Jane Setter recently asked me about noodles. Her take on them was that Americans can call spaghetti noodles and the British can't. My take, as ever, is: it's complicated.
Let's start with the British. In my experience (and, I think, Jane's) noodle in the UK is associated with Asian food. This is indeed what my English (and American, she would tell you) 7-year-old means when she says that her favo(u)rite food is noodles (various types and dishes but especially pad see ew and yaki soba. I've come to reali{z/s}e that on some days I eat nothing that I ate as a child).
Noodle is used for Asian types of noodles and noodle dishes in the US too. But I would suspect that the default understood ethnicity of noodle will vary by the speaker's age, location and ethnicity in the US.
Let's start with me, because that's easy (for me). If someone in my family asked me to go to Wegman's and buy some noodles, I would pick up a bag of these:
And once I got them home they would be used in a dish like this (but less fancy):
...most probably made with a can of Campbell's condensed cream-of-mushroom soup, like our household's other main noodle dish, that perennial Lenten horror, tuna noodle casserole (UK's drier version: tuna pasta bake).
(You don't get condensed soups in the UK, so you don't get condensed soup recipes.) [see comments for more on this]
Now, in my childhood, I would not have called those noodles pasta. I'm grown up now and I've come to tolerate much, so maybe I could bear to now. But to me, as a child, pasta was what you had in Italian food, noodles were what you had in the "less ethnic" dishes. But, of course, the other foods were ethnic too, and I suspect that my default understanding of the word noodle may be more common in the parts of the US that had more northern-European settlement. (I come from a rather Dutch part of New York state, and my parents from the more westerly more German part. The word noodle comes from German Nudel. My hometown also has a lot of Italian-Americans, so maybe that helped the pasta/noodle distinction become meaningful in my mind.)
Now, the OED defines noodle as:
My childhood understanding of a pasta/noodle divide seems to be in tune with the National Pasta Association:
And then there is spaghetti noodle (the lead character in a series of Hyperbole-and-a-Half cartoons—which has macaroni noodle too). For me, this is a way of getting around the problem of spaghetti having become a mass noun when it was borrowed into English. Actually, I wrote about this in my textbook, so I might as well quote myself at length (with a little extra explanation in red). This is part of an explanation of Anna Wierzbicka's argument that the 'countable' or 'uncountable' grammatical status of a word is not arbitrary:
After 1980, there are more examples in recipes. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (from the 2000s), there are only 8 instances, 5 of them singular as in "Sure enough, a long spaghetti noodle had entangled itself in my reddish-brown hair."
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I'm adding this bit (between the lines) the day after the original post, because I forgot to say these things:
"German"-style noodle dishes are much less common in the UK than they are in the US (which is to say: I've never seen one in Britain), but I also get the feeling that pasta felt 'foreign' more recently in the UK than in the US. Here are some thoughts related to that.
Just in case you want to get even by judging me for failing to not-judge spaghetti on toast, know this: my family eats Kraft macaroni (AmE: and) cheese with (Dad's homemade) strawberry jam on top. And I'm not going to apologi{z/s}e for that. It's great. (I've no idea how this started. Could there be any link to having a German grandma—sweet noodle dishes? Dan Jurafsky's The Language of Food says that macaroni was originally a sweet almond pasta—but I can't imagine that a 14th century Italian dish affected my family's eating habits.)Let's start with the British. In my experience (and, I think, Jane's) noodle in the UK is associated with Asian food. This is indeed what my English (and American, she would tell you) 7-year-old means when she says that her favo(u)rite food is noodles (various types and dishes but especially pad see ew and yaki soba. I've come to reali{z/s}e that on some days I eat nothing that I ate as a child).
Noodle is used for Asian types of noodles and noodle dishes in the US too. But I would suspect that the default understood ethnicity of noodle will vary by the speaker's age, location and ethnicity in the US.
Let's start with me, because that's easy (for me). If someone in my family asked me to go to Wegman's and buy some noodles, I would pick up a bag of these:
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| http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/beef-stroganoff-recipe.html |
Now, in my childhood, I would not have called those noodles pasta. I'm grown up now and I've come to tolerate much, so maybe I could bear to now. But to me, as a child, pasta was what you had in Italian food, noodles were what you had in the "less ethnic" dishes. But, of course, the other foods were ethnic too, and I suspect that my default understanding of the word noodle may be more common in the parts of the US that had more northern-European settlement. (I come from a rather Dutch part of New York state, and my parents from the more westerly more German part. The word noodle comes from German Nudel. My hometown also has a lot of Italian-Americans, so maybe that helped the pasta/noodle distinction become meaningful in my mind.)
