On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta

The second book by Jen Lin-Liu takes us along the ancient Silk Road as she attempts to discover the origin and path of pasta/noodles. The author is married now, has opened a cooking school in Beijing and spends part of her time in the US for her husband's career/education. She is struggling with being newly married and no longer independent, able to travel, or not, as she pleases. Her travels takes her through a culinary and cultural journey that is as much about societal issues and politics as it about food. It is the food that really kept me reading, even though I am a vegetarian and much of what she eats and cooks would not work for me, the writing is so good that I was seriously tempted to make an exception for some of her dishes.

Whew! I've been reading this travel narrative/cookbook for about a month. It was a slow read, and I was often tempted to put it down, but yet there was something endearing about the author/traveler and her insights about food, travel, love, and women's place in culture.

Chinese American Jen Lin Liu founded a Chinese cooking school in Beijing and met an American journalist also living in Beijing who she marries. Upon traveling with him in Rome she conceives of an idea to trace the path of the noodle from China to Rome. She strives to understand where the noodle first originated and decides that following regional cuisine while traveling the silk road would be a fascinating travel memoir.

She travels through China, Central Asia, Iran, show more Turkey, and finally Italy to answer this one question: did China invent the noodle that Italians have now perfected? The question, while somewhat intriguing seems (and I think proves to be) a mighty thin thread to hand a 300 plus page travel narrative.

Ms Lin-Liu does dig deep into some more interesting questions primarily about the place of women in most of the countries through which she travels. She also begins to ask difficult questions about her own marriage. She meets lots of friendly cooks and locals who introduce her to the cuisines of the region.

After struggling to get through this memoir, I started to really like this author and stuck with it to hear how her marriage ended up and read her conclusions about the noodle. I won't give it away--I hate to spoil it for others. I will say that while Central Asia seemed pretty bland food wise, she wrote food porn about the cuisines of Turkey and Italy that made me vow to travel to eat in both of those places.

In the end, some interesting observations in patches, a few recipes, an earnest author who you root for, and some good food writing probably salvaged this memoir. A must read if you plan to travel in this region. show less

Okay, so memoirs are by nature somewhat self-indulgent. But--as I've pointed out in reviews of other books, such as Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan's A Tiger in the Kitchen--effective memoirs are written at a distance: with reflection; with a veil or patina of wisdom that imparts a deeper meaning on one's erstwhile actions and thoughts. When one is too close to those actions and thoughts, superficiality, naïveté, and self-centeredness rear their ugly heads. For me, then, Jen Lin-Liu's On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome with Love and Pasta read decidedly as so-called chick lit. The premise sounded fascinating, but the delivery was too unfocused, too rambling, too diary-like; and the reader leaves the journey ultimately unsatisfied, since the show more author's intended goals seem unmet at the end. When I teach writing, in fact, I find that students often have a very difficult time understanding what level of detail is appropriate for their tasks at hand. The most important matter is to keep the narrative moving forward. So the writer must know the goal; and the writer must be able to imagine how his or her readers will respond to the text. When that sense of connecting with the reader is lost, the story, the thread, the argument, the whatever becomes something only the author cares about--and the reader just wants to be finished.

In short, then, the bifurcated storylines (that of the ostensible premise of the book--traveling the Silk Road in study of noodles and noodle dishes--and of the author's relationship with her husband [about which I was completely uninterested]) fail to speak to one another; they're a marriage of convenience for the purpose of packaging a book that I suppose might appeal to readers who enjoy books in the Eat, Pray, Love genre. I prefer food-related books where I learn something transformative and meaningful about food and culture--or where the author has a gifted ability to write about food in a way that does not sound merely like litanies of ingredients or dishes followed by too-brief (or absent) analyses of the results. The baggage and trappings of the authors are difficult for me to warm up to, particularly with contemporary authors (and almost always the case with authors who are younger than I am). When I finish these sorts of books--and I do so only because I commit myself to finishing what I begin--I always tell myself, "Never again!" But I'd read this author's first offering, Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey through China, of which the first part of On the Noodle Road resurrects (and thus feels repetitive), so I am the one to blame here for giving the author another chance. Alas. (And I must clarify that these views are my impressions of the book qua effective story, not of the author qua person.) show less

Jen Lin-Liu is SERIOUS about noodles. That said, she manages to see--and convey--the humor in various aspects of her culinary research trip. My favorite parts of the memoir involved her travels to Central Asia and Iran; her discoveries seemed fresh and unique. I've read a fair number of travel memoirs, and this one ranks among the best because it is so well written.

First Published on We Should Make T-Shirts.

I love noodles, so this book seemed right up my alley. And I would say it lived up to my expectations. I learned a hell of a lot about the cuisine of the countries represented, and I have a few extra places to add to my "Future Travels" list. Turkey in particular surprised me, because it's a country I've really never thought about before.

One of the things that I really appreciated about this book was the way that Jen Lin-Liu approaches the idea of marriage. Her plans to travel the silk road in search of the history of noodles means separating from her husband for months at a time while they are still in their newlywed stage. She questions what exactly it means to be a spouse and an individual show more at the same time. That's something I think every couple questions at some point, especially if they haven't had children yet, and I like that it became an important part of her journey.

The book comes with recipes at the end of each country's section, and I'm excited to try some of them. I can see myself rereading this once or twice. show less

Combining travelogue, history, cultural investigation, food diary, recipes, and memoir, On the Noodle Road is a layered treat of a book. Journalist and cooking school founder Jen Lin-Liu was inspired to travel the ancient Silk Road route from Beijing to Rome after being struck by similarities between Chinese and Italian pasta dishes. Common wisdom holds that Marco Polo brought the noodle from China back to Italy, but the evidence is shaky. Lin-Liu decided to investigate cooking styles along the Silk Road to see what she could learn about the long history of noodle cuisine.

Traveling sometimes with her new husband, sometimes alone, Lin-Liu visits and shares food preparations in home kitchens and restaurants, often in places far off the show more beaten path. She journeyed through Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and the culturally distinct western provinces of China, including the disputed territory of Tibet. Cooking together turned out to be an interesting and intimate way to get to know people, especially the women she meets, and reading about her experiences is fascinating. Lin-Liu writes candidly about their lives, cultures, and family dynamics--and about how what she sees impacts her struggles to balance or blend the fiercely independent woman she always has been with her new married life.

If your experience is like mine, On the Noodle Road will make you want to take a food adventure yourself, but at least you'll be craving finely cooked meals made from scratch with fresh local produce, not junk food. Recipes are included in the book and more are on Lin-Liu website. show less

The authors Silk Road journey to discover the origin of the noodle...where very little about noodles is actually discovered but so very much more is. This was fascinating and so educational, I learned so much about the different cultures in that area, some cultures I hardly knew existed except maybe in passing in a news story and then usually in a political way not a cultural way.

The book is well written, engaging and informative without being overly preachy though I did find it a bit hard to believe the author was as naive as she came across about the way women are treated in that part of the world.
The overall balance in the book between the cultures, their history and her personal experience was handled quite well and she never spent show more to much time on one or the other that I lost interest.
I really enjoyed this and I am definitely going to be checking out her other book. show less