by Jen Lin-Liu
Though I’d established a fairly solid link between Chinese, Central Asian, and Turkish dumplings, I didn’t find any material that linked Italian pasta with traditions of the countries through which I’d passed. But still, the echoes nagged at me—the uncanny likeness between tortellini and manti, the strikingly similar words Luisa and Asli had uttered about them. Maybe noodles and filled pasta had taken a roundabout tour of the Middle East and North Africa on their journey to Italy. Or perhap during the Byzantine Empire, culinary exchanges had taken place between the Italian peninsula and Asia Minor. Or perhaps it was a coincidence? After seven thousand miles, the connection was still a mystery.
Long after I left Oretta’s and long after my journey had ended, I came across an article about noodles that, after all my travels and research, struck a chord. The piece, by the food historian Charles Perry, had appeared in a 1981 issue of a rare magazine called Petit Propos Culinaires, and although I’d seen it quoted in many other pieces, it had taken me a while to track it down. Researchers had cited the article when attributing noodles to either the Romans (with their laganum) or to the peoples of the Middle East (based on the string-like boiled noodles mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud). But those researchers had missed the point of the article, which was titled “The Oldest Mediterranean Noodle: A Cautionary Tale.”
“It is our romantic habit to believe the popular foods of a culture are eternal,” Perry writes. “As a corollary, we believe a food was probably invented by people whose descendants eat it today.” After entertaining various theories, Perry does not try to determine where noodles began and instead ends the article with three morals for food historians:
If a people eat much of a dish, this does not mean that they have eaten it forever.
If a people eat little of a dish . . . it does not follow that they never ate much of it.
Time and chance and fashion rule cookery as they do the rest of our social behavior.
• • •
Putting the pasta puzzle aside in my last days in Rome, I explored and enjoyed the city’s food. I met a tomato vendor who sold more than fifty types of the fruit and interviewed him in feeble Italian, bastardized with three years of high school Spanish. (Me: “Quanti . . . tipo . . . pomodori?” Tomato vendor: “Cinquanta.” Me: “Quanti tipo pomodori . . . en el mundo?” Tomato vendor: “Centinai,” which meant hundreds and was followed by a lot of Italian I didn’t understand.) I visited the Jewish quarter and, at a sidewalk table, ate carciofi alla giudia, deep-fried artichokes. I cooked in the Roman countryside with a woman named Giovanna who topped her gnocchi, made of just potatoes and flour, with a spectacularly simple sauce: halved cherry tomatoes sautéed with shallots, and a shower of hand-ripped basil at the very end. An American friend named Kathy, who lived in Italy and accompanied me to Giovanna’s, commented, “In America, we’d be throwing in all kinds of things.”
Late one morning, a Roman friend named Federica took me to a market near the train station, where Bangladeshis, Chinese, and Egyptians sold produce and meats. Around the market was one of the few pockets of Rome with international restaurants. Like many people I’d met on my journey, Italians didn’t eat much foreign food, but here the smell of butter chicken collided with the scent of chilies and ginger in stir-fries. Federica mentioned that Giovanni Fassi, one of the city’s best gelaterias, was nearby. “Let’s go there,” I said. She looked at her watch and frowned. “But it’s not even noon!” Italian eating rules notwithstanding, I talked her into it, and we arrived to find many customers waiting in the marble-walled institution. But before I could feel vindicated, Federica said, “They’re all tourists.” Still, she pushed her way to the front of the line and treated me to a very generous cup of raspberry and strawberry gelato—“in season,” she said—and a dollop of whipped cream. She even deigned to take a taste. Then she took me around the corner to a most unusual restaurant.
