10/1/2018 0 Comments The Confusion over noodlesAs a cultural psychologist, I have the great pleasure of being in close contact with “cultural shock” or cross-cultural (mis)communication on a daily basis, not only because I am living in a culture drastically different from the one that I grew up in, but also thanks to my husband, who is an American boy brought up in the Midwest with both German and Italian heritage.
Since we are both busy working, sometimes it is too much to have to worry about what to cook for dinner, that we will just have what is in the house and easy to prepare. One such weekend, on Saturday we had thick rice noodles with mushroom sauce for brunch, sweet potato noodles with spicy seafood broth for dinner, and on Sunday we had Vietnamese-style pho with thinly sliced beef for brunch, and Northern-Chinese style noodles with brown sauce (炸酱面 zha jiang mian) for dinner. Of course we also had some side dishes to go with each meal. Still, at the end of the weekend my husband was a little grumpy, commenting “you know we’ve been having noodles for the whole weekend?” This at first confused me, since my mind automatically translated “noodles” as 面条 (mian tiao, food made with wheat flour dough and usually boiled in water). I could not help but refute, “what do you mean? We only had noodles once, for Sunday dinner.” Needless to say, we went into a rather fruitless argument about the definition of noodles, which only got resolved by our cat meowing desperately for our attention (so she could have dinner) multiple times. Afterwards, as I ponder over our conversation, I realize that the argument is inevitably caused by the languages associated with different ways of thinking of food. In modern English, “noodle” is used to describe “a food paste made usually with egg and shaped typically in ribbon form” according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, or “a good in the form of long, thin strips made from flour or rice, water, and often egg, cooked in boiling liquid” according to Cambridge Dictionary. The common themes in both definitions are: 1) the ingredients for noodles are non-specific, be it flour, rice, with/without egg; 2) the shapes for noodles are non-specific, as “ribbon form” or “long thin strips” are very vague depiction of the actual shape that noodles can appear in. In other words, in English, any food made of any kind of starchy dough with a shape that resembles ribbons can be called “noodle”. If further distinction is needed, one may add descriptors before “noodle” to specify the ingredient, e.g. rice noodle, buckwheat noodle, or to specify the shape to a certain extent, e.g. thin noodles, thick noodles. But this system of noodle vocabulary does not work very well for someone from a culture where each type of “noodle” has a unique name, according to their varying ingredients and shapes. Moreover, the word “noodle” is usually translated as “面” (mian), which by definition has to be made of wheat. The traditional character of “面” (mian) even has the radical that represents wheat in the character. Rice noodle, which may be called 米粉 (mi fen) or 米线 (mi xian) based on the shape or the origin, has no wheat in it, thus can never be called “面” (mian) in Chinese. You can see my confusion when my husband asserted that the 米线(mi xian), 红薯粉丝(hong shu fen si, sweet potato noodles), 河粉(he fen), and 面(mian) are all “noodles”. Why is it the case that in English, no distinction is made between different types of noodles? Maybe linguists are better-qualified to answer that question. From my observation, it is possible that in the part of the world where the word “noodle” originated, i.e. Germany and later Britain, there simply were not that many different types of noodles to make the distinction necessary. Noodles as a mainstay starchy food does not seem popular in German or British cuisine, even nowadays (mashed potato or other types of potato-based food seems more popular—and it is not easy to make potatoes into noodle-like shapes, unless you mix in other types of starch). Germans have spaetzle, which did not seem to get spread into Britain. As a result, in the English-speaking world using one word to describe “noodle” seemed more than enough. When other paste-based food (e.g. pasta) was introduced into English-speaking cultures as part of globalization, English speakers either directly adopted the original words from other languages such as Italian—this is particularly common when the languages in question are phonetic—or incorporated the concept of the pasty food by fitting it to the framework of “noodles” (e.g. rice noodles). The result is that in modern English that we use today, there are many words describing a variety of pasty food around the world unknown to English speakers a few centuries ago, and you can usually tell where the food originally came from by looking at the language, since most of the pasty food vocabulary follows different rules for spelling and pronunciation, denoting their “exotic” origin. One example for such “language/food invasion” is Italian pasta, well-known for the hundreds of different kinds designed to suit different sauces. The early Italian immigrants into the United States and Canada helped the spread of this versatile food into the new world, and the powerful influence of these new immigrant countries in turn spread the pasta love across the globe. Due to a lack of proper vocabulary in English to describe the different kinds of pasta, their Italian names are used and well-learned. When I first learned the word “spaghetti”, it did not occur to me that this word was not English in origin, though I did struggle with the spelling since it is so different from other English words. Likewise, most Americans nowadays are fairly familiar with fettuccine, rotini, penne, lasagna, etc. without thinking of these words as “exotic”. It is somewhat puzzling to me though, that my husband certainly considers different types of pasta as “different food”, and has no objection to having four different types of pasta dishes over the weekend, despite the fact that the difference among spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine, and rotini is, objectively speaking, not nearly as distinct as the difference among 米线(mi xian), 红薯粉丝(hong shu fen si, sweet potato noodles), 河粉(he fen), and 面(mian). After all, the latter are made of different ingredients and with different thickness, whereas the former are just the same dough shaped differently! I guess the logical argument here is less relevant than the personal taste that one is brought up with:P
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