There is a line written on the wall of a restaurant in Guangzhou: "porridge, noodles and rice: four great inventions." There is quite a bit of Lingnan-style street humor. But think about it, too. Why can't food be a great invention?
Recently, watching the Korean documentary "The Road to Noodles", I discussed the "great invention" of noodles in the grand background of the communication between eastern and western civilizations, which made people realize with emotion that this seemingly ordinary food has such a far-reaching impact on human life. It is worth noting that noodles have got the greatest development in China since they came out, while in the west, except Italy, the traditional staple food is another food made of flour-bread.
But why? I'm afraid this is not necessarily a taste preference, but because the development of food is always limited by specific social conditions, and its evolution follows a strong path dependence.
As we all know, the raw materials of noodles and bread are flour (whether it is ground from wheat, barley, buckwheat or rye), and to make flour, it is natural to have wheat and stone mill first-both of which are generally believed to originate from the Middle East. The word "lai" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions for wheat is a foreign word, which is also common sense in agricultural history; The promotion of stone mill in China is generally considered as late as the Qin and Han Dynasties (here, I might as well insert a sentence: it is generally believed that tofu was invented by Liu An, the king of Huainan in the Western Han Dynasty. This time is probably not accidental, and beans used to taste terrible, but since wheat grains can be ground into flour, beans can naturally be, so tofu was born with the promotion of stone mill).
It is not difficult to imagine that in the era when wheat can't be ground into powder, "grain food" is quite unpalatable, because it can only be steamed in pottery-rice is also steamed, which is much more delicious than wheat, but rice is even rarer in the pre-Qin period and is a rare food.
Perhaps it can be speculated that wheat was planted and stone mills were invented earlier in the Middle East, and people chose to bake pasta in earthen stoves (the finished products are bread, biscuits or naan); However, when China planted wheat, pottery and bronze ware were quite mature, but stone mills were not popularized, so that the Chinese people in the pre-Qin period could only steam or cook the wheat for more than 1000 years.
The difference at the beginning determines a series of differences thereafter. Pottery has a far-reaching influence on China people's eating habits and cooking methods. The most obvious point is that people in China use steaming and cooking in large quantities, which presumably comes from the practice of adding water to pottery to ripen food, which is quite different from the way of baking food directly on fire in the Middle East and Europe. Generally speaking, hunting nomads use barbecue more, while farming people use cooking more.
In addition, China people's food is rich in plant protein, while vegetables with leaves, stems and berries are obviously not suitable for cooking by barbecue. Furthermore, Chinese food attaches great importance to soup (in You Ran, Lingnan, where more traditional culture is preserved), which may be traced back to this point.
In the world, there are only four cooking methods in China: water cooking (boiling), steam cooking (steaming), fire cooking (roasting) and oil cooking (frying). Of course, there are other practices, such as stewing, frying, frying, stewing, etc., but there is no doubt that the oldest cooking method in China is cooking, so the dominant diet in the pre-Qin period is to cook a pasty soup.
In this way, flour, a kind of food, has naturally developed into a wide variety of noodles in the social environment of China: since people in China are used to cooking instead of barbecuing, it is natural to cook the mixed noodles in water. At first, noodles were called "soup cakes", which were often flaky. Knife noodles appeared in the Tang Dynasty, and slender dried noodles were developed in the Song Dynasty-undoubtedly because people found it easier to cook, and chopsticks used by China people were particularly suitable for catching noodles. In Europe, the only people who often eat noodles are Italians. Perhaps it is no coincidence that before16th century, only Italians used forks instead of chopsticks or forks, so it is obviously uncomfortable to eat noodles.
In a word, noodles in China, like gunpowder and printing, have encountered the most suitable social conditions for their vigorous development.