First of all, click here for the playlist.
I have no first memory of pasta because pasta wasn’t novel but I do remember the pasta I ate. When I was little and my mother made all my food, I had penne for lunch with spoonfuls of Sacla pesto and atop this cheddar. I can feel the slippy-gripping of the big cheddar block in my little hand, the difficulty of holding it hard enough to grate it against the biggest eyes on the stainless steel grater. The block would be imprinted with my little paw marks. Even better, I’d have spinach and ricotta pasta parcels — packet ravioli — with butter and parmesan. Or cheddar, if there wasn’t parmesan.
As hungry children we'd be mollified by a steaming saucepan of spaghetti, tossed with butter and cheese, which would release a warm familiarity into the air. I have a very strong memory of my mother asking another mother “What did parents cook their children before we had pasta?” and she replied, “Oh, bread and dripping probably.” And they both laughed.
Dripping I knew about but it was alien. I'd tried it once with bread at some pub in Sussex — not somewhere serving dripping as a nice gastropub might now, but somewhere that, still in the mid-90s hadn't had the dripping kicked out of it. Pre-English revival English cooking. I didn’t like it and the idea of having it rather than pasta appalled me. How black and white film that would be. How odd how strange how foreign was bread and dripping.
Later I asked why people didn’t have pasta before. Well, because people didn’t always eat pasta here, because it was from Italy, because because. I liked this and found it uncomfortable, that there was something new in my everyday lunch.
My mother didn’t cook often in the evening, but one of the things she would make was spaghetti bolognese. Not the subtle unctuous milky ragu from Bologna but the English sort, the sort we all grew up eating, heavy on the tomatoes and the onion. This, again, with cheddar. Preferable I think: Anglo Bolognese is much much better with cheddar than with parmesan or any other dry cheese because the melty richness creates a sticky sort-of emulsion with the sauce.
My father would make penne with sharp caper laced tomato sauce, a sort of al’ariabiata; or English (/Anglo?) carbonara made with cream, parmesan, egg white and yolk, and crispy bacon; or excellent pesto Genovese, tingling with garlic, that he’d pummel in the pestle and mortar. I loved picking the leaves from the basil plants he’d buy from the supermarket especially, which would then die over the next week or so.
I ate metal trays of watery pasta at school and pasta bakes at friends’ houses — I hated the ones with tinned tuna and cheese. Someone’s Irish father made a peanut sauce for spaghetti, remarkable for its incredible richness and the way he said peanut, which made us squirm with laughter. Also macaroni cheese cooked by someone’s Jamaican granny which might have been my favourite. At my grandfather’s a magical, thick, peppery cream and pheasant sauce with spaghetti, the bird from a neighbour’s shoot.
Pasta had reached a certain sort of normality where it ceased to be exciting, my parents, my father especially, were enthusiastic and adventurous cooks and our table was sophisticated. But pasta was just pasta, and had its own sort-of English, at least settled, boring and quite mundane sauces. Pasta was simple food. I can’t think of a single time they served it at a dinner party.
It was mainly penne or spaghetti, with the occasional tagliatelle creeping in until it wasn’t and pasta began to take on many shapes. “I didn’t know that, that it could look like a little star.” Soup pasta noticed, actually, in a Polski sklep in Plymouth.
I don’t think my real pastification began until I moved back to London for university with Lo’. For Christmas I was bought Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Italian Cooking, which I paw/poured over. Italian food was becoming fashionable again, but in a way that seemed new and classic at once, avoiding the high street trattoria’s big plates and bread sticks. Rachel Roddy, the patron saint of the contemporary English love of pasta, had begun her blog a couple of years before and pasta machine sales were rocketing.
Thanks to kids like us. Lo’ and I would make fresh pasta in our little studio apartment in Hoxton, she turning the crank on the machine and I gently feeding the sheet in, laying the strands over chairs and on clothes hangers. With it I’d make a spicy king prawn sauce. Very delicious and a little spicy, and silly, as a friend pointed out because a dish like it ought to use a dry pasta with more bite. They were right. So, instead, I served my fresh pasta with a lamb ragu, made from left-over lamb shoulder. Much better.
And tomato sauce. In a time before I had complete control of the kitchen, Lo’ would make a tomato sauce in which the secret ingredient was tom-yum paste and tell me how much better it was than mine, standing over it for hours trying it until her tongue burnt and her lips were very red. I had to improve. I read and spoke to Italians and watched Youtube videos and finally met gained approval with a very saucy spicy sauce in which wholemeal spaghetti swims happily. It’s what I make for her when she’s unhappy or unwell or in pain or hungover. Sometimes I add a spoon of cream or yogurt.
