setting the scene
under the spell
food rationing: the unattainable Carbonara dream
it’s Carbonara, but not as we know it
Theodora the explorer
first impressions
the recipe: how it eats, what it tells us
the very first British Carbonara
is this recipe Carbonara without ‘coal’ ?
the impact of food rationing

setting the scene

UNDER THE SPELL

Something a little momentous was going on in Trastevere, Rome in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but of course no one realised it at the time.

Quite separately and independently, two British authors fell under the spell of one of Rome’s latest recipes - Spaghetti alla Carbonara - and both writers subsequently included it in the cookbooks they were writing. That’s how 1952’s Cosmopolitan Cookery in an English Kitchen (Theodora FitzGibbon) and 1954’s Italian Food (Elizabeth David) came to thrust the eggiest pasta sauce the world had ever seen in front of an incredulous Britain.

That’s a pivotal moment in pasta history…. in social media history. Because without FitzGibbon and David, today the internet would be limping along on kittens, Get-Ready-With-Me, Police Chase and Eyeshadow videos.

Perhaps both authors had indeed been so captivated by Carbonara’s novel ingredients and approach to pasta sauce that they simply felt obliged to introduce the recipe to 1950s Britain.

Their timing, however, couldn’t have been worse.

THE UNATTAINABLE DREAM

Britain in 1952 wasn’t a great time to try and cook pasta, or in fact anything remotely interesting. Wartime food rationing was still in place, and would drag on for a further two years. Whilst some basic foods like bread and flour were slowly becoming more readily available, other staples like sugar, butter and meat (including bacon) remained tightly controlled.

Pasta was mostly known in its tinned form, with early convenience food products like Heinz Spaghetti being already well established for several decades. Olive oil wasn’t even classed as a cooking ingredient, and wouldn’t really be for another couple of decades. If you wanted to buy olive oil in the 1950s, you’d need to visit your neighbourhood chemist, where it was sold as a remedy for earache, sunburn and constipation.

Even worse, dry spaghetti and parmesan were seen as exotic specialities, sold exclusively in high-end city delicatessens or niche, small Italian grocers - in areas like Soho or Clerkenwell in London, the heart of the city’s Italian community.

Yet that’s the reality which FitzGibbon’s and David’s readers would have encountered. Spaghetti alla Carbonara would have undoubtedly struck them, as it had the authors, as a stunningly beautiful dream on a plate - but how could anyone ever cook it?

IT’S CARBONARA, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

Given all of that, I’m pretty sure many readers would have seen both recipes as ‘must-try-whenever-we-can’ meals. Familiar, loved ingredients - magically transformed into a foreign and exotic dish. The perfect mix to create an aspirational meal for a population bored to death of years of repetitive ration eating and dinner parties that never were.

THEODORA THE EXPLORER

Ham, eggs and pasta. Today of course you’d be forgiven for thinking it ordinary, but consider for a moment the impact Theodora’s Carbonara might have had back then. That’s quite hard for us to do. But imagine, a pasta sauce without a tomato in sight; in their place, a buttery sauce made with ham and eggs. Unknowingly, perhaps, Theodora was exploring a genuinely undiscovered country.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

We might call it an indulgent recipe, in a way; a fairly restrained way… but I think it would have absolutely been seen as an indulgent recipe in early 50s Britain.

We might say it’s a recipe with a certain air of refinement and class, but perhaps think it doesn't amaze.

But I think even today it’s a recipe that knows it doesn’t need to try too hard. It can whisper its credentials in a confident, matter-of-fact way and know you’ll always remember its roots; the taste of a very different pasta and a very different Britain.

When you try it, and I hope you do, just let Theodora’s Carbonara take you back to the Britain of the 1950s.

I promise you everything about this understated pasta will suddenly make sense.

You can see where Theodora FitzGibbon’s Carbonara sits in the historical carbonara recipes by clicking the diagram above, in the ‘Team Eggs’ segment.

the recipe: how it eats, what it tells us

We’re so used to seeing crispy pig on Carbonara that Theodora’s Carbonara looks, with its pale pink ham and minimalist appearance… a little under-done and unfinished.

