, which still stands today. Bodhisena would spend the rest of his life in Japan, holding so much influence that today he’s considered the father of the Japanese written language, the Katakana alphabet, created by his disciples and based on Sanskrit. And of course, he’s also known as the father of Japanese noodles, which he introduced using the name from the Chinese palace in Xi’an; the same version we tried at the start of this video. La Mian. Pronounced in Japanese, of course, as ramen. Anyway, given the direct association between Ramen Noodles and Buddhist philosophy, the Japanese would treat this dish with the highest form of respect; a delicacy and elegance befitting a food of the Gods. (Title Cards) (Music Playing)
Alright, I want to tell a quick story about this place. This is No Name Noodle, a hidden speakeasy in a strip mall near the Rama 4 Highway. It opened about two years ago, serving exactly 35 bowls of Chef Shin’s perfect ramen each day—no more, no less—to some of the luckiest customers in Bangkok. Reservations are taken each morning at 9 AM, and getting through to reception became the Holy Grail of local foodies. I think I called 500 times—and that’s not an exaggeration—before I finally managed to land two of those coveted counter seats and some of the best noodles anywhere. And today we’re not just here again, but we have the whole place to ourselves! Invited to try a few of Chef’s specialties at the end of the day’s service. (Music Playing) (Subtitles on Screen) (Music Playing) (Subtitles on Screen) (Music Playing)
Yeah—what a treat this is to be sitting here. I mean, again, I’m the only one here in this restaurant right now, except the staff, and Boris. And this is like—do you guys mind if I sleep here tonight? Is that ok? (Music Playing) You wish you were me right now. (Title Card)
Alright. As society reached the Middle Ages, the spread of noodles throughout the old world was almost complete. From the Tibetan Plateau, Thukpa had reached Nepal, Bhutan, and Northeast India. Hanom Cin was a staple throughout the Eastern tropics. Rice Noodles had spread as far as Indonesia, Chinese Mian was consumed from Japan all the way to Central Asia, and Arabic traders had spread Italian pasta from Spain to Turkey. And finally, well, believe it or not, this actually brings us to Marco Polo. Now if you’ve been watching since the beginning, you most likely understand how ridiculous the suggestion is that Polo was the one to teach Europeans about noodles. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still factor into this story, as he did, as a matter of fact, mention a discovery of noodles along his travels, but not in the way that’s been widely reported. What he spoke of was finding pasta made from something called “farina di alberi,” or flour from trees, while visiting the island of Sumatra. What he described is something that was unknown abroad; a method of making noodles from the starchy part of breadfruit, a technique that appears to have no connection to anything else we’ve previously mentioned in this story.
Which brings up a very important point. The noodles that we know today exist almost everywhere thanks to dominant civilizations who built empires based on trade; the Chinese, Romans, and Arabs. But who’s to say that other societies didn’t also develop their own forms of noodles independently, like what Marco Polo might have encountered in the Indonesian islands? Let’s remember, after all, that in their most basic form, noodles are just bread, boiled instead of baked. Theoretically, anyone who was making flour could have come up with their own form of noodles, and pretty much everyone was making flour. It’s become a growing theory among historians that before the Qijia or the Greeks, the Ancient Egyptians might very well have had their own form of pasta. The basis of this idea is that since Egypt had discovered the technique of adding yeast to bread as far back as 6000 years ago, it would seem logical that archeology would show a shift to this new style. Except it doesn’t—and we see evidence of a simple dough of flour and water remaining widespread. Sometimes we even find both kinds of dough, leavened and unleavened, prepared side-by-side. So maybe that other dough was used for another purpose.