Now, the OED defines noodle as:
For me, that's not quite right. In my mind, a noodle is prototypically ribbon-like, rather than string-like. Once I started to get my head (a)round Italian pasta being noodles, I could admit that fettuccine and linguini were noodles, but spaghetti was a more borderline case. I'd not use noodle for macaroni or shells (which in the UK are harder to come by and are often called by the Italian name, conchiglioni). (By the way, there's discussion of the BrE/AmE difference in the pronunciation of pasta back here.)A long stringlike piece of pasta or similar flour paste cooked in liquid and served either in a soup or as an accompaniment to another dish; (more generally in U.S.) any style of pasta. [...]
My childhood understanding of a pasta/noodle divide seems to be in tune with the National Pasta Association:
According to the standards published by the National Pasta Association, noodles must contain at least 5.5% egg solids by weight. Noodles can be added to soups and casseroles while pasta can be made a complete meal with addition of a few vegetables. Pasta is much lighter and, under Italian law, can only be made with durum wheat. [diffen.com]Still, I am betting that (a) younger Americans (maybe especially in certain areas) are more likely to have 'Asian' as the default ethnicity of 'noodle', and (b) ethnicity/region might make a difference for older people. Unfortunately, I can't find any dialect maps for noodle meanings—so what do you say/mean? Would any of you mean 'spaghetti' if you said "We're having noodles for dinner"? Please give an approximation of age and where you're from with your answer.
And then there is spaghetti noodle (the lead character in a series of Hyperbole-and-a-Half cartoons—which has macaroni noodle too). For me, this is a way of getting around the problem of spaghetti having become a mass noun when it was borrowed into English. Actually, I wrote about this in my textbook, so I might as well quote myself at length (with a little extra explanation in red). This is part of an explanation of Anna Wierzbicka's argument that the 'countable' or 'uncountable' grammatical status of a word is not arbitrary:
[...] cultures may differ in how they interact with, and thus conceptualize, the denotata [i.e. things that words refer to]. For example, although people rarely bother to count it, in Italian spaghetti is a plural count noun (1 spaghetto, 2 spaghetti). In English spaghetti is treated as a mass noun. This is not just because English speakers do not know that spaghetti is a plural; we could very easily add our own plural marking to it to make it a count noun (two spaghettis), but we don’t. It also is not because spaghetti is too small to be counted in English, since noodle, which denotes practically the same thing as spaghetti, is a count noun. Wierzbicka (in a lecture given in the early 1990s) has pointed out that English speakers have a very different relationship to spaghetti than Italians do. First, Italians are more connected to how spaghetti is made — historically it was made at home, where the individual strands would have to be handled. On the other hand, spaghetti generally entered English speakers’ consciousness as something that gets poured out of a box into boiling water — with no need to handle individual pieces. Second, pasta is eaten differently in Italy and English-speaking countries. Spaghetti in English often refers to a whole dish, which is presented as a mass of pasta beneath an opaque tomato sauce. In Italy, pasta is traditionally a first course or side dish, where it may be eaten with just a bit of oil and garlic. In this case, the strands are more perceptible as individuals. Furthermore, some English speakers cut their spaghetti, destroying the integrity of the individual strings, whereas Italians instead wrap the strings around a fork or slurp them up without cutting them.The way I understand spaghetti noodle is that it's an AmE way of making spaghetti countable. I'd say a piece of spaghetti or three strands of spaghetti. BrE seems to prefer counting spaghetti in strings. In those cases, we're counting with a noun that indicates a 'unit of', but spaghetti noodle (and macaroni noodle, if you're so inclined) does the job too, with noodle being a unit of spaghetti. Looking it up in Google Books, there are only spaghetti noodle(s) after the 1960s, and most of the hits are false—having a punctuation mark between spaghetti and noodle(s). This is the earliest instance I found, from 1964, where the emphasis is on the forming of the pasta:
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| https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UE_3pZs3_UUC&pg=PA293&dq=%22spaghetti+noodles%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB8Q6AEwADgUahUKEwji24_LjKLHAhXDXBoKHZzDDVw#v=onepage&q=%22spaghetti%20noodles%22&f=false |
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I'm adding this bit (between the lines) the day after the original post, because I forgot to say these things:
"German"-style noodle dishes are much less common in the UK than they are in the US (which is to say: I've never seen one in Britain), but I also get the feeling that pasta felt 'foreign' more recently in the UK than in the US. Here are some thoughts related to that.