I’d also make pestos, sort-of, based on what I could get easily. Basil is expensive, especially when compared with the massive bunches of parsley, coriander, dill, and mint I could get for 50p (now 75p) at Ridley Road. Likewise, pine nuts are a luxury besides walnuts or hazelnuts or peanuts which, lightly toasted, give their own creaminess. So that’s what I’d use, grinding big bunches of bright green herbs up with nuts — sometimes nuts picked out of muesli — and salt and oil and, if I didn’t have parmesan, a little honey.
My pestos were reflective of our environment, of our city. Nowhere is like London, nowhere else allows such culinary freewheeling. Another particularly London pasta was a ravioli filled with squash, sumac, ricotta and feta, served with sage butter. Where else would that make so much sense? At the home of some Italian friends in London I was impressed with their rigatoni and took notes and at the same time felt their constant complaining about not being in Italy a little sad. The tomatoes weren’t right, the oil was bad, the water was wrong, the air itself rebelled against the food. Everything they made was not quite as it ought to have been but far preferable to bucatini with dill pesto. “What? Allora! That’s not pesto!”
And then I went to Rome for the first time, arriving there on a cool train from Puglia and suddenly into the din and hotness just outside Termini. And everything about pasta changed. I had my first proper carbonara, cacio peppe, cozze vongele, each plate a lesson in restraint and thought and skill. I also became a lover of the starchy soft unnameable vegetable pastas at Pastaficcio, so much so that the lady who ran (runs?) the place would recognise Lo’ and I and grin at us from the till waving her gem encrusted hand.
Actually that’s not true. Everything didn’t change. I returned to London with pasta on the brain and with thoughts of new and better and maybe righter ways of cooking, and so more confidence. I wouldn’t put cream in a sauce and call it carbonara, but I wouldn’t pretend I was in Rome either. I felt emboldened to play. With Lo’ I would press flowers into fresh dough or dye it pink with beet or mix in sugar for an odd sort of desert. For one particularly memorable dinner we mixed in blackberries we’d picked a few days before in Devon and taught our friend Precious how to roll pasta with the purply-hand-staining ball, flecked with little seeds.
Now when I make pasta it’s al dente, yes, and the water’s well-salted. But it’s not just something from elsewhere, it is situated here, part of the big comfy bright tapestry of my culinary experience. In Barcelona, after checking no one was looking, I mixed a big spoonful of romesco (a sauce of tomato and almonds to eat with calçots, calçots are sort-of onion/leeks) with taglietelle. It was delicious and it made sense (there). Tonight I might have the rosecoco beans I’ve just made with a little green sauce and feta cheese on orechette. Delicious. Sensible. In its place. Where else does food come from?
Slutty Spaghetti
I made this pasta the day my sister, Calypso, left Barcelona after staying with us for a week because she wanted something filling for the plane. She calls it slutty pasta which is a derivation of pasta puttanesca, though this is actually more like a spaghetti alla norma because of the aubergine. But the aubergine is up to you. I love naming like this, the changing and softening and personalising overtime. Other people call it slut sauce, pasta puttana, whore’s spaghetti and making it very differently.
1 large aubergine, sort-of cubed
Generous glug of olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
Pinch of chilly flakes
2 tins of whole tomatoes
Splash of red wine
A handful of spaghetti e.g. however much you want
Fry the aubergine till in its golden on each side and soft in the middle, about ten minutes of a medium heat and put aside on a plate with a sheet of tissue paper.
Now turn the heat down low and — letting the pan cool a bit — add the garlic and fry till golden with the chilly flakes. Add more oil if necessary.
While the garlic cooks — on a low heat! — take the tomatoes out of the tin with a fork and roughly chop them. Tinned whole tomatoes are much better than pre-cut so this slightly messy business is worth it. Chuck them and their juice into the pan with the garlic and chilly.
Bring to the boil then simmer on medium, stirring every now and then and loosening up with a little red wine, till you’ve got a rich, tangy sauce, very thick, almost jammy. Add the aubergines and stir in.
Boil your spaghetti in salty water — I haven’t told you to season the sauce, that’s intentional — and when al dente use tongs or whatever to transfer the pasta to the sauce pan. The pasta water that comes with the pasta as you lift it in will season and reinvigorate the sauce. As a splash more if necessary.
Good with parmesan.
beautiful