Now that is just a guess—but what isn’t a guess is that to Egypt’s west, there was a culture that did create their own form of pasta and just like the Sumatrans, it also seems to have evolved completely independently from the famous points of origin. For this we go to the country of Algeria, all the way back in the days of the Numidian Kingdom around the 3rd century BC. That’s when we find the first evidence of a dish made by mixing water with semolina—creating essentially tiny bits of pasta that would then be steamed or boiled. That technique—completely unique to North Africa—would be given the Berber name of couscous. Now if we assume that all of the noodles of today’s Asian countries come from that first creation on the Tibetan Plateau, and everything in the West and along the Silk Road started with the Laganon of the Ancient Greeks, then Couscous is actually incredibly important in this story because it might be the only pasta surviving today that evolved separately from either of those two points of origin. And while I’m not an expert—hell, most of my life I figured it was some kind of plant—fortunately, one of my very good friends just happens to be one of the world’s most renowned Cous Cous masters; a two-time finalist in the World Cup of Couscous—yes, that’s actually a thing—as the official representative of the country of Morocco. (Title Card)
For a Moroccan, Couscous is a dish that we eat, couscous is a grain, it’s two things—and couscous is a cultural time, because we only eat couscous Friday at lunch. That is the only time you’ll find a couscous in Morocco outside of maybe a wedding. Couscous is for Friday at lunch, when all the family gets together in the matriarch’s house. Because you don’t make couscous for a person, you make it for the tribe. You sit down, kind of like Italians have grandma’s pasta after the church on Sunday morning, Moroccans and Arabs have couscous after the Mosque on Friday lunch. The making of cous cous, like any other noodle, starts with, of course, flour. And not just any flour, but semolina—the same variety introduced from North Africa to Sicily. And Chef Badr himself is actually today based in Sicily, where he cooks his ancestral pasta next to restaurants serving something that looks very different—but is, surprisingly, made with almost the exact same technique. I grew up in the cities, so we made it more of an industrial way. You go to the shop, and you buy couscous, the grain, that’s already been finely—much finer, let’s say, size grain that you work with steam for two hours. You take the grains, you put them in what’s called the Gassar, which is a huge terracotta plate, and you start sprinkling some hot water and oil. And you rub it in your hands. You do that for about twenty minutes until every single freaking grain is coated with some sort of fat, usually a type of ghee, or modernly more olive oil because people have started to be more health conscious, and ghee has a tendency to clog arteries in heavy quantities. Then it’s put back in the couscoussier, the steamer, this grain steamer for twenty minutes. You take it back out, and you redo the process. You can do it up to six times before the couscous is ready to eat. At the same time, what you’re steaming it with is not water, you’re steaming it with the broth that has vegetables, meat, and everything in it. And when you’re done, when everything is ready, you take this beautiful couscous, you butter it again or you oil it again one more time. You put it on this gigantic plate, and then you scoop amounts of broth, meat, vegetables on top of it, and you bring it to the table.
So if you, then, are describing a process that involves taking flour, in this case semolina, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, and then adding a fat to that and steaming it, that, to me, sounds like a pasta. At least, in the definition of what it is, if we’re in such a broad category, would you agree with that characterization? Absolutely, and I think that there’s already been a debate about this for a while. People say, in pasta, you knead things, well in couscous you work it with your hands. What is kneading? It’s developing the gluten inside the pasta. Kneading is developing the grain. So there is the hand effort. Industrial couscous that you buy is just like the industrial pasta that you buy—you didn’t go and knead it inside your house, when you could have; you didn’t take the semolina, the pure semolina and water it, and just like that—so yeah, in pasta, or what is called pasta, or noodles, you have more kneading; and even then, you can argue that in some parts, some noodle making techniques or pasta making techniques do not involve kneading. Is couscous a pasta, is pasta a couscous? They are cousins. They’re both products of grain at the end of the day, that involve hot water. So we already have three things that are in common. It’s a grain, it needs hot water, and it needs some sort of labor to get it going. (Title Card)