However, a couple of huge things to consider here.

IT’S THE VERY FIRST BRITISH CARBONARA

First, take a look at the diagram above. We’re very early on in the timeline of published Carbonara recipes - excluding the Liberation Carbonara of 1944, which never appeared in print at the time, Theodora’s is one of the three earliest Carbonara recipes ever published - along with the Fabrizi Carbonara (Croix du Nord, 20/4/1952) and the Chicago Carbonara (Vittles & Vice, Patricia Bronté, 12/1952).

However, Theodora’s was almost certainly the first Carbonara recipe that British home cooks would have encountered. Italian actor Aldo Fabrizi’s recipe had appeared in a regional French newspaper, while Patricia Bronté’s was buried in a Chicago restaurant guide published only in December 1952. Theodora’s book also went on to be reprinted in 1953 and again in 1960, meaning it carried considerable influence for the way Carbonara was cooked in Britain at that time, even allowing for variations like Elizabeth David’s Carbonara.

PEPPER: IS THIS RECIPE ‘CARBONARA’ BEFORE THE ‘COAL’?

A second consideration. Look at the ingredients of the first five ‘Team Eggs’ Carbonaras. Fabrizi likes pepper, as does Cucina Italiana - but British and American cooks aren’t even told that back pepper is a main ingredient of the sauce. That’s potentially at odds with the theory of the recipe’s name deriving from the charcoal burners of central Italy (i.e. that pepper is a representation of charcoal). Subsequent recipes in the 1960s and later fluctuate between including and omitting black pepper - which begs the question, when and why did Carbonara first acquire its ‘carbone’ ?

We currently have no information about the ingredients of the Trastevere Carbonara of 1939, which is the first recipe we know of called ‘Carbonara.’ It may or may not have contained pepper. However, our ‘mitochondrial Eve’ recipe, Strascinati of 1931, DID include pepper, as did the two dishes I see as contributing to Carbonara’s original emergence: Cacio e Ova and Pasta alla Gricia. Both of these related recipes included pepper… so the mystery of why Theodora chose to omit the spice from her recipe remains.

FOOD RATIONING

NB I’ve reproduced the original ingredients below, together with my tweaks. Cooking the recipe as published delivers a pretty dry and austere result, which is the tell-tale consequence of the author writing for the ingredient availability of the time: WW2 and rationing has ultimately delivered much more parsimonious ingredient quantities than we’re accustomed to today.

When I cooked the recipe a second time I increased the quantities of some of the ingredients, which I think may have been a more accurate recreation of whatever pasta Theodora originally ate in Rome.

In the introduction to her book, Theodora does say that when she returned to Britain—about three years before writing the book—she had heard alarming accounts of the ‘impossibility of surviving on the rations.

I think it’s clear that Theodora is taking pains to make readers aware that the recipes in the book have been written with many of the original ingredients substituted, to cater for what foods might be available in Britain - but that hasn’t deterred her from writing the recipes she wanted to write, in fact she says “…a good substitute is far superior to ignoring the recipe..”

Seen in that light, Theodora’s Spaghetti Carbonara appears to be a much more extravagant dish, needing not insignificant amounts of ham, butter, egg and two different cheeses.

And all of that, of course, presents the choice of cooked ham - along with Gruyére, as the ingredients most likely to have been substituted. Yes, there’s a chance that whatever Carbonara Teodora ate in Rome was made with Gruyére and parmesan, but I think it’s far more likely that those were the most practicable cheese and meat substitutes she could find.

Butter is a tricky ingredient to explain - it could have been chosen to make up for the missing fat from a fattier cut of pork, or it might have been simply an addition to raise the status of the dish.

Whatever the answers, I’d like to think that Theodora would have still been able to recognise her recipe in my interpretation here.