- My English sister-in-law (in about 2003?) made a pasta dinner of some sort for her future (English) mother-in-law, who was in her early 70s. The woman had never had pasta before in her life (and was rather unimpressed). I cannot imagine meeting her American counterpart (i.e. 70s, non-immigrant, suburban) who had never eaten pasta. I tell this story to other English people and they say 'unusual, but certainly not unimaginable'. On a slightly related note, the perceived 'foreignness' of garlic bread seems to sustain Peter Kay's career.
- As discussed in the comments, many British people of middle age think of their childhood spaghetti as coming out of a (BrE) tin (and then often served on toast—I try not to judge. I try very hard.). But the other way that people ate spaghetti in the UK in the 70s (and continue to) was spag bol—i.e. spaghetti bolognese—i.e. spaghetti with meat sauce. (In my experience, you can barely see the spaghetti.) Americans in the 70s were probably not a lot less rigid in their spaghetti habits, but our thing was spaghetti with meatballs. But at least we didn't make an ugly name for it. (Oops. Judgy again.)
- Americans, of course, had mass Italian immigration in the 19th century, and there are Italian restaurants there that were started in the 1800s that are still running now. The oldest Italian restaurant in the UK (the internet tells me) was founded in 1922 in Aberdeen—and it might have been the first one in the UK—this market-research history of Italian restaurants has nothing earlier. It might be interesting to know if the Scottish experience of pasta is different from the (southern-)English one, since there's been a good deal of Italian immigration to Scotland.
- Even before mass Italian immigration, pasta was not unknown in the US. Thomas Jefferson was a big fan of macaroni (which was treated then as a cover-term for pasta) and had macaroni-making equipment imported from Naples. The dandies of England may have too—the word macaroni was used to make fun of them (thus the macaroni line in Yankee Doodle).
Now I'm going to try to leave this post alone and not add any more!
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I suppose I should say something about the other noodle. This is older than the food word and unrelated to it, coming from an old word noddle for 'the back of the head'. This has two meanings that have taken root in different ways in the UK and US.
The first meaning is 'a stupid or silly person'. I don't think I hear that in the US, but I do hear in the UK. (I know a couple of parents who affix noodle to the ends of their children's N-starting names, e.g. Nellie Noodle, which seems kind of like calling a William Silly Billy.)
The second meaning is 'head', as in use your noodle or get hit in the noodle. Cambridge Dictionary lists this meaning as 'US old-fashioned informal', but it has a history in the UK. The first use in the OED is from Tristram Shandy: "What can have got into that precious noodle of thine?"
Posts
Kirk Poore
ReplyDeleteLynne made that point in the OP — so subtly that we didn't notice. She wrote:
my family eats Kraft macaroni (AmE: and) cheese with (Dad's homemade) strawberry jam on top
The enormity of the content blinded us to the language used.
Kirk Poore wrote: ... from comments on this thread it seems be "macaroni cheese" in BrE and "macaroni and cheese" in AmE.
ReplyDeleteYes, Kirk. That really is the usual difference. Lynne has noted it many times in many posts.
– AiNJ
Yes, I missed it. I was probably stunned by the strawberry jam addition.:)
ReplyDeleteI was walking the streets of Hoboken, New Jersey, today, and on Washington Street near the old Lackawanna RR terminal, passed the establishment of Planet Mac, purveyers of "gourmet mac 'n cheese".
ReplyDeleteHe or she who wouldst may surf to planetmac.com, and learn what they hath wrought with the crescent pasta tubes.
Western Canada, born 1983
ReplyDeletePasta was not a term I grew up with, but now use occasionally for the Italian origin shaped items and for me pasta is a sub-set category of noodles, I've never associated noodles with Asian food in particular, that's just another sub-set category of noodles.
