We don’t quite know whether it was Marco Polo, the famous Venetian traveler of the 13th century, who brought back noodles from China to Italy and hence kick started the pasta revolution. But what we do know for sure is that it was vermicelli that he first encountered in the Far East. That he recognised the strands and named them in his account without describing them in too much detail has given credence to the theory that pasta was already firmly present in the eating cultures of this part of the world. But it was the trade between the east and the west, following the route Marco Polo took, the silk route as we now call it, that not only facilitated the exchange of capital and goods but of ideas, stories and foods too.
Seviyan in India is perhaps a fall out of that tradition of syncreticism. Vermicelli or seviyanas we call them in northern India are pretty pervasive. In China, traditionally the thin noodles were typically made of buckwheat or older grains, though of course today it is the Cantonese style rice strands that are most famous. You can find them as the mai fun(meaning rice) noodles on Cantonese-inspired menus, as stuffing in lumpia rolls, in thebihun goreng of Indonesian food, and all over south east Asia in many stir fries served up with sauce, fish, peanuts, lime and more.
Seviyan in India is perhaps a fall out of that tradition of syncreticism. Vermicelli or seviyanas we call them in northern India are pretty pervasive. In China, traditionally the thin noodles were typically made of buckwheat or older grains, though of course today it is the Cantonese style rice strands that are most famous. You can find them as the mai fun(meaning rice) noodles on Cantonese-inspired menus, as stuffing in lumpia rolls, in thebihun goreng of Indonesian food, and all over south east Asia in many stir fries served up with sauce, fish, peanuts, lime and more.
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