On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  Unlike the ear-shaped pastas of Puglia, which consisted simply of flour (mostly semolina, thicker than durum wheat) and water, the pastas of Emilia-Romagna invariably contained eggs, giving them a thicker body and richer flavor. Locals raised a certain type of hen whose eggs had especially yellow yolks that nicely tinted and flavored the pasta. The flour was also important—the sfogline used “doppio zero” flour, a super-refined white variety with no equivalent elsewhere. One afternoon later in the trip, when I made Chinese dumplings for an Italian family, I was stunned by the light, feathery texture this silky flour gave the wrappers—and they crisped to perfection when I pan-fried them. (“Delizioso!” the husband said. “What do I call these if I want to order them in a Chinese restaurant? Ravioli fritti?”)

  Nadia combined half a dozen eggs, six hundred grams of flour, and pureed boiled spinach for color and extra flavor. She kneaded the dough on a tagliere, a flat wooden board that was as sacred as a wok was to a Chinese chef. “We never use soap to wash it. Only water,” she said. “The wood is a living thing. You will dry it out if you use soap.” Italy was the only place I’d visited where people described kitchen implements as having souls of their own.

  After the dough sat for half an hour, Nadia began rolling it out by hand with a fat rolling pin, preferring it over a pasta machine. “Rolling by hand is better because the pasta will be able to breathe,” Nadia explained. “If you use a machine, the air in the pasta is squeezed out.” She held up the sheet of dough. On close inspection, it had ridged little bumps formed by the tiny imperfections of the rolling pin and the tagliere. For comparison, she showed me what happened when the pasta went through the machine, an appliance as heavy as a typewriter. After feeding a gob of dough through it several times, she held up the sheet. It was slick and slippery, a little too perfect. “This pasta won’t hold the sauce as well. The sauce will just slip off,” she said.

  Nadia made a béchamel of butter, flour, and milk and began assembling the lasagna: she spread a small amount of the béchamel in the baking dish, then topped it with alternating layers of pasta, ragù, and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. She placed the dish in the oven, where it baked and bubbled, before she took it out and cut the lasagna into hearty squares. Though the sauce was rich and dense, the delicate spinach noodles kept the texture light. When I made lasagna at home, it was invariably a half-day affair, even with the aid of packaged lasagna noodles. Under Nadia’s skillful hands, it had taken a mere ninety minutes from scratch.

  From Valeria—the sfoglina who’d taken me to the Parmigiano-Reggiano factory—I learned that restraint was important. I sampled her pasta at her tiny bed-and-breakfast nestled high in the mountains overlooking a particularly breathtaking valley. The stone guesthouse, which dated back to the 1700s, had only three rooms and a dining room for ten. She’d made the tortellini the day before, stuffing them with ricotta, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and parsley. I watched her make the simplest of sauces to go with the filled pasta: she melted butter in a pan and added sage leaves. The herb infused the butter with a sweet, earthy fragrance. She added the tortellini to the pan, tossed them in the glistening sauce, and served them piping hot. A heavy sauce was overkill for filled pasta; after all, sauce was already wrapped in the pasta. And indeed, the sage butter worked its magic, letting the tortellini reach its full, mouthwatering potential. I demolished my portion, had a second helping, and fought the impulse to slip some into my pocket for the road. (Takeaway boxes were rare in Italy.)

  Luisa, a third sfoglina, taught me how to fold tortellini. She ran a bed-and-breakfast that featured a stuffed panther her husband had shot in Africa and a sprawling yard where pigs, ducks, and chickens roamed. She rolled out pasta dough made of eggs and flour and cut it into small squares of less than an inch—the same as the size of manti wrappers in Turkey. As with manti, she dotted each square with a dab of meat filling, this one made of a mince of cooked pork loin, prosciutto, mortadella, eggs, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. She grated in fresh nutmeg—a touch of the distant Orient. She and her assistants wrapped each small square, sealed it into a triangle, then clasped together its opposite corners, almost the same method as for chuchura in western China and manti in Turkey. As with the manti, tortellini making was very much a communal activity done among women.