As society reached the years of the Columbian Exchange, two hundred years after Marco Polo’s journey, the noodles that had spread through the Arabs and the Chinese would adapt and evolve, as the world became smaller. Of course, there were the obvious changes, with chili peppers introduced to Asia and tomatoes to Italy. But that was just the beginning. As dried pasta, previously the domain of silk-road travelers, became valuable to sailors on long ocean journeys, factories sprung up across coastal Europe, in the Iberian harbors of Portugal and Spain; with Spanish soldiers responsible for bringing their own form of noodle soup, Sopa de Fideo, to Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines as far back as the 1500s. But it wasn’t just the colonists who spread their dishes during that time. With the growth of European trading ports in Asia, Chinese merchants arrived en masse, most notably from the province of Fujian—which is how we find things like Hokkien Mee in Malaysia, Singapore, and Phuket. And as these trading ports absorbed influences from everywhere, we see the emergence of fusion dishes like Laksa, blending Chinese noodles with Indian Curry and Persian spices in Peranakan households along the Strait of Malacca. And right here in Thailand, the first noodles not based on Mon Hanom Cin—a dish called Kway Teow, brought by the Hokkien to the Siamese hub of Ayutthaya. By the end of the 16th century noodles were being spread along the water by the Chinese, Malays, Spanish, and Portuguese but somehow lost in all of this was the ancient and revered tradition of Italian pasta—which incredibly had remained a well-kept secret since the Arabs took control of the Silk Road trade. For a thousand years—things like spaghetti, fettuccini and the old-school lasagna confined to family homes, while the dishes they so long ago inspired became famous across the oceans. But that was about to change. (Title Card)
In the year 1613 a British man named Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel, set out with his family on a cultural journey across Europe. Along with a guide they traveled from Dover, on the southern coast of England, to visit the high society palaces and art museums of France, Belgium, and Germany, working their way through the Alps and spending the next twelve months gallivanting across Italy. This trip would be recorded in writing and would spark something of a sensation, and for the next 200 years, following this path would be a rite-of-passage for any affluent young man or woman from England, and later from much of Western Europe. It would come to be known as the Grand Tour, a must-do for anyone with rank and ambition. And the focus was on appreciating the sites of the Renaissance and gaining an understanding of all things Italian. Grand Tourists would be accompanied by an Italian-speaking guide, known as a Cicerone, named after the great Roman orator who we already mentioned as one of history’s most well-known lovers of pasta. King Gustav III of Sweden would make this trip. So would Lord Byron and many others of prominence.
Now as you might imagine, when floods of young adults traveled to a far-off land, this trip would soon become known less for culture than for debauchery, with Grand Tourists by the 18th century derided as drunken lushes who didn’t so much appreciate classical art and music as much as spending their year drowning themselves in Italian wine and pasta. The young rich would be given the nickname of “Macaroni,” a term also applied to the rebellious hairstyles of the day that really ticked off the old people. But while the tradition of the Grand Tour would finally end with the advent of railroads, the most significant lasting legacy would be the affinity gained by wealthy Europeans for the food of Italy. The years of this expedition would see Italian-style pasta spread to all corners of the continent—incorporated into local cuisines and taking on new flavors and ingredients. And this would also impact the other side of the Atlantic, where Thomas Jefferson in 1789 returned to America from France carrying the country’s first pasta-rolling machine.
