We've both been feeling a bit rough for the past few days and I haven't felt up to much cooking. "Oh"said Paul " let's just have pasta; that's always easy." So I made some rigatoni with a high-class commercial sauce, pine kernels, rocket and Parmesan.
In My Day
When I was a child, Pasta was certainly not the easy option. You could get macaroni and, in very smart shops, unfeasibly long spaghetti in blue paper wrappings. At home, we only consumed macaroni cheese.
I think it was Clement Freud who described this food as "Worms in tomato sludge" in a Sunday supplement article. He also, I believe, introduced the terms "al dente" into the chattering classes' lexicon of cookery terms.
By the time we lived at Rowan Avenue in the late '70s, I had mastered the art of cooking spaghetti al dente (having an Italian sister-in-law helped) even though my cupboard continued to sport those Heinz nasties for some years to come.
I remember one occasion, when my sister Beatrice and her husband-to-be, Nick were living with us. Beatrice and I had a long walk home in the cold from the station and that night the chaps thought they'd surprise us with dinner on the table when we walked in the door. Paul heaved out the spaghetti in the blue wrapper. "How long do you cook it for?" he asked Nick. "I don't know; 20 minutes?" hazarded Nick. Maybe he thought that pasta was just an Italian form of potato.
We walked through the door to a delicious smell and plates heaped with home-cooked worms in tomato sludge. We tried, we really did, to eat the dinner, but eventually the thick slimy white ropes defeated us.
Do you know, a few years ago, a friend of mine so yearned after some Heinz Spaghetti hoops on toast that Paul bought some specially and made them for her as a nostalgic treat.
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