  “We call this shape of pasta the ‘Venus belly button,’” Luisa said. And then, sending a chill up my spine, she spoke almost the exact words that Asli had said of manti: “A good tortellini maker can wrap them small enough to fit a dozen on a spoon. In the old days, daughters-in-law were judged by how well they could wrap tortellini.”

  Luisa boiled the tortellini in a simple chicken broth and served the two together. Asli had mentioned that Turks had a tradition of serving manti in broth. As I dipped my spoon into the soup, I wondered if tortellini and manti were actually one, a legacy of the Silk Road that had brought them, in various shapes and forms, all the way from China.

  • • •

  When Craig arrived in Emilia-Romagna, I was in the middle of making pasta with a sfoglina. When we’d parted ways in Turkey, he wasn’t sure if he would make it to Italy. I was so thrilled to see him that I covered his face in flour as we embraced. But when I pulled back, he had a look on his face that seemed to say, When will my wife be done with all the cooking?

  Craig and Italy were a little like oil and water. It wasn’t just the super-long meals that tried his patience. It was also the coffee. Elsewhere on the Silk Road, my caffeine-addicted husband had happily downed cup after cup of Nescafé. But instant coffee disappeared the moment you stepped into Italy, replaced by the ubiquitous cafés where baristas brewed coffee at expensive machines that forced steam through finely ground beans. Italians stood at the bar while they downed shots of espresso, and then, having had their morning dose of caffeine, left in a hurry to go about their day. This was antithetical to how Craig liked to drink coffee. Nescafé aside, he loved the American drip-style variety. When we weren’t traveling, every morning he brewed a giant pot of it and drank it leisurely at the breakfast table while reading. He liked it black—additions like steamed milk were too froufrou for him. He carried a tall commuter mug of black coffee wherever he went.

  On our previous visit to Italy, Craig had been ecstatic to find a McDonald’s in Rome, only to discover that the restaurant, just like the rest of Italy, didn’t have his drink. En route to Amalfi, he pulled over at a gas station mini-mart, hopeful that here at last he would find a dose bigger than a shot. My six-foot-tall husband returned holding a tiny disposable cup by its even smaller paper-wing handles.

  Tuscany did little to change Craig’s perspective on Italy. And I couldn’t help agreeing with him this time. We were bored in Florence, exhausted by the lines to see the Michelangelos and the overpriced, touristy restaurants. Admittedly, we enjoyed some good wine and stayed in a nice farmhouse in the countryside near Siena. But the rolling green fields reminded me of a gigantic golf course, Craig yearned for mountains, and after the great food I’d eaten elsewhere in Italy, the much-touted Florentine beefsteak was boring. I would have taken a hunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano with a splash of balsamic vinegar in Bologna’s romantic—and quiet—town square over Tuscany any day.

  And even as the journey’s end loomed, we still had no plans beyond our summer in Washington, DC. One evening in Tuscany, at a pizzeria—decent enough, but not up to Naples’ standards—we resumed our discussion of what we might do. The idea of working together on the cooking school came up again.

  I’d given the idea some thought, particularly as I’d seen quite a few husband-and-wife businesses on our travels, especially in Italy. Even the pizzeria where we were eating was such a partnership. The bald husband worked the cash register and checked on the pizzas while his attractive, pregnant wife, who looked at least a decade younger, waited tables. But so far, seeing couples who mixed their personal and professional lives hadn’t convinced me.

  “Oh hon, I don’t know if it wo
uld work,” I said. I could be a pain to work with. I was demanding. I was bossy.

  Craig knew all of this, of course—and he wasn’t even sure about the idea himself, he said. But he saw my unwillingness to consider the idea further as just another indication of my obstinacy. At least we should weigh all our options, he said.

  I looked over at the waitress. “Let’s ask her what she thinks about working with her husband,” I said.

  After I summoned her over, she took a breath before she answered. I waited smugly, certain she was about to launch into a tirade, a long list of complaints. Instead, she sighed. “It’s fabulous! Twenty-four hours a day we can be together.” Her husband joined her. “With love, you can do anything!” he proclaimed, touching her rounded belly.

  I was incredulous. Gimme a break. These guys must be joking! I grumbled. But then I caught the look on Craig’s face. He was incredulous at my incredulity, I realized. Was I so obstinate that I couldn’t accept that this couple enjoyed working together?