Spaghetti Carbonara, Theodora Fitzgibbon (1952)

FOR FOUR PEOPLE

original ingredients

• 340g / ¾ lb freshly made spaghetti

• 115g / 4oz cooked ham, chopped

• 2 egg yolks

• 15g / 1 tbsp butter

• 115g / 4oz Gruyère, grated

• 55–60g / 2oz Parmesan, grated

my tweaks

• 400g dry spaghetti

• 140g / 5oz cooked ham on the bone, torn

• 4 egg yolks

• 30g / 2 tbsp butter

• 120g / 4¼ oz Gruyère, grated

• 60g / 2oz Parmesan, grated

method

Theodora’s original method is:

And let me confess there are a few ‘period’ touches there that I simply can’t bring myself to adopt.

First, boiling the pasta for 20 minutes - I just can’t. My spaghetti were cooked to a slightly chewy, ‘al dente.’ Secondly, I have to confess to preferring to mix both cheeses with the yolks and whisk them together before adding to the cooked pasta - this is clearly a more modern technique but I think it guarantees a result closer to what Theodora’s written - that we shouldn’t allow the eggs to cook at all.

Lastly, notice that Theodora wants us to ‘melt the butter, chopped ham and Gruyére’ together; my interpretation of that is that the cooked ham shouldn’t be crisped or coloured at all.

prepare the ingredients

Grate the cheese, tear the ham, separate the yolks.

boil the pasta

Boil the pasta and when it’s half done, melt the butter in a tossing pan and being to warm the ham gently.

make the ‘sauce’

Whisk the cheese and yolks together.

toss and combine

When the pasta’s very nearly done to your liking, fish it out of the boiling pan and add to the ham and butter in the tossing pan, with perhaps a tiny splash of cooking water. Mix, toss, and then let the spaghetti rest for a minute or two, so that the temperature drops slightly and you’re less likely to make scrambled eggs when you…

Add the egg mixture to the pasta, toss, add small amounts of cooking water if it needs to loosen up, then plate and serve immediately.

give me the next Carbonara

more recipes

more food history

recipe notes
how I started making pesto
the quest for authentic pesto
Pragmatic Pesto
tips for perfect pesto
Recipe: Pesto Genovese
Pesto tips and trivia
the pesto factions

I was lucky enough to be able to stare at this amazing view every single summer of my childhood. It’s from near my grandmother’s house on the Italian Riviera in the small village of Polanesi, to the East of the city of Genova, looking towards Camogli and Portofino Mountain. Portofino itself and the Cinque Terre are a little further down the coast.

On holiday in Italy absolutely everyone cooked, from my grandmother to my aunts and all of my uncles. It might sound sugary and syrupy but that’s honestly how it was - focaccia on the beach, after dinner strolls for gelato, decades of family reunions and every single hello and goodbye with my dearest relatives and every friend I can think of, all with food in common.

And it was there, in the summer of 1977, that I ate pesto for the first time.

recipe notes

HOW I STARTED MAKING PESTO

I want to share what’s been a recipe in development for over 40 years, since I started preparing it as a teenager.

In the 1980s you couldn’t go out and buy a pot of growing basil from a supermarket like you can today. You had to grow basil from seed. And that’s what I did; starting somewhere around 1984, each spring I grew as many trays of basil as I could and - eventually - made my first homemade pestos. Germinating and growing outdoors in South Wales made the basil pretty robust tasting, but I was overjoyed that I’d finally been able to make one of my favourite pastas.

And what a long way we’ve come - today most of us are maybe half an hour away from getting our hands on basil we can make pesto with, compared with the 6-8 weeks I had to wait in 1984.

Over the years I’ve tweaked and adjusted my pesto recipe - using supermarket basil when that first became available; for cheese, first parmesan alone and then pecorino and parmesan together when that appeared.

My only main substitutions now are having to use the shorter, fatter, ubiquitous Chinese pine nuts instead of the longer, creamier and more delicate Italian variety, and a mix of standard olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, instead of Ligurian Olive oil - which is milder then EVO but more flavourful than standard. And that’s where I was more or less over lockdown, when I was writing my book Pasta & Magic: Pesto Sauces, and I finally settled on a definitive pesto recipe.

PRAGMATIC PESTO

Many of you are interested in recreating historic recipes as close to how they would have been prepared in the past. I am too. In fact, I’m in the process of writing a book about historic recipes, and I’m adopting exactly this approach.

