Exam taking became so ingrained in Chinese culture that in Yunnan Province, a local dish called Crossing Bridge Noodles was said to have been developed specifically for cramming scholars. As the story goes, a wife used to walk across a bridge to deliver a nocturnal noodle snack to her husband, who was up late studying. The noodles, however, cooled before she crossed the bridge. So she devised a way of keeping the dish hot with an insulating layer of oil. True or not, the story says a lot about national obsessions. Consider, by comparison, the English, whose contribution to the culinary
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