Long and stringy, chewy or delicate, stuffed or hollow: In all its configurations, the noodle is a primary food source for billions of people, but its origins have been buried by the mists of time.
The Italians claim they created the noodle as the perfect complement for tomato sauces; the Chinese say the Italians got it from them via Marco Polo; Arabs claim its creation as an easily stored foodstuff suitable for long treks in the desert.
The Japanese, Koreans, French and even the Germans also have claimed it as their own.
Chinese researchers may have finally settled the contentious question by unearthing a 4,000- year-old container of noodles in northwestern China.
The easily recognizable noodles are far older than any that have previously been discovered and predate the first written mention of noodles by at least 2,000 years, said archaeologist Houyuan Lu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who led the team.
“I can’t imagine a more conclusive piece of evidence than this,” said Ming Tsai, a celebrated Chinese fusion chef who owns Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Mass.
The discovery of intact noodles is very unusual, added Greg Drescher, senior director of the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley in California. “You often hear about ingredients being found, whether it is corn or ancient grains, but it is not too often that you hear about something as complex as noodles,” he said.
Most noodles today are made from wheat or rice, but the Chinese noodles were made from millet, a type of grass that has been cultivated in the country for more than 7,000 years. It is still a mainstay of the diet in certain arid regions of the north.
That confirms work by archaeologist Gary Crawford of the University of Toronto-Mississauga, whose work at other Chinese sites dating from the same period also show a high reliance on millet. That may explain, he said, why archaeologists often find no grain seeds at some sites: The grains were crushed into flour and made into noodles.
The noodles were discovered in the excavation of the site known as Lajia on the upper reaches of the Yellow River in Qinghai province. Lu’s team has been digging there for several years and has found the remains of a primitive, Neolithic village.
