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 20 June 2002
Richard Ng
As a BBC born and bred, I consider myself pretty grounded in the ways of the traditional British lifestyle. I understand the national obsessions of football, curry and the weather. I jostle on the tube, I'm marrying my wonderful English fiancee, Ruth, in August and I pub (though I admit I go beetroot if I don't take it slow). However, there seems to be an innate part of me that just can't do without noodles. I love 'em. I've eaten them for every meal, for breakfast, lunch, dinner and pre-bedtime snack, unashamedly, in the same day. I buy packets of them in boxes of 30 (it's cheaper and saves having to face a noodle-less larder at midnight). I eat them souped and fried and even in that bizarre oily 'stir-in' mix that tries to be fried, in a funny kind of way. I've had them with a sausage, bacon and egg fry-up. I cook up spaghetti in a bowl of thin chicken broth and add pork and pickled cabbage for a traditional shanghai-ish noodle meal. I've eaten them raw and crunchy in Nepal, fresh and glorious udon in tiny Japanese hole-in-the-walls and cooked to mass-produced perfection in those wonderful Dong Dong (East East) restaurants, throughout Hong Kong (think McDonalds but you order your Coke with a steaming bowl of wonton noodles and they ask if you want chilli fishballs on the side). It's embarrassing but I'm actually salivating while I write this. So from where does this all-encompassing love derive? I can't attribute it all to my mum's cooking since it was at my insistence rather than hers that I managed to get a packet of wonton flavour Doll noodles in my Christmas stocking one year. Packet noodles, it must be said, are not the healthiest of foods and after hearing about people who've died with great lumps of guar gum stuck in their guts, I religiously rinse my noodles through once they've softened out of their dried 'cake' form. Speaking of religion, I believe it total sacrilege to break the noodle cake before cooking it and I have watched agahast as people I previously thought of as good friends, crack their noodles into half and quarters... I've even converted the heathen - before she met me, Ruth didn't even eat rice. Now, from time to time, she actually craves noodles, particularly Mi Goreng (a fried noodle simulacrum with an acquired taste, including not one, two, or three but FOUR sachets of add-ables). I shall disown any children who are not eating noodles by age two. Even my hamster eats noodles. I know I'm not alone in my crazed addiction. From time to time I see others in the supermarket looking shiftily around before pulling a box off the shelf and hiding it under a sack of rice. People like me, who can identify a brand (and even a flavour) from the smell of the dried noodle cake. People who chase those last stray centimetres around their soupy bowls with chopsticks. People who get up again after going to bed, for one last bowl. May you dream well my brothers and sisters. Dream of sweet, sweet noodles. |