One of the reasons that people are drawn to recreating historic recipes is that they’re seen as the definitive, original, ‘authentic’ versions. The ones with the ‘proper’ ingredients and traditional methods. The ones where you can taste history. And that’s fine - I love the tangible link to the past and other generations too… but when it comes to recipe names or descriptions, ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ are some of my least favourite words to read. Right up there with ‘Trump’ and ‘Farage.’

And here’s why.

THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTIC PESTO

Pesto, like many other Italian recipes, didn’t just suddenly spring into being. The recipes we cook today are variations of a combination of ingredients that have gradually become codified over the decades. So saying a pesto is ‘authentic’ normally only refers to the most recent, contemporary version of the dish (unless there’s been a very recent, sudden change in its ingredients / techniques). And bizarrely, we often never assign the label ‘authentic’ to the earliest recorded versions of recipes, instead preferring to adopt more recent variations as sacred canonical dishes.

AUTHENTIC - BUT TO WHEN?

One of the first ‘modern’ recipes we have for Pesto Genovese is from 1863 and a Genovese chef called Giovanni Battista Ratto, who tells us to use basil, garlic, DUTCH cheese and oil. Usefully, he says that if we can’t get hold of basil, marjoram or parsley will do nicely. Notice there’s no mention whatsoever of pecorino, parmesan, or pine nuts.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara and Ragù Bolognese have similar back-stories. Amongst the ingredients for some of the first published recipes for Carbonara were bacon or cooked ham, rather than today’s guanciale; gruyére or parmesan instead of the modern choice of pecorino, and other unexpected choices like garlic, cream and CLAMS. Yet no one chooses to label those as ‘authentic’ Carbonara recipes, even though they predate anything we’re cooking today.

Similarly, Ragù Bolognese, which most of the world’s population would describe as a rich, red pasta sauce. Yet in Pellegrino Artusi’s 1891 recipe, again one of the first recipes published, there isn’t a tomato in sight. It’s what we call today a ‘white’ ragù. But again very few people would refer to that as a recipe for ‘authentic Bolognese.’

ARSE-BACKWARDS

I find all of that more than a little topsy-turvy. Or as food historians like to say, arse-backwards. It’s as if we’re imposing our modern, ‘codified’ versions of recipes on the earlier examples, implying that somehow they’d got it wrong, that our version is better.

But I don’t think we should get to choose which is ‘authentic,’ or even ‘traditional’ (and let’s leave that other can of worms for another day). If your idea of authenticity is based on chronology, or simply what came first, you need to respect early versions of recipes. We’re not those cooks and it’s not our food anymore, but it’s a damn sight more faithful to history than what the influencers are raving about on Instagram.

Back to pesto.

Here’s my Trofie with Pesto Genovese with Beans and Potatoes, from this summer. It’s what most Ligurians would describe as ‘authentic’ pesto. Because if it’s pesto, it’s got to be trofie and two-veg, as they don’t say in Genova.

But as we’ve seen, beans and potatoes weren't in the early 1863 recipe. They’ve crept in over the generations, along with options to use pasta like corzetti, mandilli di seta or trenette.

PRAGMATIC PESTO

And then there’s HOW you make the pesto itself.

The purists/historical re-enactors will use a pestle and mortar to make their pesto (presumably because they like their food tech to show its age and heritage in millennia).

But when I’m cooking pesto at home I take a slightly more pragmatic view of the whole process (mostly because it’s quicker to chew a shipping container full of fruit pastilles than it is to make pesto with a pestle and mortar).

I make pragmatic pesto with my very clever electric pestle and mortar - my food blender.

And they tell me that’s wrong, that it’s not ‘real pesto;’ that I risk ruining the basil and also making the pesto too oily. Now, I’d agree that there’s sometimes marginally more oil needed if you use a blender, but that rather depends on the size of the your blender bowl and the quantity of basil you’re trying to blend. So in terms of oil content, the differences between pestling and blending can be negligible, and as you’ll see below, we can do really clever stuff to make sure our time saving tech still makes delicious pesto.

