Ramen

Do you know what this word means? The word origin from English is Japanese but from Japanese it comes from the Chinese. According to certain English dictionaries this word is the newer addition to the English language. To many

ramen will be familiar with cup noodles or instant noodles, typical white flour noodles. It is interesting to note that the word in Japanese is written in katakana to show that it is a foreign loan word (Chinese). In Chinese the word is raamien written like 拉麺. The first character ra is the character meaning to pull, you will find this character on doors telling you to pull the door open. The second character is mien or noodles. Therefore, ra-mien becomes “pulled noodles” or stretched noodles. Interestingly the place in China known for there hand stretched noodles is Lanzhou, now quite famous all over China and perhaps the world is “Lanzhou Raamien”. These are hand stretched noodles and are found in only certain areas in China. I wonder if this was the actual word origin, it does sound probable.

Nowadays, most ramen noodles are machine made so are quite short, and are made either straight or curly. I think it is the Japanese kind that are curly so that they fit into the small packaging, not really sure of this though.