History of Noodles I

History of Noodles I
Noodles are strips or strands cut from a sheet of dough made of flour, water and either common salt or a mixture of alkaline salts.

They are one of the main staple foods consumed in East and Southeast Asian countries, representing up to 40% of total flour consumption.

It is believed that noodles originated in the north of China as early as 5000 BC, but their essential modern day form has developed over the last 2000 years.

Present day noodles were a unique contribution by the Han Dynasty (206 B to 220 AD) to Chinese culinary art.

The development of noodle foods in the Han period seemingly can be explained by the fact that techniques for large scale flour milling were introduced to China from the West during the latter part of the earlier Han Dynasty as a result of the Han expansion.

Han ingenuity in experimenting with such common food materials, combined with the willingness to incorporate technology from other cultures, led to the emergence of an eventually dominant new product in Chinese culinary history.

The writer Shu Hsi in the Western Jin Dynasty (late third and early fourth centuries) noted that the various kinds of noodles “were mainly the invention of the common people, whole some of the cooking methods come from foreign lands.”
History of Noodles I