2009 I’m the man who brought spaghetti (back) to China

Steven B. Zwickel

August, 2009

I’m the man who brought spaghetti (back) to China. (According to a popular myth, Marco Polo brought noodles from China to Italy 700 years ago. It’s not true, but who cares?). This is the story of how an American prepared a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs with all the wrong ingredients in China.

In July, 2009, I returned to Dingnan, the city in Jiangxi province where I’d had such a great time teaching conversational English to teenagers the year before. My host was Geoffery Zhang Yong Bin, who taught English at the local high school. Geoffery met me at the train station and helped me get a hotel room. I spent a couple of wonderful days with my students and their families. 

After a long afternoon hiking around Dingnan, I arranged to meet Geoffery, his wife Linda, and their daughter Honey later so we could go to dinner. I got the woman at the hotel to let me use the internet connection for 20 minutes so I could send out my email. The room I was in didn’t have a working air-conditioner, so I had to change my shirt again before going out to dinner. I remember doing this last summer and I was glad I brought so many extra shirts with me this year.

We ate dinner at a restaurant near the little lake and close to the International Hotel where I lived the summer before. While we were waiting to be served, Geoffery and I were conversed in English and he translated for his wife and daughter. Geoffery asked me how often I ate Chinese food in Madison and I told him about all the restaurants we have (I think Madison now has about 40 Chinese restaurants). I told him that Americans like variety in their diets and it isn’t unusual for us to eat a different kind of food every day of the week. I knew he’d had Korean food and when I asked him if he’d ever had Japanese food and he said no. Nor had he tried Thai or Vietnamese.

He asked me what kind of food I liked best and I told him that Indian was very high on my list, followed by Italian. I told him that there were many, many foods he could eat in Madison. In fact, I said, if he came to my house I would cook an Italian food called spaghetti for him.

Can you see where this was going? Before I knew it, I had offered to cook dinner for the four of us if Geoffery and Linda would buy the ingredients. I made a list of what I would need and wondered what I was getting myself into. I told them that we could either have meatballs or we could use ground meat. Geoffery told me that he has a way to grind meat, so I told him that he could buy an inexpensive piece of meat and I would use that in the sauce.

Geoffery let me pay for dinner. He sent Linda and Honey home in a cab and we went for a walk around the lake. Then it was time for a zú liáo — a Chinese foot massage.

This zú liáo “foot” massage is one of the greatest inventions ever. It starts with a lovely young woman squeezing and pounding your shoulders and neck while your feet soak in hot tea. That night, I think it lasted a long time. We watched the new Dingnan TV station (same dreck as the rest of Chinese TV, but with a local touch). We ate watermelon and drank green tea while the girls pushed, twisted, and pounded on us. They even cleaned the Dingnan mud off my shoes. Geoffery let me pay ($13) for both of us.

I was so relaxed I had trouble getting up to my room—4th floor walk-up. Very pleasant dreams indeed. Tomorrow I am cooking spaghetti in China!

I slept a bit later than I usually do in China. I don’t know why, but most mornings I am up and awake before 6 here. Back in Madison I rarely get up before my alarm goes off, but in China I seem to need less sleep and I get up earlier. That’s why I have been able to do so much writing here.

Blue skies and mild temperatures lured me out of the hotel. I wandered over to the “Supermarket” to see what had changed since last year. It was only slightly changed; someone had reorganized the second floor merchandise so that clothing took up a lot more floor space. I didn’t see any of the Chinese swords or musical instruments they had last summer. The first things you still pass when you enter are the big tubs of “Wisconsan” ginseng. The street on the far side of the supermarket is now an outdoor clothing and housewares market.

Traffic is heavier in Dingnan this summer. There are more cars and the city has installed electronic count-down traffic lights at several busy intersections. I was surprised to see the police out and enforcing the traffic laws during rush hour. I never saw anything like that anywhere else in China. In Weishi, a traffic cop stood on a podium in the middle of the busiest intersection, but she stood at attention and seemed fairly oblivious to what the cars and trucks were doing below her.

Dingnan is different from other parts of China in other ways, too. The air here is clean—I could see the stars and the moon at night, something I never saw anywhere else this summer. The streets are clean—they wash them twice a day. I saw more people wearing nicer clothing here than in other cities. Even the bicycles have less rust on them. Later in the afternoon, when I was walking with some of my students back to my hotel, one of them commented that Dingnan is so small. Then she said, “And we are so poor!” I was going to say something about what I’d seen in Henan Province, but I just shook my head and said, “No, you are not poor.” Teenagers have their own ideas about money and I didn’t think I could give an adequate explanation of the realities of economics, so I shut up.