It’s also the time period that would see noodles get their modern name—as you’ve probably noticed that until this point in the story the only person saying that word has been me, with the Chinese, Italian, Arabic, Mon, Southeast Asian, North African and Himalayan cooks we’ve covered all using their own terminology for dough cooked in water. The word “noodle” in this context first appears in Germany in the mid-1700s, during the heyday of the Grand Tour. It was already a German term, referencing dumplings or bits of dough boiled in water like, for example, the Swabian delicacy of Spaetzle, which by the way—is, like couscous, also a pasta most likely developed independently. But anyway, as Italian pasta became common across the rest of Europe, with no other local word to describe this new imported dish, the Germans lumped it in with Spaetzle and started calling it “nudel”—…and thus was born the term. But it didn’t catch on immediately outside Germany. That wouldn’t happen until the early 20th century, within the German immigrant communities in America, where the word became common in American English and returned to the UK with British travelers. Anyway. This finally brings us into the modern era, and the 20th century is where we find both our last story and our last meal of the day. (Title Card)
It’s 1945 in post-World War II Japan and a businessman named Momofuku Ando is taking a walk through the ruins of the bombed-out streets of Osaka. He sees a line of people waiting for bowls of ramen; one of the only forms of sustenance available to a population ravaged by unimaginable devastation. So Ando thought to himself, “I need to find a way to cure world hunger. After all, if nobody’s starving, there will always be peace.” This, of course, is the canon of instant noodles; the legendary origin story commemorated in multiple museums and countless works of hagiography. And this makes sense because his invention would, indeed, change the world, with more than a hundred billion portions now sold each year and a Japanese survey ranking Instant Ramen as the most important invention of the 20th century—ahead of things like televisions and the internet. But this is a history video and so with all respect to Mr. Ando, the well-known story—like the one about Marco Polo—well, it has some problems. So let’s start at the beginning. First—Momofuku Ando was not Japanese, he was born Go Pek-Hok to a Hokkien family in Taiwan in 1910. From an early age he was an entrepreneur, starting his first business as a teenager producing textiles, then moving to Osaka in 1933 and doing it again. Before the outbreak of war, he’d dabble in various ventures; producing charcoal, packaging salt, and manufacturing something—and I have no idea what this is—called magic lantern projectors. The story of how he saw a need for fast and convenient noodles in the aftermath of the bombings was true, but he didn’t immediately get to work, primarily because shortly thereafter he went to prison—convicted of tax evasion and serving time until 1950. When he was released, he took a job working for a bank, before getting fired when the bank collapsed in 1957.
And with nothing else to do, isolating himself in a shed behind his Osaka house and finally starting his experimentation with how to package dehydrated noodles. He settled on a technique of flash-frying wheat noodles in oil, using a method of curling the noodles for more efficient storage, invented earlier in the decade elsewhere in Japan.
Anyway, he’d perfect his new creation and begin to sell it in 1958, under the brand of Nissin Foods, the company he’d long ago founded as a salt distributor. But they weren’t an immediate hit. The noodles did extend the shelf life of Japan’s beloved ramen, but the production process raised the cost so high that they were sold not to combat hunger, but as a luxury item, for more than six times the price of a bowl on the street.
Still, he kept working. By the middle of the 1960’s, Go Pek-Hok—now a Japanese citizen using his wife’s family name—had succeeded in lowering prices enough that sales began to increase, especially once they were exported to the United States. On a visit to America, Ando watched how local people were eating his creation and saw that workers in a grocery store were breaking the dried noodles in half, putting them into coffee cups and pouring hot water over the top.
This would be the inspiration Ando would need, and so on his return to Japan he set to work developing an all-in-one package, which would be released in 1971 under the name Cup Noodles. And from then on, it was a rocket-ship to the big time. Instant Noodles would become the staple food of college kids studying in American dorm rooms. It would be consumed by countless workers on job sites across China, Japan, and Indonesia, with South Koreans eating the most per capita at 75 servings per person per year, followed closely by Vietnam and Nepal.
Countless brands would follow Nissin into the market, though Mr. Ando’s company continues to dominate global sales to the present, and the man himself—well, he’d live to the age of 96, attributing his own longevity to eating a bowl of instant ramen every single day. And whatever his real intentions when starting his company, his supposed goal of eradicating world hunger would actually come closer to reality than you might think, as his instant noodles are now the first thing typically handed out in refugee camps and following catastrophes and natural disasters—a shelf-stable and ready-to-eat meal that’s affordable and has a flavor that suits just about every palate.
(Title Card) (Music Playing)
If your question is, looking at this, what am I most in the mood for? The answer is none of them. We have been eating all day (laughing), and finishing some of the best noodles in the world with a bowl of instant noodles feels a little bit wrong, but somehow that is the story that we’re telling and I will take one for the team.
(Music Playing) Fishcakes…and so this is the Japanese Hokkaido Miso Tonkatsu flavor. From the Nissin, the company that started it all. Do I want this right now? I do not. Uh, let’s get some chives, that counts, alright, good enough. Boris, you want a drink?
