Don’t throw the pasta at the wall mum ……. you’ll make a mess in the hall

So, ….. pasta nights in our house were always accompanied with mum throwing the spaghetti at the wall.

Is the pasta cooked?

Well, when I say the spaghetti, I mean a strand of the stuff following that very British tradition that you determined whether the pasta was cooked by seeing if it stuck to the wall, and if it did then it was cooked.

Even at the tender age of eight this seemed to me a little daft when you could just extract one strand and taste it, but that was the received mantra of how pasta was cooked back in southeast London in the 1950s.

On a bad day it left a heap of the stuff on the floor and a smeary mess on the wallpaper.

And when I told the Italian side of the family that this was what we once did, the howls of laughter were matched only by the incredulous looks from the assembled crowd.

This however was nothing compared to the collective response when I went on to confess that the spaghetti was cooked with milk and sugar. 

I tried to retrieve the situation by suggesting that the dish was a pudding, but alas the damage was done.  In the same way that putting pineapple on pizza or the practice of adding fish fingers as a topping.

Pasta e fagilli

There is no defence.  But it started a trickle of memories, like the use of small bottles of olive oil bought from the chemist and used on the hair or even as a form of suntan lotion.

I would be well into my twenties before I started cooking with olive oil or dribbling it over a salad, and even older before I realized the unending variations in pasta shapes.

More that it could be served in heaps of ways which didn’t involve tomato sauce.

Along the way I discovered the cookbooks of Elizabeth David and Claudia Roden, as well as roasting peppers and serving up dandelions as a salad.

But then I grew up in the 1950s, and while I can’t remember it I was four before sweet rationing ended, and much older before the growing consumer revolution with supermarkets, TV food adds and a plethora new foods opened up a world which challenged boiled beef and carrots with tinned fruit salad and carnation... not that there is anything wrong with either.  Although as a veggie l will pass on the beef.

Along the way mother experimented with TV dinners which came already made and just need heating up, boil in the bag Vesta curries, and Angel Delight.

Happily I now make pasta with chilli and olive oil, and have tried heaps of Italian and Greek puddings with a mix of results.

But all a little more exciting to make and eat than Pecks potted shrimp paste or fried corned beef in batter.

Shopping for heaps of fruit and veg in Esselunga, in Varese, 2023

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Balzano