La Sorgentine had the aesthetics of a Chinese restaurant. The interior looked like it had been hastily finished. The tables were round and the chairs had white covers and floppy bows on their backs. Kenny G–like Muzak played over the speakers. A friendly, stocky Chinese man with a distinctly Italian accent introduced himself as the restaurant’s owner. Michele had left China for Italy two decades before, he explained, and worked his way up in the Chinese restaurant industry. La Sorgentine, which he’d opened six months earlier, had a unique business model: his Chinese chefs cooked Italian food. He catered to Chinese guests, especially the increasing tide of mainland tourists, who found traditional Italian restaurants too intimidating. An Italian maestro had taught his chefs the dishes. But Michele tweaked them to make them more appealing to his clientele, using Parmigiano-Reggiano only sparingly, focusing on seafood, and boiling the noodles slightly longer. (Chinese noodles were generally served soft, though not to a medieval degree.) The spaghetti ai frutti di mare was particularly popular, as were the risottos, with their congee-like consistency.
But after La Sorgentine opened, Italians came in and, seeing the Chinese wait staff and decor, asked for Chinese food. So Michele added Asian dishes to the menu, and thus one of the world’s very few Chinese-Italian restaurants was born. But the schizophrenic menu caused some problems, he admitted. “Sometimes at the same table, one person will order Chinese while the other person orders Italian. Everything is fine when the meal begins: the appetizers come out together. But when you get to the primi, you start having problems. Chinese food is always cooked faster. So we’ll bring out the Chinese primo first, the Italian primo second. And ditto with the secondi. So the Chinese eater finishes and the Italian eater is only halfway through his meal!”
To avoid the timing problem, Federica and I shared everything: it was the way I liked to eat anyway. I left the ordering to my friend. A waiter appeared with a salad of octopus and calamari and a plate of bruschetta. Pieces of imitation crab and shrimp came sizzling over rice on an iron plate. Another waiter brought Michele’s touted spaghetti with seafood. I ate with a fork while Federica used chopsticks. We drank Tsingtao beer out of wineglasses. We ended with fried gelato, a dessert as Chinese as fried ice cream was Mexican. The fried gelato reminded me of what Charles Perry had written: Time and chance and fashion rule cookery as they do the rest of our social behavior. If you were to extrapolate from a visit to La Sorgentine you’d end up with many a confused notion of both Chinese and Italian food.
As we finished our meal, Michele came and sat down at our table. I couldn’t resist taking one last stab: Where did he think noodles had originated? Perhaps his twenty years in Italy had given him some insight.
Michele paused before answering. “I like to study history,” he said. “China developed early, that is true. In the past, everything in China was good. But then it began to lag behind the West. Now the Italians are lagging, becoming stagnant. They say, ‘We have two thousand years of history. We used to be the best in the world.’ But where does that get you? It gets in the way. You can’t say spaghetti is one culture’s or another’s. You’ll never discover your answer.”
But still, I was disappointed. After all these miles, I hadn’t gotten any further with an explanation not just for how noodles originated, but for how they ended up in Italy. Why was I so bothered? Perhaps it was because my noodle quest had paralleled my own identity struggle: were they—and was I—Eastern or Western? Could I, too, seamlessly blend into both East and West? And wherever I happened to be, was it possible to maintain a dual identity?
But then I reflected on my journey. Somewhere along the way, I had, in fact, stopped worrying so much about straddling two cultures. I’d felt welcome everywhere (except in Turkmenistan), and I’d met others who struggled with their identities, too. There had been the extreme cases, like Isabel on the Tibetan Plateau, who was a fan of Mao Zedong but loved red wine and tennis. Or Shaheen in Iran, who’d railed against mullahs and Ahmadinejad and took us out for pizza, but was steadfast in his love for Persian poets. And I
’d met whole ethnic groups (like the Uighurs) and entire countries (like Turkey) that for centuries had struggled to find a balance between East and West.
As I traveled from East to West, my gender had become more important. Being female had given me access to women in all kinds of situations. I’d been glad to see the journey through a woman’s eyes. It had made me incensed to see how women were treated in certain situations in Central Asia, though I realized it might not be fair to judge a region based on only a few experiences. But spending time with women in distant cultures had made me more appreciative of my own situation, and at the same time made me realize that I needed to take a harder look at gender relations in the United States and China, places I’d lived for years.