(Music Playing) I’m completely overwhelmed. So, I was trying to keep up with this, and I’m like, no! It just went past number 1! Cooking method is listed right here. When this place opened, they used to have staff here to idiot-proof it for people like me; I guess they think that that’s not necessary. I—alright, step one, put food in the bowl. Step two—recognize bar code attached to the bowl.
(Music Playing) Is there a secret to opening this? Scissors!
(Music Playing) No. Didn’t scan it? Ok. Ok, thank you. Start cooking? The time for cooking is here. Thank you. I’m a professional chef!
(Music Playing) What a jerk I would be if I start nitpicking—"oh, the noodles are a little bit, I wish they were more al dente." Like, you don’t nitpick this, this is survival food. And it’s one of the greatest survival foods that’s ever, ever, ever been created. Mmm. I am really full. Not survival food for me. It’s whatever the opposite of that would be.
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In the 10th century AD, when Chinese cities under the Song Dynasty introduced the world’s first night markets, vendors quickly realized that one dish in particular resonated with customers who came by for a quick meal after a long day of work, or just to socialize; to hang out and have a good time. Noodles—not served with elegant preparation or in elaborate stews but heaped out with things like wontons and spring onions—would become what we can today consider the world’s first mainstream street food.
A little bit more than a thousand years later, I found myself on a flight to Hong Kong. It would be an understatement to say I was panicking. I’ll never forget what it was like on that plane, thinking about everything that could go wrong. I was supposed to land around 10 and then somehow in this crazy far-away place, find my way to the Shenzhen border where I’d meet my girlfriend at the time, who was spending a year abroad teaching English. The border back then closed at midnight, and I had all these thoughts about what would happen if I couldn’t get there, if the driver couldn’t understand me or I got lost and I might be stuck forever; like, I actually imagined myself just spending the rest of my life lost on the streets of Hong Kong.
But yeah, anyway, I made it to the border, heavy backpack and massive jetlag and just completely thrown and overwhelmed by where I was, and so just to kind of wrap my mind around the fact that I was in China, we took a walk around my girlfriend’s neighborhood. There was a vendor on a sidewalk stir-frying something so we ordered a plate of noodles, and I remember sitting on a curb with a plastic plate of my first-ever meal in Asia and it was like—this is it. I’m here. I made it. I think somehow right at that moment over a plate of street food noodles, I already knew I wasn’t going to go home like I planned three weeks later.
That was fifteen years ago. Whether it’s my own experience with finding stir-fried chao mian with that perfect Wok Hei on the streets of southern China, Anthony Bourdain falling in love with pho on his first visit to Vietnam or the old European aristocrats getting hooked on pasta on their Grand Tours of Italy…there’s something about noodles that’s so much more than a simple dough of flour and water. It’s a platform for the ingenuity of local cooks; a showcase for some of the best flavors humanity’s managed to come up with.
From Malaysian Curry Laksa to Xinjiang Dapanji, spaghetti with pesto to that big tray of mac and cheese, noodles tell us the story of where we are—the people who’ve come before us and who laid the groundwork for today’s culinary culture. So as we finish this video, since we are here in Thailand and our path for the last hour has taken us all the way around the world, I might as well finish with a plate of this country’s iconic national dish. Pad Thai—created in the 1940s based on a 19th century Thai classic—itself using rice noodles long ago brought from Qinghai to Lanzhou, Lanzhou to Xi’an, Xi’an to the southern border and eventually to Southeast Asia.
And by now I’m just continuing to talk to prolong the inevitable because I’ve officially reached my eating limit—but as anyone’ll tell you, there’s always room for one more bowl of noodles. So long.
(Title Cards) Subscribe to the channel for more from OTR. Thank you so much to everyone who supports us on Patreon, it’s a massive help to keep us going. Find links below to our Patreon and social media and we’ll see you next time. Let’s try this. I can’t just ignore this, it’s just sitting here looking at me. I don’t need this, I’m just going to take most of this home or give this to Boris to take home. Well, maybe not. I’m in trouble.