If you are sick and tired of pasta, here is a modest proposal
Few things are more awkward than confronting, well past middle age, a truth whose name one has never dared speak. It looks cowardly to have lived a lie for so long. Why, friends ask, did you not tell us earlier?
Fair enough, but if one has said nothing at the outset, the embarrassment at making a belated announcement grows with the passage of time. Because an assumption has never been rebutted, continuing silence is presumed to confirm it. We do not on reaching the age of majority make a formal declaration of the things the world may be getting wrong about us and ought to know. Perhaps we should. So here, 34 years later, is something I lacked the courage to say when I first left home and went out into the world.
I don’t see the point of pasta.
Now please do not misunderstand. I do not dislike pasta — how could you? It has almost no taste. I do not dislike tofu or Marie biscuits either, but if somebody said to me ‘Hooray! — Look — a Marie biscuit restaurant — fantastic — they serve Marie-biscuits of every shape and size: long and thin, twizzled, in flat strips, in hoops, in hollow pipes, and even in bow-tie shapes! You can eat them with a wide range of sauces’ — then my reply would be obvious: why does the shape matter? The question is, what does the stuff taste of and how does it feel on the tongue.
Pasta tastes of little and has a glutinous consistency on the tongue. It comes across as what it is: a cheap and efficient way of ingesting starch. With a tasty sauce or with bits of meat, fish, cheese or fried vegetables it is perfectly palatable, but that’s because of the extras. Pasta itself, which I understand is made from flour and water, is simply a culinary base, designed to refuel. It is peasant food, easily prepared — no more — and just because the peasants in this case are Italian I do not think we should suffer from an inferiority complex about it.
The game is given away, of course, by the ridiculous fuss people make about the shapes. Macaroni, spaghetti, linguine, fettucini, penne, rigatoni, farfalle, fusilli ... when children take delight in the shapes their breakfast cereal shrapnel comes in, insisting on this one or that although the cardboard taste is identical, we think that rather infantile. But perfectly intelligent adults will say things like, ‘Oh dear, we can’t have macaroni cheese because we’ve only got spaghetti.’ This is how one knows that what is in play here is a desperate need to add fashionable interest to something dull.
Why the fashion? I think people have the vague idea that Italians are all terribly civilised and know how to live. Pasta acquires a sort of cachet-by-association association with opera, Michelangelo, the glories of Venice and the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. My impression of modern Italy, however, is that it is a rather barbaric place where shopping, queuebarging, wearing designer clothes, watching soft-core pornography on television and electing unpleasant politicians are what people do. How much cachet this lends pasta is open to question.
Of course we all have friends who cry, ‘Darling! Of course you don’t like pasta when it’s that nasty stuff in packets from the shelf of Somerfield’s in Matlock — but have you never tried fresh pasta? Mm — all those eggs — you haven’t lived until you’ve experienced it — fresh pasta’s another thing altogether.’ No, it isn’t. It’s still pasta. In a blind test I’ll bet half its devotees couldn’t distinguish it from the Somerfield’s variety.
I’ve travelled pretty widely, savouring in different lands the different ways people choose to ingest the carbohydrate the body needs as fuel. Manioc is the worst: slimy and tasteless. Yam can be pleasant when roasted but is otherwise glutinous. Breadfruit is very good when properly cooked and not allowed to go soggy, but this is time-consuming. Rice scores neu trally on taste but, when not soggy (risotto — ugh!) feels good on the tongue and looks nice. Turnips and swedes have too distinctive and controversial a taste of their own to be good general accompaniments. Pumpkin and marrow are a bit watery.
No, the king of carbohydrates is the potato. Potato is light yet substantial, smooth without a hint of stickiness, never watery, and with only the most delicate and unobtrusive flavour of its own. Bland, yes, but classily bland. Experts — and I salute them — may wax eloquent on the different types of potato and the different ways of cooking this magnificent root crop, but to me the great thing about potatoes is that though the best cooked by the best methods are nonpareil, any old potato cooked any old way will do.
In the Andes, where the soil is thin and poor and the weather unkind, potatoes are more of a delicacy in the Indian people’s dishes than they are in ours. A meal will sometimes be served with a single, small and slighly pockmarked potato sitting triumphantly in the middle of the plate. You should not, in other words, travel to the home of the potato in order to encounter it at its best. Here in Britain and in Europe you will find the potato at its most delicious.
The potato, just like pasta, is basically a fuel-intake of starch. Like pasta it has undertones of peasant cooking. Like pasta it is easy to prepare and cook. Like a pasta meal, a potato-based meal will often take its tone from the accompaniments (and perhaps if we English had been better at sauces we would be serving up potato carbonara or bolognese). But unlike pasta, you can thoroughly enjoy a roast potato, or potato chips, or a salted baked potato, all on its own.
It is far too late, I realise, to glamorise the humble potato. Italians, I accept, will never scan their Yellow Pages and cry ‘Marvellous, there’s a little potato restaurant just around the corner!’ But in the name of culinary justice it is not too late to remark that the devaluation of those lumps of boiled flour cut into the shape of a bow-tie, and the revaluation of Sir Walter Raleigh’s wonderful gift to European cooking, are long overdue.
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