When history collides with the kitchen …… cooking from home no. 2

The challenge is a simple one.

Take a handful of ingredients from the kitchen and come up with a favourite meal, while at the same time exploring its history.

So, the ingredients are some tomatoes, a handful of olives and capers and an option on a bit of garlic.

Gently fry the tomatoes with a good dollop of olive oil adding some tomato puree with salt and pepper  until everything is soft and a golden red colour, add the olives and capers and continue cooking for a tad longer.

Then as they say in all cookbooks …. “set the sauce to one side, boil a pan of salted water, add the pasta and cook till it’s ready”.

Mother would employ that age old test of fishing out a strand of pasta and throwing it at the wall, telling me "if it stuck then the pasta was cooked"..  

I have to say it was spectacular but never worked.  

True the pasta did sometimes stick but it didn’t guarantee it was ready and just left a mess on the wall. 

Far easier just to take a piece let it cool and bite into it.

Once the pasta is ready just add it to sauce, warm through and serve it straight away.

Finishing off with more black pepper.

My Wikipedia tells me that pasta with olives and capers most resembles “Spaghetti alla puttanesca invented in the Italian city of Naples in the mid-20th century, typically made with tomatoes, olives, capers, anchovies, garlic, chili pepper, and extra virgin olive oil".*

That said the same article explores in more depth the history qualifies its place of origin and suggests that while there is one variation from the region of Lazio, the Neapolitan version omits the anchovies.

I like Wikipedia did go to my copy of Silver Spoon that bible of Italian cuisine which boasts 2000 recipes and couldn’t find my dish.**

But as I often observe there is no uniform way to cook and present most dishes, which are influenced by regional variations, the availability of ingredients and the whim of the individual cook.

Now given that I love the food of southern Italy the chances are that I picked up the basic idea from something I ate in a restaurant, but never being hidebound by rules and with a poor memory I guess I just came up with my pasta, olives and capers all on my own with a sideways nod to Naples.

It seems to me it goes well with spaghetti or linguine but my favourite at present is bucatini which is a long slightly thicker pasta with a hole running through it and the tube manages to catch a bit more of the sauce, adding to the pleasure.

Location; our kitchen

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 2026

*Spaghetti alla puttanesca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_puttanesca

**The Silver Spoon, 1950, first published in English in 2005

Celebrating ….. that humble but wonderful historic dish

 Potato hash comes in many varieties and will no doubt be claimed as their own by regions across Europe and beyond.

Just when the first cook added mashed potato with whatever was left over around the kitchen is I think lost in time.

Although I bet there will be learned articles pinpointing the exact moment when that wonderful all-purpose vegetable arrived in Europe and quickly ended up in a blend of other vegetables with some meat and fried till you get that crispy golden crust.

I grew up with corned beef hash, left over Sunday beef hash and veg hash.

What they all had in common was that simple and sensible form of household management which looked to using up all the leftovers.

Now many of the recipes I have recently looked at rely on buying in a heap of ingredients to create nourishing and authentic versions of hash, while in our house it started with what ever mother or grandmother had to hand.

And that in turn pretty much meant that the finished dish as it arrived on the plate was never quite the same from one meal to the next.

So today I took yesterday’s veg Shepherd’s pie mixed it with an avocado hard up against its sell by date, threw in a couple of fried chopped tomatoes, an onion and the last of the pesto.

And for good measure added the remnants of Tuesday’s halloumi cheese with some olives.

The lot just gently cooked away until there was that crispy golden crust which announced it was ready.

The finished thing doesn’t look elegant or sophisticated and won’t win a prize for presentation, but it ticked all the boxes in that it was economical, used up all the bits and tasted good.

And that is how I remember the hash we ate.  Although as we all know other variations are available as are other definitions of what the word hash means. 

But in terms of food when I checked on the definition of the word, I discovered it just means to chop food into small pieces and usually refers to a meat and potato dish cooked till brown.

Location; the kitchen

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 2026