TIPS FOR THE PERFECT PRAGMATIC PESTO

• Chill the bowl and blade of the blender for at least 30 mins in the freezer before starting to make your pesto. The purists have a valid concern - if you raise the temperature of the basil leave too much they can turn black and acquire a bitter taste. To avoid this, start with an ice-cold blender bowl and blade and…

• Pulse-blend as you add each ingredient. DO NOT just press the button and walk away from the blender to do something less boring instead.

• NEVER USE ICE CUBES to lower the temperature of the pesto. Adding water to pesto at the blending stage is a spectacularly bad idea as it will (1) make for watery pesto and (2) shorten the shelf life (or rather FRIDGE life) of any pesto you need to store.

• Use slightly older, drier cheese rather than wedges that you’ve just unwrapped from their vacuum packing. I keep all my pasta parmesan and pecorino in the fridge cheese drawer wrapped only in paper kitchen towel. You’ll need to allow a week or so before your first wedges are ready to grate, but the difference you’ll see will be enormous. Instead of small, buttery curls that clog the grater and make a stodgy pesto, you’ll get light, snowflake-like whisps of cheesy goodness.

• use an old-school hole-punch grater rather than a microplane grater. You’ll get finer, more snowflake-like shavings of aged cheese, rather than the larger curls produced by a microplane. The finer the grated cheese, the better it will mix into a pesto.

• Buy pots of growing basil rather than the packets of ready-picked stalks with larger, more pointed, darker leaves grown in Africa or South America - they’re normally pretty bitter. Remember too that even growing plants in the colder seasons will give you stronger tasting leaves than those grown in warmer months.

Mark Gowen’s Pesto Genovese

FOR 6 PORTIONS

• approx 60g of a 50:50 mix of pecorino & parmesan

• 100g fresh basil leaves

• 120ml olive oil (50:50 mix EVO and Olive Oil)

• 1 large clove garlic

• 50g pinoli

• black pepper

• 300g fine beans

PASTA

• 600g dry trenette / linguine / trofie / corzetti / mandrilli di seta

MANTECATURA

• none, simply combine using pasta water

method

prepare the ingredients
Weigh and prep the ingredients. Pick the leaves by pinching the stalk as close to the leaf as possible, you want minimal stalk in the pesto. (If you wash the basil leaves, make sure they are as dry as possible before blending - I dry mine between tea cloths or kitchen towel.)

make the pesto
Using a blender, fit the bowl and blade you’ve previously chilled in a freezer for at least 30 mins to your blender. I start by pulse-blending all the leaves first, with a small pinch of salt. You can can go ahead and add all of the ingredients and continue pulse-blending - or, if you don’t trust my quantities, add a little of each, one at a time, until you have the balance of flavours you like.

pesto at room temperature
The pesto needs to be at room temperature before you start cooking, so allow at least half an hour for it to sit outside a fridge and come up to room temperature. It’ll mix much easier with the pasta and won’t cool the pasta down!

boil the beans / potatoes
If you’re going to serve your pesto with beans and/or potatoes, prepare the vegetables and boil them. Cut the beans into lengths about 30mm long and the potatoes into chunks the size of your thumb. Don’t overcook them.

At this stage, if you are cooking for others, make sure they’re sitting down at the table waiting for their food - if your guests are anything like my family, call them to the table at least 15 minutes in advance, make sure they’ve all washed their hands or used the bathroom or done whatever else they need to do before eating, and then tie them to their chairs.

boil the pasta
Boil and cook the pasta - when it’s done to your liking, put about half the total pesto into a pre-warmed tossing pan (warm it with some of the pasta cooking water, then discard it), and loosen it up with perhaps a third of a ladle of cooking water. Fish the pasta out of the cooking water and add it immediately to the tossing pan, off the heat.

combine
Toss to combine, adding more pesto and tiny amounts of cooking water if it feels too sticky, but don’t turn it into a runny mess. When the pasta and sauce are nicely combined, throw in the beans and potatoes. Toss and combine and then serve with lots of black pepper and grated pecorino or parmesan.

nutrition per serving: 761 kcal

fat: 42.4g • saturates 8g
carbohydrate: 71g • sugars 4.1g
protein: 21.3g • fibre 3.8g
salt: 0.51g

pesto tips and trivia

We’re not doing much history of pesto today, but there are a few things you need to be aware of, when it comes to planning your pesto. Number one - and surprisingly - everyone, even in Genova, has an opinion. I’m sure this comes as something of a shock to you, as we’re so used to Italians always speaking with one voice and never disagreeing about recipes, ingredients or techniques.