  That was the beginning of my regret.

  • • •

  We pushed on to Rome, where I’d taken that fateful pasta class a year and a half before, setting in motion my great Silk Road adventure. But as we sat in morning traffic just outside the Eternal City, our arrival felt anticlimactic. We were both exhausted and out of sorts, and I had a busy Roman agenda. I planned to visit more restaurants and cook with another woman or two. I still had to do some culinary sleuthing, though I knew by now that there was no simple answer as to how Italian pasta and Chinese noodles were linked.

  I was determined, though, to celebrate the end of the journey with Craig, and I’d booked a table at a Michelin three-star restaurant called La Pergola.

  “Didn’t you tell me that Italians are suspicious of it because it’s run by a German?” Craig reminded me.

  Yes, I admitted, some Italians didn’t like the restaurant because an outsider was at the helm.

  “And how much would the meal cost?” my husband wondered. He had a theory: the more expensive meals were often less tasty. Sometimes it was true, I had to admit.

  “Oh, around a hundred and fifty euros per person,” I said nonchalantly.

  “You mean four hundred dollars?” he asked, incredulous.

  My estimate didn’t include wine, I added.

  Craig sighed. “It’s a good thing we don’t have kids. With meals like that, we wouldn’t be able to put them through college.”

  Yes, it was expensive, and some Italians harbored suspicions about it. But Michelin had given the place its top rating, I pointed out, and after a trip of no-star meals I thought it might be nice to end with a blowout.

  “What are the specialities?” Craig asked skeptically. “Cock’s comb? Pig’s snout?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Evidently, in our time apart, my husband had been keeping up with the latest trend of “snout-to-tail” eating. That was a surprise.

  Our moods lifted considerably after we arrived in Rome at last. After dropping off our rental car, we boarded a local train at busy Stazione Termini and went through the center of town. On our last trip, Craig and I had spent Christmas Eve shopping at the markets and cooking together in an apartment we’d rented near Vatican City. We’d laid out thin slices of prosciutto, boiled fresh pasta (I didn’t have the courage to make my own back then) and tossed it with butter, pan-fried steaks, and opened a bottle of red wine. After dinner, we’d walked to St. Peter’s Square for the Pope’s midnight mass, chatted with enthralled pilgrims from afar, and admired the nativity scenes. It had been only our second Christmas since we’d married and we had yet to form our own traditions, though one had stuck since then: Craig and I cooked together on the holiday.

  On our arrival to Rome this time, we went directly to a neighborhood called Trastevere, which means “across the Tiber.” The river snaked along one side of the district, which didn’t have many important monuments but was full of narrow, twisting alleys, with an intimacy that reminded me of our Beijing neighborhood. After we checked into a cozy bed-and-breakfast, Craig stayed in to write while I headed to the city’s north to meet Oretta Zanini De Vita, a food writer whose Encyclopedia of Pasta detailed the Italian staple’s hundreds of shapes and sizes.

  The picture of elegance, Oretta invited me into her home. She was a well-dressed, middle-aged woman who’d worked for the government before she began writing full-time. She poured us glasses of Prosecco, toasting my arrival in Rome with the sparkling wine. She showed me around her home, her kitchen cabinets filled with artisanal pastas and the walls of her study lined with cookbooks. She shared memories of growing up in Emilia-Romagna, where she ate tortellini in brodo—in broth, the traditional way of eating it, as I’d experienced with a sfoglina.

  Best of all, she and I could commiserate about the Marco Polo myth. “Oh, it is so stupid!” Oretta said. “Did you know in Europe they’ve even written it into some children’s textbooks?” I told her how I’d met food professionals across the Silk Road who believed the story. Even on my last day in Rome, an executive at Gambero Rosso, Italy’s version of the Food Network, was adamant about Polo’s supposed contribution.

  As I learned from Oretta and other food experts, while it was certain that Italians ate pasta before Marco Polo, exactly how far back the tradition went was still a matter of debate. Some Italian experts claimed that Etruscan reliefs from tombs dating to the fourth century BC depicted rolling pins and boards and were evidence of indigenous pasta, though no pasta was depicted in the drawings. Others pointed to mentions of a Greco-Roman dish called laganum by the Roman poet Horace in the first century BC and by the Greek writer Athenaeus in the second century AD. Although historians saw it as a possible precursor to lasagna, the dish—sheets of dough made from wheat flour, crushed lettuce juice, and spices, which was then deep-fried—bears only the faintest resemblance to today’s pasta.