I grew up with 'noddles' and the following were common individual types that all fell into that category for me:
spaghetti, dried, served with tomato/meat sauce
macaroni, dried, served with cheese sauce
linguini, dried, tossed with olive oil, garlic and clams
tortellini, fresh, tossed with oil and topped with grated cheese
ravioli, tinned with tomato sauce
lasagna, frozen and pre-built into a layered casserole
ribbons (egg noodles), dried, served with butter (note I didn't know these didn't fall under the 'pasta' category until reading this post)
ramen, dried, in an instant soup packet
chow main, semi-dried, served with stir-fried veg & meat
chicken noodle soup, dried in an instant soup packet -or- condensed in a tin -or- made fresh by my Oma (german grandmother)
We also ate a fair amount of perogies but I never associated them with noodles (/pasta)
As an adult I've added to the commonly found noodles in my kitchen with more pasta shapes (fusili, penne, orzo) and asian styles (udon, rice vermicelli) and german styles (spaetzle)
also a note on dumplings; my family now eats a lot of dumplings of various asian origins (being noodle wrapped around vegetables and/or meat) and I buy them pre-made frozen. As well as perogies which I now conclude fall under the 'dumpling' category. However growing up perogies were just perogies and dumplings were something completely different; they were a cloud-like homogeneous (no filling) mass floating in my chicken soup and made by my Oma. I haven't seen such things in my adulthood.
British, early 40s. Am with all the other Brits on the subject of pasta and noodles. I'm just posting to add that my other half, who grew up in Austria with am Austrian father and a British mother, and who therefore grew up speaking both German and English, refers to "pasta noodles" if he wants spaghetti or some other kind of pasta. He imports "noodles" for "noodle soup" - these noodles are very fine and quite short. I think they are made of pasta rather than whatever Asian noodles are made from.
ReplyDeleteThe Scottish macaroni pies contain macaroni cheese.
I like to cook sausages with my cauliflower cheese.
The radio food programme The Kitchen Cabinet has just been on the air with a show recorded in King's Lynn. This used to be the site of Cambells' first soup factory outside America. And at least some of the panel of food experts took seriously Campbells' claim that they worked basically from home-made recipes — except, of course, that they cooked in vast vats.
ReplyDeleteMost notable, one remarked that when Campbells made a condensed mushroom soup they made
'a really good mushroom veloutée'.
So, well done Lynne for spotting that ingredient!
Late to the comments party, but I wanted to point out something that amused/confused me: "vermicelli", to me (37-year-old raised in Cleveland, OH) is rice vermicelli, generally in Vietnamese food; I didn't hear the term until I moved out of the midwest and encountered more varied Asian cuisines. From a google image search, it looks like it also means spaghetti broken into short pieces? It's not something I associate with Italian food at all.
ReplyDeleteAs for the "pasta" as pretentious -- it wasn't, by the time I was growing up, although it generally meant Italian specifically -- pierogis weren't pasta, nor were egg noodles (which I disliked as a kid, even when I loved fettuchini -- something about the texture). But there was a general sentiment that calling things by their original-language names when they hadn't been fully brought into American English and it wasn't your cultural heritage was pretentious -- or even getting the pronunciation right. Correcting "expresso" to "espresso" (when that trend hit) was seen as pretentious, correctly pronouncing bruschetta would get you weird looks, etc. I'm trying to remember some non-Italian examples, because I know there were a bunch, but I'm blanking.
Vermicelli ('little worms') is a pasta noodle that's thinner than spaghetti. (Not broken spaghetti.) In BrE it's also used to refer to (AmE) chocolate sprinkles.
DeleteGah -- I think that should be spelled Lo Mein. Not sure....
ReplyDeleteI meant to say something along this line last year, and then forgot about this entire thread before suddenly stumbling onto it again.
ReplyDelete@pineau You've just said almost EXACTLY what I, as an American, thought. I think of macaroni and cheese as homestyle, down-home (to be a bit slangy) cooking -- not necessarily dowdy (though that may carry a different connotation in Britain than it does in America) but as a basic, everyday, non-pretentious meal, and exactly what you might get from a grandma. Certainly NOT what you'd get at an upscale restaurant.
That said, we have a bar that is also serving rather snooty la-di-da meals, definitely with upscale pretensions, and they have fancy macaroni and cheese on their menu. You can get it with a few choices of additional stuff mixed in if you pay extra, the only one of these I can remember is bacon. I think it uses extra cheeses, not just cheddar, and it comes, as they now say, "plated" -- meaning they sort of drizzle stuff about and put little pieces of green stuff on the edge to make it pretty before they serve it. I've had it and it's good, but it isn't really the same as homemade mac'n'cheese and quite frankly it was a bit weird and not as good.
I'm with you on this one, when did mac'n'cheese become a classy meal? A new fad in the restaurant world perhaps?
(I'm getting caught up on your old posts all at once, sorry!)