In Genova, Pesto is a pretty serious matter of involving a handful of related but very, very different factions. I’m not sure if there are websites, flags or t-shirts available (there must be somewhere), but for now simply be aware of the following pesto creeds.

the pesto factions

Within those core pesto factions, there exist a number of shadowy sects:

more recipes

I don’t even like Carbonara that much, yet here I am, trying to make sense of the original shape-shifting pasta—and from a decidedly British point of view too. I want to work out how we started cooking Carbonara in Britain in so many different ways, following the recipes back as far as we can to uncover when—or if, or perhaps why—we started cooking pasta with eggs and cheese and pig our own way.

I want to go in search of Authentically British Carbonara.

A Cunning Plan

I’m going to try something possibly quite foolish. I’m going to try and reconstruct Carbonara’s DNA by combining historical recipes, studies, my own research, recipe recreations and my own original recipes to figure out how we got to the Carbonaras we’re cooking today in Britain. But I think it might be fun too to try and guess where that road might be taking us.

I’m massively indebted to the work of, amongst others, Luca Cesari, Alberto Grandi, Janneke Vreugdenhil, Edwin Winkels and of course the original chefs, restaurants and recipe authors - all of whom have inspired me to try and join these Carbonara dots.

The Key Recipes… and Ingredients

Let’s dive in and get controversial straight away.

Over the course of this miniseries I’m going to be recreating some of the most significant recorded recipes for Carbonara. And to help me do that, I’ve made a little diagram - which you can see full-size by clicking the link or graphic below.

And I can hear the teeth-sucking already. No, the 1931 recipe isn’t called ‘Carbonara’ and yes, it contains ingredients that aren’t regarded as canonical in Contemporary Carbonara. I’m not claiming that every subsequent carbonara descends from 1931 Strascinati, but it is the earliest documented dish we’ve found that brings together so much of Carbonara’s later ingredients.

That’s the kind of fun we’re going to be having in this series, together with history and theories and of course recipe recreations.

I’m excited. I hope you are too.

read more Food History

Making pesto from capers can be tricky - mostly because of how capers tend to be stored. They’re normally bought preserved in vinegar or salt, and having a pesto which is either too salty or vinegary is really quite unpleasant. I’d advise mixing both types of capers, if you have them. With both varieties, make sure you let them sit in water for a couple of hours, ideally all day, before making the pesto. If you haven’t got all day to wait, soak the capers in boiling water for at least 30 mins, check their saltiness, and possibly repeat.

Pappardelle with Caper Pesto and Scallops

FOR FOUR

• 250g large scallops

• 200g small scallops

PESTO

• 30g salted capers

• 50g capers in vinegar

• 40g flaked almonds

• 28g pinoli

• grated parmesan (approx 40g)

• 30g basil leaves

• 5g flat parsley leaves

• 1 large garlic clove

• EVO

PASTA

400g fresh egg pappardelle

MANTECATURA

none, simply combine

Method

• make the pesto

Unlike my other recipes for pesto, I’m giving a more precise indication of quantities for this dish - but there will still be a certain amount of adjusting flavours ‘to taste’ at the blending stage. Just begin by pulse blending small quantities of each of the ingredients and adding enough oil to help the blender do its work. If you prefer a smoother pesto, omit or reduce the almonds and just use pinoli.

• sear the scallops

Once you’ve blended the pesto and reached the balance of flavours that’s right for you, let it sit at room temperature for half an hour or so before you start to boil the pasta. At this point you can sear the scallops - I do this in a heavy iron pan which has been wiped with oil and then heated until it’s very hot. Place the scallops in the pan and after 30 seconds turn off the heat, turning each scallop individually to cook on the other side with the residual heat in the pan. Smaller scallops will take about 4-5 min cooking time and larger ones about 6-7 min. Don’t under-cook OR overcook them!