And what had also helped me alleviate my identity issues was my discovery that East and West weren’t so different, after all. Across the Silk Road, I’d discovered palpable connections among cultures. I’d seen how food crossed geographical, religious, and political borders and blurred the divide. I’d seen how family traditions and hospitality had tied together the Silk Road cultures and made them as similar to each other as places we lumped together as “the West.” It occurred to me that the idea of the West was as much of a construct as the concept of the Silk Road, and it was only a lingering Orientalism that kept our ideas of Asia and Europe so divided in our heads.
Moreover, I’d learned that the process that brought us the dishes we know and love is mostly an organic one that has unfolded over years and generations. Dishes are living things, little documented, that are passed down from parent to child (or, as I saw on the road, from mother to daughter-in-law). Methods are altered, names evolve, and individuals claim the dishes as their own. I’d enjoyed “Chef Zhang’s” noodles, savored “Asli’s” manti, indulged in “Nadia’s” lasagna. And when I returned from the trip, I would think of the dishes I learned as “mine,” even though they’d been created by the collective minds and hands of many generations.
That was another reason why it was difficult to determine where noodles had begun. Like a guest from a distant land, they had been welcomed into far-flung homes and assimilated into kitchens, melding with different flavors, from East to West.
• • •
In Rome, I had one last person to see: Andrea Consoli, the Italian chef who’d inadvertently inspired my journey. His restaurant, Le Fate, which was down the street from our guesthouse in Trastevere, had been built out of a six-hundred-year-old horse stable. The Christmas tinsel I recognized from our previous visit was still strung around the cozy dining room, even though it was May. Andrea was finishing his daily cooking class, and a group of Americans and Australians were at a long table, polishing off the last smudges of chocolate soufflé on their plates. Andrea’s father was at the cash register behind the bar and his brother was lugging boxes through the front door. His mother and his fiancée, a pretty American Midwesterner named Erica, were tidying the room.
After hugging and saying good-bye to the last guests, Andrea and Erica invited me to a table and uncorked a bottle of wine. I learned that things had changed over the last year, for the busier. “Jen, I’m done,” Andrea moaned. “I’m way over my limit. I have too many requests, too many people asking me for classes.” He looked slightly gaunter than he had the year before, though it didn’t dim his classic Italian features. Everything had been going steadily, he told me, and then—he gestured toward his fiancée accusingly—“this American created an explosion in the business!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Erica said, her blue eyes widening.
Leave it to Italians to think that too much success was a bad thing. Le Fate had opened six years before and started with a small flow of customers. Then Andrea had met Erica, who was studying abroad, and she’d suggested that he teach tourists how to cook. In the beginning, he charged just twenty euros (less than thirty dollars) per guest. “I never cared about the money,” Andrea had told me the year before. “In my little universe, in my little world, it makes me happy. It gives me satisfaction if I can help tourists understand what real Italian food is like.” Even now at fifty euros (around sixty dollars), the classes were a bargain.
Andrea looked tortured. He’d become so busy that his brother had taken over the dinner service, and he told me he was looking for a new space.
“So you can expand?” I asked.
“No, not to expand,” he said forcefully, as if I’d suggested something criminal. “The idea is not to become McDonald’s. It’s so I can devote more time to my students. Plus, you know, Americans can be quite . . . big . . . and they have this thing about ‘space.’”
