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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
it was not enough one thing or the other. neither a proper food anthology nor an exhilarating travelogue, it just ends up sort of ... ok. not bad, not great. three stars mainly for iran and turkey. i had this on my wishlist for ages, and had high expectations, but was massively let down. i also feel the book sort of just ... ends. there's not a lot of wrap up, it's as if jen said "oh i've met my page limit, let me tie all this in a bow." unlike other reviewers, i like the "navel-gazing" bit (funny how only women are looked down upon for giving context) but was disappointed in how it all wrapped up; her conflicted attitudes toward marriage and all the marriages she saw on the road tied together thematically and i'm unsure why she spent so much time building up to something that she literally wrapped up in two sentences (loosely: "now i'm pregnant. yay marriage!"). also, she needs to leave her husband completely out of the next book -- he's not as interesting as she thinks he is.
I'm still really trying to decide what I thought about this book. It wasn't bad, but I didn't love it. I think my main problem is I opened it up thinking I was getting a combination of travelogue and food writing about trying to find the origins of pasta and noodles, and it ended up being more about a woman trying to assert her independence and decide what it meant for her to be a wife. It's not that this is a bad topic to explore, just not what I thought I was getting. I wanted history and food, not meditations of what it means to be a wife and how to balance career and family.
A travel book about noodles? I had to read this book as soon as I heard of it. Add in the fact that in 2017 I'm trying to read more Asian authors and books set in Central Asia and this book was perfect for me. It took me forever to read it though. I think I found this book so soothing that I would fall asleep after a few pages. It wasn't boring. It just relaxed me.
The author is a Chinese-American journalist who lives in Beijing with her white American husband. She owns a cooking school. While most people in the west think of rice when they think of staple dishes of China, noodles are more common in the cuisine of northern China. She decides to follow the path of the Silk Road to see how noodles spread between China and Italy. Who invented them?
First of all, the old story about Marco Polo discovering noodles in Asia and bringing them to Italy is not true. The true history of noodles turns out to be very difficult to figure out. The author travels from China through central Asia and into Iran and Turkey interviewing chefs and home cooks. She is taught to cook dishes that amaze her and dishes that she learns to dread like plov, a central Asian rice dish that she was fed at every meal. I thought plov sounded really good if you left out all the dead animal parts that she kept being served. For a book that was supposed to be about noodles, it was very heavy on the meat. She had sheep killed in her honor and a lot of time was spent sourcing and waxing poetic over pork in Muslim countries.
There is also a lot of discussion about relationships and the role of women in society. At the time she started this trip, the author was recently married and was considering whether or not to have children. She is very conflicted about what her role should be in her marriage. Both she and her husband travel for work. Can they keep doing that? Should they stay in China? Does being married automatically mean giving up her independence? She spends part of the trip traveling alone and part of it with her husband. She talks to women as they cook about what their relationships are like. She realizes that her love of homemade noodles means that someone has to spend all that time making them. Younger women with jobs outside the house tend not to learn those skills.
This book does have many recipes if you would like to try making different types of noodles and dishes featuring noodles. It even has recipes for plov. It won't give you the answer though to where the noodle originated. That answer is lost in time.This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story
More of a travelogue than a food book, but enjoyable nonetheless. I now desperately long to A) go back to Italy and B) check Turkey out, especially Istanbul.
Also, frankly, I could have done without the musings on the meaning of being a wife and the crap about husband/wife businesses. It just didn't fit in this book about travelling and eating noodles.
Also, frankly, I could have done without the musings on the meaning of being a wife and the crap about husband/wife businesses. It just didn't fit in this book about travelling and eating noodles.