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

Laughing at our Brave New World ………

Now I have a lot of time for the first post war Labour Government.

And Now Win the Peace, Labour Poster, 1945

In quick succession after it was elected in 1945, it set up the National Health Service, created the Welfare State, and introduced measures to improve the conditions of women, children, and workers while reorganizing key infrastructure industries, creating bold new development corporations to construct new towns and started a huge house building programme.

But as exciting as these were, they were set against a post war world where money was tight, rationing remained in place, and Britain underwent the awful winter of 1946-47 which saw massive disruptions to industry and agriculture with closed factories and animals freezing to death in the fields.

And as ever when faced with such a testing time the British film industry set out to make people laugh.

All of which is the introduction to a series of films made during the 1940s and 50s which I have been revisiting,

Back then I was too young to have seen them, but now over 70 years after they were made, I am watching the best.  Some like Passport to Pimlico released in 1949 have become classics and are watched because they remain funny but also as a commentary on the period.  

Family Ration Book, 1946-47

In short, a small piece of Pimlico discovers it is part of Burgundy not Britain and so is not subject to post war rationing and a heap of other Government regulations.  

What follows is a comical take on how the new “Burgundians” react to their new freedoms, matched by the Governments’ harsh measures to restore the status quo by turning off supplies of water, electricity, and gas, as well as preventing supplies of food entering the area. 

Coupons for clothes, 1946-47

This leads to a mixed set of reactions from the wider public which at first seeks to take advantage of the end of rationing by flooding into Pimlico buying up everything from nylons to sweets, but then responds by trying to defeat the Government’s food blockage by throwing food parcels over the barriers, parachuting in pigs, and delivering milk via a hose and a helicopter.

Three years later and a year after the very successful Festival of Britain, the film The Happy Family sought to re explore the conflict between the little people and their Government, centering around the opposition by one family to the demolition of their home which is in the way of a vital road into the festival site.

It milks the same themes of rigid bureaucracy set against the individual, revisits the Government’s tactics of a food blockade and the direct action from the family when confronted with a police attack.  

Celebrating the Festival of Britain, 1951

But because this the film is set in the Britain of 1951, the direct action consists of pelting the authorities with over ripe vegetables and flour bombs, leaving the audience to note that “no one was hurt in the making of the film”.

But like Passport to Pimlico, a compromise is reached after a direct intervention from the Prime Minister and leads to the architects redrawing the plans so that the road goes on either side of the house.  

And in that "best of all possible worlds" the film ends with the family enjoying a day out at the Festival.

There were other films exploiting that period of the Brave New World, and in time I will go looking for them.

Location; London, 1945-1952

Pictures; And Now Win The Peace, Labour poster 1945, Clothes Ration book, 1946-47 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and The Festival of Britain emblem, designed by Abram Games, from the cover of the South Bank Exhibition Guide, 1951