As you probably don’t know, and good for you, it’s World Pasta Day today. Why the need to celebrate a carbohydrate that has taken over the universe I do not know, but there is no rationale to any of the Days and Weeks that we are invited to focus on, as here.
Anyway, Day or no Day, it’s always a good time to reflect on the dismal dominance of pasta in contemporary diets. The great reformer, William Cobbett, had a downer on the potato as an essentially alien foodstuff by comparison with morally sound and wholesome bread. Well, potatoes and bread are both leagues ahead of pasta as a stomach filler and provider of energy. The dominance of pasta in the British diet, as seen in the acreage given over to it in shops, is a sign of a nation with impoverished indigenous gastronomy, of cooks with not much time to cook anything more than a length of starch in boiling water for 10-15 minutes. At least in Italy, it’s commonly a first or second course that fills you up before you get to the interesting things: meat, fish, vegetables. Here it’s the default option for people who can’t, won’t, cook.
Pasta is boring in a way bread is not. Both have the same basic ingredients: flour (various), salt and water, with the possible addition of eggs for pasta. But while bread is delicious both in its own right, if well made, as well as in its infinitely various forms, from buttered toast to sandwiches, pasta is essentially boring except as a vehicle for other things – usually, in Britain, some kind of not very good tomato sauce. It does fill you up, though, which is one reason for its popularity among the broke. It is a very cheap food.
Is it the most tedious carbohydrate? I do hear you when you say rice, though you probably wouldn’t if you were Iranian or Chinese. But as cooked in Britain rice and pasta are probably equally boring, equally good just to take up tummy space, unless we’re talking about a nice rice pudding, which people are too grand to cook nowadays.
The potato is another matter — a magnificent foodstuff
The potato now, is another matter, a magnificent foodstuff both in itself (if you’re cooking the right variety, and you should know one from another) and in countless dishes from potato cakes, Colcannon (buttered mash with spring onions), salad, dauphinoise (we won’t even start on that debate), roasted with dripping, or chips. It is arguably, with tobacco, the only useful thing to have come from the European discovery of America.
But even in Italy pasta has been contentious, as discussed by Elizabeth David in her still-terrific book, Italian Food (1954).
“On the 15th November, 1930, at a banquet in Milan, the famous Italian futurist poet Marinetti launched his much publicized campaign against all established forms of cooking and in particular against pasta. ‘Futurist cooking’, said Marinetti, “will be liberated from the ancient obsession of weight and volume, and one of its principal aims will be the abolition of pasta. Pastasciutta, however grateful to the palate, is an obsolete food; it is heavy, burtalizing and gross; its nutritive qualities are deceptive; it induces scepticism, sloth and pessimism”. He also considered that consumption killed libido.
Marinetti was, perhaps, a controversial figure in more ways than one, but on pasta he was right. He sparked a debate: the Duke of Bovino, Mayor of Naples observed that “the angels in Paradise eat nothing but vermicelli al pomodoro”, to which Mantinetti responded that this confirmed his suspicions as to the monotony of Paradise.
Boo to pasta, then. But there are as with all things, exceptions. I have just returned from a stay at the lovely Continental Hotel in Siena where the luncheon buffet included big slithery ravioli enveloping ricotta and a green vegetable of some description. It was delicious and I made a complete pig of myself. All right; in the right hands, pasta can be a good thing. But there’s not much of that here, no?
Melanie McDonagh is an London Standard columnist
