ABSTRACT
Noodles are strips or strands cut from a sheet of dough made of flour, water, and either common salt or a mixture of alkaline salts. They are one of the main staple foods consumed in East and Southeast Asian countries, representing up to 40% of total flour consumption (Miskelly, 1988). It is believed that noodles originated in the north of China as early as 5000 b .c ., but their essential modern-day form has developed over the last 2000 years. Present-day noodles
(mian) were a unique contribution by the Han Dynasty (206 B.c. to 220 a.d.) to Chinese culinary art. The development of noodle foods in the Han period seemingly can be explained by the fact that techniques for large-scale flour milling were introduced to China from the West during the latter part of the earlier Han Dynasty, as a result of the Han expansion. Han ingenuity in exper imenting with such common food materials, combined with the willingness to incorporate technology from other cultures, led to the emergence of an eventu ally dominant new product in Chinese culinary history (Yu, 1979). The writer Shu Hsi in the Western Jin Dynasty (late third and early fourth centuries) noted that the various kinds of noodles “were mainly the invention of the common people, while some of the cooking methods came from foreign lands.”
