The origin story – the specific episode or exact moment when someone decides to make something for the first time: an apple fell on my head, so I made a crumble; I burned the pasta, but everybody loved it; the tale of the margherita, a pizza for a queen... I love such stories, yet find them a nightmare, too.
On the one hand, even when fanciful, they recognise a set of circumstances or a person – credit where credit’s due, etc. On the other, in being recognised, these stories and, therefore the recipes, get trapped, often becoming the very opposite of what they once were – a happy accident of resourceful cooking, a record of when someone improvised and made something good. Take Enzo Francavilla, for example. A young chef from a town called Foggia, he moved to Bari in the early 1960s and worked in various places before taking over a joint called Al Sorso Preferito. In a long interview with the journalist and historian Sandro Romano, Francavilla explains that, one night, a couple from northern Italy asked for something good and substantial to eat. “So I invented a plate of spaghetti with a tomato sauce and a generous dose of chilli, prepared directly in the iron pan, making the sauce tighten well and thus creating a tasty external crust.” “Sei un assassino” (“you are a killer”) was the customer’s response and a dish was born.
