As in other parts of northern China, in Shanxi there seems to be a gender divide when it comes to pasta-making. Women specialize in the quiet, patient jobs, rolling out doughs by hand and wrapping buns and dumplings or grating soft doughs into pots of water, while men carry out the dramatic tasks, playing their dough ‘violins’, pulling skeins of dough into hundreds of strandy noodles and catapulting squares and snippets of dough through the air.
