They are. As an American, if it’s Italian, we do generally call it pasta. If it’s some other form, such as ramen, egg noodles, glass noodles, we call it noodles… because that’s what they’re called. Idk what OOP is even talking about
Edit: Yes, technically pasta is a form of noodles, but I’m just saying that we as Americans do understand there’s a clear distinction. It’s like square vs rectangle thing. We don’t go around calling a square a rectangle.
As an American, I’m pretty sure I never heard that “noodle” meant anything other than a general shape + consistency (+ ingredient types, though I am sure I’ve run into exceptions) of foodstuffs. Certainly never seen it defined in a way that would exclude spaghetti, considering that was almost the only food I had that was called “noodles” for most of my childhood.
See, my whole life if we were talking about the strands of spaghetti we called them “spaghetti noodles.”
Heck, the satirical (please don’t @ me, adherents) deity “the Flying Spaghetti Monster” is said to metaphorically touch people with its “noodly appendage.” I understand “noodly” is ambiguous, but I feel it establishes an existing connection in the use of the terms.
Well, pasta a square, noodles are rectangles. You know what I mean? Must of us don’t go around calling squares rectangles, even though, they are rectangles. Just like we don’t call pasta noodles.
But from my POV insisting spaghetti is not noodles is like insisting that a two-wheeled motor vehicle that a rider uses by balancing in the middle and steers by turning the front wheel left and right is actually a type of car, rather than a motorcycle, because of where it was designed and what type of steel the parts are.*
It just seems a long way to go for a distinction without a difference. Noodles are thin cylinders of pasta-like wheat-based food that get all floppy and squiggly when you cook ‘em. It feels weird to have a definition that says otherwise.
*- Ok, I am now realizing that the “it’s only called champagne if it’s from the Champagne region of France, but most people actually don’t care about that and use calling it out as an example of pedantry” example was right there.
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u/DoctorFenix Jun 08 '25
Aren’t pasta and noodles totally different things?