When I mentioned that I planned to eat at La Pergola, Andrea made a face. “It’s not worth it,” he said. “It’s like buying a pair of brand-name Diesel jeans. The food is important, not the place, the name, or the brand.” He rattled off a list of places I should visit. “Divide up the money you’d spend at La Pergola and go to four restaurants.” He pulled from a shelf a respected Italian restaurant guide and translated snippets from La Pergola’s review: “‘Bottles of wine from forty to two thousand euros . . . there is nothing wrong with the kitchen, but there is something wrong with the service . . . zero kilometer products . . . innovative dishes that include octopus, avocado, and peaches.’” Before I could say anything, Andrea slapped the book shut. “We don’t eat avocados in Roman cooking. It’s not our cuisine. What’s the point of trying avocados here when you can get them at home? You are here to taste our food. With food, you cannot make innovation anymore, not these days. Everything has been done.” I heard this repeatedly from Italians. Italy was a place where trends like tail-to-snout cuisine and molecular gastronomy were destined to fail. Tradition reigned on the peninsula. It wasn’t exactly true that cooks couldn’t innovate, but rarely did food change in leaps and bounds overnight. Marco Polo had not suddenly brought noodles from China to Italy. Andrea was getting at something that was at the heart of my journey: treasured dishes like tortellini, manti, or hand-pulled noodles, the ones that defined a cuisine, were created over the centuries, the methods evolving slowly—not quite as lumbering as human evolution, but something like it, incremental changes stacking up over the years.
I asked Andrea if he cooked at home, explaining that I’d found few men in the tradition-bound cultures I’d visited who cooked for their families. He looked surprised. “I always cook at home. I am the one who goes shopping. Erica buys milk, and maybe cereal.” But Andrea added that he was an anomaly; not just because he was a man, but also because his peers mostly eschewed cooking. “The grandmothers—they all know how to make pasta. Then my parents’ generation began forgetting. Now nobody knows how to make pasta, or even how to clean an artichoke.” Those were the two lessons with which his classes generally began.
It occurred to me that Andrea was the missing link: if we were to preserve the making of fresh pasta and other traditional dishes, we needed men to be more involved. I vowed that if I ever had a son, I would initiate him into the work of the kitchen. A daughter might get off a little more easily, but not by much. As for my husband, well, he, I supposed, was a lost cause. In the end, he’d made most of the trip with me, and he’d spent just as little time in kitchens as he did at home. But he’d accompanied me halfway around the world, and he’d given me plenty of autonomy. To preserve marital happiness, I would have to let the cooking slide. And, perhaps, as Asli in Turkey had said, one cook was enough for a household.
Sitting down with Andrea, I was reminded of what I’d learned across the Silk Road. I’d gone through a string of places where hospitality was more important than making money. Where people made good, honest food without having to market it or spin it into something bigger. Where people had invited me into their homes so warmly and treated me to so much without asking for anything in return. Where you could sit down for a two-hour lunch in the middle of a workday and feel good about it. That was what the trip was about—the im
portance of friends and family, of slowing down enough to enjoy life. Searching for the origin of noodles had allowed me to come to those realizations.
The day before Craig and I left Rome, I stopped by Andrea’s a final time to say good-bye. The daily class had just begun, and he was going over the menu with a dozen guests from the United States and London. When he mentioned gnocchi with tomato sauce, several of the students let out audible gasps of excitement. The main course, straccetti alla romana, was greeted with silence—nobody had heard of the thin slices of beef with tomato and arugula. “And then for dessert: tiramisu.” One student’s jaw dropped so far that it looked like he would need a clamp to shut it. “We lucked out!” another shrieked, as if she were a winning contestant on a game show.
Andrea interrupted the guests’ reverie to divide up the potatoes. “Now turn on—not off!—your brain and pay very close attention!”
The students donned their aprons, and as I slipped out of Le Fate, my cell phone rang. It was Candice, the manager of my own cooking school, calling to give me an update. The chefs said hello and told me they were fully booked for the night. I told them I would be back soon enough. For now, in Rome, I had something more important to attend to: my husband.
• • •
On our last night in Rome, Craig surprised me with a tour of the city’s best gelato shops. Forget that the first time the dessert ever came up, early in our relationship, he’d shuddered. “Gelato? That sounds gross. You want to eat something with gel in it?” he joked.