LOL, Helga. Thanks for sharing.
About the noodles... I'm not sure what happened on which side.
Dictionary.com says this about "noodle":
A narrow, ribbonlike strip of dried dough, usually made of flour, eggs, and water.
It further notes that the word comes from the German "Nudel," but, since I don't speak German, I don't know how that word is used.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, "pasta" is a subset of "noodles." All pasta is noodles, but there are noodles that are not pasta. The definition above clearly includes pasta, as far as I'm concerned.
Their definition of "pasta" is:
Unleavened dough, made of wheat flour, water, and sometimes eggs, that is molded into any of a variety of shapes and boiled.
n : shaped and dried dough made from flour and water and sometimes egg
Glancing through history, this makes sense. Pasta was created when Marco Pollo went to China and discovered noodles. He brought the idea back, and tried to reproduce it with local grain. Those efforts led to pasta, a more or less new type of noodle.
In China, there are many different kinds of noodle, but the main distinctions are regional. In some areas, noodles are made with wheat flour, as they are in Italy (although the Italians use Semolina, which, IIRC, is a variety of wheat native to the area). Lo Mein noodles, for example, are very similar to spaghetti. In other areas, the most common grain is rice, and in those regions, you see rice noodles. Chow Mein noodles, glass noodles, etc.
In all cases, the idea is the same. It's just a matter of using rice or different kinds of wheat to make the flour.
So, Lo Mein, Chow Fun, Chow Mein, Spaghetti, Linguini, etc etc... All are noodles. Pasta are Italian-style noodles. Chinese noodles are an equally large subset, which includes rice noodles as well as some more pasta-like varieties.
Like I said, I don't know why the meaning is different in the UK than in the US and Canada, but I wonder if the change this time was made on the UK side.
Paul