  I was more inclined to believe food historians who looked beyond Italy’s borders. The development of pasta in the country seemed to be the result of cross-pollination with other cultures, unlike in China, where evidence suggested that noodles were homegrown. But in Italy’s case, exactly which cultures were responsible remained in dispute.

  What many experts agree upon is that ethnic groups along the Mediterranean had something to do with it. One of the earliest mentions of a boiled type of dough—called itrium—in the West has been traced to the Jerusalem Talmud dating back to the fifth century AD. A document, written by a Syrian physician several centuries later, described itrium in further detail—string-like pasta made of semolina and dried before cooking. (Though the practice of boiling pieces of dough came to China earlier than to the Middle East, the Chinese didn’t shape dough into noodle-like strings until later.) Furthering the idea that itinerant groups played a role (something that had struck me earlier in my research, when I’d read about Turkic nomads and Mongols preparing noodle dishes), Jews who’d moved to northern France boiled kneaded dough as early as the eleventh century AD, calling it vermishelsh—a word that sounded similar to vermicelli—according to documents that debated whether Jews should be allowed to boil dough on certain holidays.

  Meanwhile, by the twelfth century AD, Sicily had become a center of trade in dried pasta, as evidenced by royal Sicilian maps published around 1150 that charted the locations of water sources and flour mills in a territory called Trabia. From Trabia, merchants distributed long strands of pasta across Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, and nearby Muslim and Christian lands, according to the twelfth-century Arab geographer Idrisi. Oretta speculated that Sicilians had learned pasta from Arabs in North Africa, who’d eaten small bits of it called couscous for centuries. “Perhaps the Sicilians saw the Muslims making couscous, and it inspired them to do something new,” she told me. Other food historians added that Arab traders went on to play a decisive role as middlemen and popularizers of pasta, spreading it to Spain.

  By
the Middle Ages, Italy had developed a full-fledged pasta repertoire. As Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban write in their book Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food, “While Italians may not have invented pasta, they invented the art of shaping and cooking it . . . in a very different way than the Chinese.” Dried pasta became an important commodity not just in Sicily but also in Sardinia. Traders sent it to Genoa’s port, from where they dispersed it through Europe. In the Apennines, twelfth-century Catholic monks wrote of fresh pastas like lasagna and tortelli, a larger tortellini. In Naples, a fourteenth-century writer gave instructions on something similar to lasagna: after boiling sheets of noodles, season them, layer by layer, with grated cheese and spices. A Renaissance cookbook author named Maestro Martino described how to make vermicelli: “Moisten the dough . . . and spread it out into a thin sheet,” he wrote. “Using your hands, break it into little pieces that look more or less like worms, and place these in the sun to dry.” The maestro’s recipe for macaroni called for fine-quality flour, egg whites, and a touch of the Silk Road: rosewater.

  But throughout the Renaissance, pastas were cooked for up to two hours, creating a mush-like gruel that sounded like Iranian noodles. And many of the preparations were sweet. An early Renaissance recipe called for cooks to submerge vermicelli in almond milk and douse it with plenty of sugar and saffron (which sounded vaguely like what Iranians did with rice); other cooks sprinkled it with sugar and cinnamon. Doctors recommended sweetening pasta to make it easier to digest (an idea that reminded me of the Uighur doctor who’d prescribed a no-noodle diet and Iranians who ingested sugar cubes and wafers with tea after meals). But there were more appetizing pasta dishes from the era: Genoans ate pasta with capons and eggs while Neapolitans ate macaroni with poultry, albeit boiled. During the Renaissance, Italians began sprinkling Parmigiano-Reggiano and other cheeses over pasta, along with spices like nutmeg and cinnamon (both still used in Emilia-Romagna). But it was not until the end of the eighteenth century, after tomatoes arrived from the New World and Italians adopted them into the cuisine, that ragùs began to appear. And the idea of serving pasta “al dente” didn’t come into fashion until the twentieth century.