Book review: On the Noodle Road
Jen Lin-Liu is a food writer with a love of pasta and Chinese noodles, and a burning desire to find out if the dishes share a common ancestry. She is also a Chinese who grew up in California, married a Caucasian and moved to Beijing.
Jen Lin-Liu is a food writer with a love of pasta and Chinese noodles, and a burning desire to find out if the dishes share a common ancestry. She is also a Chinese who grew up in California, married a Caucasian and moved to Beijing.
Despite their comfortable existence - her cookery school is a success and husband Craig Simmons is a well-regarded journalist eyeing a move to the US diplomatic service - she starts to feel uncomfortable in her own skin.
Her solution is to take a trip down the Silk Road to see for herself the role of noodles, marriage and women in the societies she encounters along the way.
This could be the premise for an interesting book. Certainly Lin-Liu does the food bits well. Her enthusiasm for the much richer culinary heritages of Iran, Turkey and Italy is evident and catching. Her recipe for Iranian saffron fried chicken is a winner, earning the book one of its two and a half stars.
There are other interesting recipes here, although it's doubtful the world needs another one for lasagne. The Chinese hand-rolled noodles are a fiddly proposition for the home chef but worth the effort, as are the Turkish manti dumplings, although you need to be a fan - these recipes produce large quantities of food. The lady's thigh meat patties are excellent.