Wuhan's Other Export

2022-03-29

A short one today.

Summer in Wuhan is extremely long, and the high temperature causes food to deteriorate rapidly. Consequently, in the past people added dietary alkali into noodles to slow deterioration; this evolved into hot dry noodles.

And this charmingly quaint paragraph from Wikipedia:

Hot dry noodles, along with Shanxi's knife-cut noodles (刀削面; 刀削麵; dāoxiāomiàn), Liangguang's yifumian, Sichuan's dandanmian, and northern China's zhajiangmian, are collectively referred to as the "top five noodles of China" by People's Daily, and in a 2013 article titled "China's Top 10 famous noodles" Business Insider reported that CNTV rated reganmian the top Chinese noodle dish. The specifics of the preparation of hot dry noodles is discussed in Wuhan author Chi Li's novel Cold or Hot, It's Good to Live (冷也好热也好活着就好).

冷也好热也好活着就好 is literally something like "Even cold is good; even hot is good; so (就) living is good."

Thanks to E. for inspiring this post with some delicious hot-dry noodles.