- Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
- Mixing water, flour and egg yolk isn't exactly a massive qualitative leap from simply having flour around.
- Spice were carried over long distances in the ancient world because of their high value density. Food wasn't. Nobody was shipping around noodles. It's still inefficient enough that all process foods are more or less locally made
now.
And finally, I don't understand why you're hypothesizing that Roman pasta would have necessarily been related to Chinese people in Rome. It makes absolutely no sense.
> Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
While Chinese noodles may be made of rice or wheat flour and Italian pasta is made of wheat flour, the noodles, regardless of what material they're made of, are indeed made in more or less the same way. And indeed, as you have left it, insisting they have nothing in common does not change that it's entirely unsupportable. That the earliest evidence of Italian pasta around the 4th century BC postdates the earliest evidence of China trading with the West, which predates Rome's founding, it is clear when taken in context of the earliest evidence of Chinese noodles around the 4th millennium BC that the recipe for noodles migrated to the West. While it is possible some intrepid Roman chef independently divined the magical process of inducing noodles from wheat flour coincidentally right around the time of the earliest evidence of Chinese trade with the West, it is slightly more complicated than the recipe, a staple of Chinese cuisine for maybe 3500 years by then, being passed along with silk, tea and ivory by traders.
I am completely flummoxed that you can't seem to grasp this, that not only did Romans not invent pasta, they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492. Italy basically imported everything, invented nothing, even the Romans themselves were imported and stole most of the innovations attributed to them from the Etruscans, themselves having migrated from S. Turkey, and who the Romans pretty much wiped out within a few hundred years. Italians like to trace their roots in a flattering way because Rome happens to be there, but I don't think there were any Italians before 1946.
By your logic the Jomon culture imported the knowledge of ceramics from Moravia because the Venus of Dolní Věstonice predates the Jomon culture. I'm not quite sure this is how it works.
> they could not possibly have ever made or even tasted pasta sauce, as Christopher Columbus hadn't yet been born when the last Roman died, nor could he have invented the tomato before 1492
You seem to have a penchant for continuously shifting goalposts. What does sauce to have with this?
- Chinese noodles and Italian pasta have nothing in common save for the shape of some variants.
- Mixing water, flour and egg yolk isn't exactly a massive qualitative leap from simply having flour around.
- Spice were carried over long distances in the ancient world because of their high value density. Food wasn't. Nobody was shipping around noodles. It's still inefficient enough that all process foods are more or less locally made now.
And finally, I don't understand why you're hypothesizing that Roman pasta would have necessarily been related to Chinese people in Rome. It makes absolutely no sense.