After lunch at the home of one of my former students, I played poker with the girls for “Hell money” and plastic coins. Poker was fun. I lost most of my “money” then I won it all back again. The girls had trouble keeping poker faces. They are hardly inscrutable. Geoffery called and asked if I’d like to go for a bike ride later. We made plans to meet at the hotel at 4.

He was waiting for me wearing Nike athletic wear and shoes. I’d never seen him dressed in anything but long pants and a dress shirt before, so this was a bit of a shock. He had two bikes, his own and Kelly Marie’s, for us to use. We rode south around the lake and I finally got in to see the new athletic field at the school. The surface is artificial turf and Geoffery insisted that they’d put in a big drainage system beneath it (Last summer that field never dried out.).

We headed east and Geoffery showed me the building where he hopes to buy a new apartment next year. We got to another new road, but Kelly Marie’s bike was much too short for me and my legs started cramping up, so we went back to the hotel.

I changed into a dry shirt and we went to Geoffery’s to make spaghetti. He, or Linda, had bought 3 tomatoes, 2 onions, and about 50 garlic cloves. They had a bottle of “tomato sauce” that seemed to have a lot of added thickener.

The search for hard cheese had failed. Geoffery had asked at the bakery and he’d brought back a cup of sweet cream pastry filling. I assured him it wouldn’t go to waste and that I’d make a special dessert out of it.

Linda had brought home a bag of Chinese meatballs, which I think are made from pork. She’d also purchased a piece of meat that looked like beef. I asked them if they wanted to save back the meat and just have the meatballs, and they said they wanted to use the meat for the spaghetti.

I put on an apron, an act that brought on endless rounds of giggles. I chopped up the veggies. I saw some small peppers on the floor (they don’t have a pantry, so they keep food wherever they have room) and I asked Geoffery if they were hot. He said no, so I chopped one up. Linda seemed a little bit unnerved by having someone else cooking in her kitchen. I asked Geoffery to reassure her that I wouldn’t touch anything without asking and that seemed to be OK.

Linda took out the meat and started trimming off the fat. I tried to keep her from cutting off too much. Then she started to slice the meat. I got Geoffery to explain to her that I wanted to grind the meat. She dug around under the dining table and pulled out an electric food processor! I threw in the meat. Geoffery and Linda stepped back. I turned the machine on. Just a few clicks and I had ground beef. Hooray!

I poured some oil (peanut, I think) into a wok and tossed in the onions and garlic with a spoonful of salt. Next came the meat. I asked for wine and Linda produced an unlabeled bottle. It was my duty as a chef to try a big swig, which made Geoffery go into hysterical laughter. It was sweet wine, just what I needed. I poured some into the wok. I added the meatballs and the entire bottle of tomato sauce with the tomatoes and the pepper. It was starting to look sort of like spaghetti sauce.

Oregano had been impossible to find. Geoffery wasn’t even sure what it was. I got Geoffery to turn on his computer and we went on-line looking for herbs. I typed in “oregano” and he read the Chinese and shook his head. I typed in “basil”. No, neither he nor Linda had ever seen basil. (Later, I remembered having seen flower pots with basil growing in Kaifeng). The same with thyme, rosemary, cilantro, marjoram, and allspice. They read the Chinese and looked at the pictures and shook their heads. Can you make a decent spaghetti sauce without any herbs? I guess.

While the sauce was cooking, I cut two big hunks of watermelon from the one sitting on the dining table. I chopped it into bite-sized pieces and put them in a bowl. I asked Geoffery if he had any other fruit around. All he had was a single Dingnan pear, so I washed it, cut it up and added it to the watermelon. I sprinkled some sugar over the fruit and poured on some of the wine. Then I put the bowl in the fridge and went back to my sauce.

I made sure the meatballs were completely cooked. Linda only has one burner, so I had to take the sauce off the heat while she boiled water for the noodles. When the noodles were ready, I dished them out and re-heated the sauce before I poured it over them. Everyone got 4 meatballs. I set them on the table and told Geoffery to explain to Linda and Honey that I wouldn’t be at all upset if they didn’t like the food. I knew that it was strange to them and that they had never had these ingredients combined this way before, so if they tasted it and chose to have rice instead I wouldn’t mind.

We ate spaghetti with chopsticks and they liked it.

I brought out the fruit and dished it out into rice cups. Then I put a dollop of the pastry filling on top of each cup and served it. It was a big hit with everyone. They were very nice about the whole meal. It felt good to be able to cook for someone else for a change.

After dinner it was time for me to go back to the hotel to pack. That was my last night in Dingnan. The next day I left for Guangzhou, Tokyo and back to Wisconsin, where they sell fresh, dried, and organic oregano and where you can buy genuine, aged asiago to put on pasta. So, Marco Polo or not, I claim the title of man who brought spaghetti back to China.