ReplyDeleteI'm 29, from NYC/New England (though probably worth mentioning that my parents are immigrants (from Cuba)). I use pasta as the default term. I am actually struggling to think of a time I would use the word "noodle" on its own. "Egg noodles," "Asian noodles," etc., yes, but I would never say "I'm having noodles for dinner," whereas "I'm having pasta" sounds totally normal (note I wouldn't call something like lo mein "pasta," but I'd either use the specific term "Asian noodles" or just name the particular dish).
I do use "noodle" in the context of "chicken noodle soup." The "noodles" in the soup my mother made were very thin "fideos," which came dried in nests -- kind of like vermicelli or angel hair. Ordered in a restaurant or out of a can, I think I would expect it to have thicker, flat, wavy noodles. I do recognize that "noodles" in my mind, must be long and thin, while pasta can be any shape. Except, of course, that if someone asked me what spaetzle is, I would say "a kind of German noodle." But I would never look at spaetzle and spontaneously call it "noodles."
Now the word noodle looks very strange.
I’m nineteen and have lived in Utah, USA all my life. I just got in a little argument (more like Fell into a cultural rift) with my friend (17) from New Zealand. I said something about Lasagne *noodles* and she got very confused, saying that they weren’t noodles because noodles are things like spaghetti and yakisoba. For my entire life I’ve used pasta to mean things you add to tomato sauce (and now that I think about it usually strictly Italian type dishes that use wheat, flour, and egg pasta). I have used noodle a blanket term for everything you can boil or add to a dish and is made from wheat and water. Think every pasta is a noodle but not every noodle is pasta. I’ve been exposed to many food cultures (Indian, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, to name a few) and from what I can recall my mindset seems to hold true for my region. Of course there are specific noodle names, but I’ve never been called out for using noodle as a blanket term. Almost as jarring as when we encountered the reali(s/z)e disparity lol.
ReplyDeleteInteresting how to food-related posts always get the most comments. Macaroni or pasta for Italian, noodles for Asian and things I'd classify as generic American that are probably German or some such in origin such as casseroles or noodle sides like noodles in cream sauce.
ReplyDeleteBrE. Scot. Mid 60s. One of the many things I love about this blog is that so many of the regular commenters ( both sides if the Atlantic) are within a decade either way of my own age. Who would have thought that such a simple difference would generate so many replies? And so many potted histories of changing eating habits in the two countries over the years. Who says that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
ReplyDeleteIn my part of Scotland, Chinese restaurants appeared before other foreign food outlets. They always had a English menu section for the less adventurous, nearly always with Chicken Maryland (NOT Murlin) with chips, and banana fritters with ice cream as a dessert option.
One one trip to Europe (can’t remember if it was Belgium or Denmark), I had lunch in the staff canteen of the establishment I was visiting. I selected a pork chop, and only just stopped the serving lady giving me what looked like spaghetti instead of potatoes. Finally, this makes sense. I always associated chicken noodle soup with the European Jewish community, but never thought about the origin of the word “noodle” till reading this post. It’s now blindingly obvious that it’s not an Asian word, even though I have always thought of noodles as Asian food. I was always aware of noodles in minestrone soup, but never made the connection with pasta. If I had thought about it, I would have assumed that the Northern European noodles were borrowed from Italy: apparently, all things Italian were the height of fashion for much of the history of the Austrian (later Austria-Hungarian) Empire. At least, that’s what I’ve been told by several different walking tour guides in different European cities.
My father was extremely conservative in his food choices, so I didn’t have many opportunities to experiment until I left home. I finally got to try spaghetti (and macaroni, Indian food, Chinese food and pizza) when I was at university in the early to mid 70s. Noodles were attempted in the late 80s, the kind you buy dry in small blocks, usually with a sachet of chicken or curry flavouring. Recently, I wanted to stock up on these, and was astounded by the range of Asian noodle types that seem to have appeared on supermarket shelves virtually overnight.
It is some years since this topic was live, but only a few days since I discovered a very interesting difference between our two sides of the Atlantic. Here in the UK, lasagne (please note spelling) is based on that served in (I think) the Emilio-Romagna district - flat sheets of pasta, separated by a bolognese-style ragu and a bechamel sauce. In America, as I understand it, it is spelt lasagna and is modelled more on that served in Naples, with (possibly) more crinkled pasta sheets, a meatball sauce and the cheese layer is made of ricotta and mascarpone! So it would appear that we Brits picked up one kind of lasagne, and Americans another!
ReplyDelete