• boil the pasta

Boil and cook the pasta - when it’s done to your liking, put about half the total pesto into a pre-warmed pasta wok, and loosen it up with perhaps a third of a ladle of cooking water. Fish the pasta out of the cooking water and add it immediately to the pasta wok, off the heat.

• combine

Toss to combine, adding more pesto and tiny amounts of cooking water if it feels too sticky, but don’t turn it into a runny mess. When the pasta and sauce are nicely combined, throw in half the scallops. Toss and combine and then plate each portion, sharing out the remainder of the scallops as a topping.

Nutrition per serving

• KCAL: 681

• Fat (g): 44.6

• Sat Fat (g): 7.0

• Carb (g): 35.3

• Sug (g): 1.7

• Fibre(g): 5.2

• Prot (g): 33.5

• Salt (g): 2.96

more recipes

BBC Radio 4 is devoting today to the Normans, in celebration of the opening of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum. I’ve just listened to the special edition of The Food Programme which asks what the Norman Conquest did for our diet… and I was heartbroken to discover there was no mention of pasta.

Maybe we should add some.

Over 200 years after the Norman Conquest of Britain began, during the last few decades of the 13th Century, an English scribe sat down and began copying Anglo-Norman passages onto a freshly prepared leaf of vellum. Among them was the record of Cressee, a dish now thought to preserve Britain’s earliest surviving pasta recipe.

More than 700 years later, we can still read the finished manuscript in the British Library, but the origins and historical transmission of its recipes remain uncertain. Could it have been an Anglo-Norman food or an older recipe concept that travelled much further, through the Norman network that stretched from Britain to the Kingdom of Sicily?

I wasn’t there, so I don’t know. But what I think what we can say with certainty is that Cressée is evidence that, by the end of the thirteenth century, sophisticated knowledge of pasta preparation was circulating in England. These techniques were being recorded many decades before The Forme of Cury, often described as the first British cookbook.

Except it isn’t.

The title by which we know it comes from an edition published by Samuel Pegge in 1780. Its preface attributes the recipes in The Forme of Cury to “the chief Master Cooks of King Richard II,” and the collection itself is dated to around 1390. Written in Middle Englis The Forme of Cury includes ravioles, a filled pasta equivalent to modern ravioli; makerouns, pasta pieces cooked and served with butter and cheese; and losyns, thin pasta sheets resembling an early form of lasagne.

But of course the Anglo-Norman recipes in the British Library pre-date The Forme of Cury by about one hundred years. Not only that, but they include other recipes for pasta dishes viewed as the forerunners to many other recipes that we still cook today. The Anglo-Norman ravieles were stuffed pasta. Kuskenole were filled pastries and could be the ancestor of modern British pies and pasties. And cressee were flavoured and coloured pasta squares.

Together, those three recipes read almost like a tool-kit of pasta techniques; knowledge that English scribes and compilers in the 13th century thought important enough to preserve. And it’s thanks to those records that I think we can reasonably infer that some cooks, probably at an elite level of Anglo-Norman society, were preparing them.

It’s tempting to examine the Norman contribution to British cuisine, even to state that by the end of the 13th century pasta dishes were on the way to becoming British foods. But I think the real question, though, is how these foods entered the Northern European cooking tradition in the first place.

That’s one of the questions that my next book, The History We Never Ate, will attempt to answer.

more food history

And that’s nothing whatsoever to do with that clown Mussolini’s attempt to Italianize french ragoût . Back in the 1930s the fascist initiative to introduce ‘ragutto’ flopped resoundingly.

So here you are - Hand-pulled fresh pici with Salmon Ragù / RAGUETTO al Salmone.

I used to call recipes like this a ‘fake Ragù‘ but today I’m officially launching the RAGUETTO… a sauce that you desperately want to seem like a Ragù but because of the ingredients or the time you have available needs to cook in a fraction of the time…

I struggle with the idea of poached salmon and tomatoes - I can never bring myself to put them together in a sandwich, there’s something that doesn’t quite work …. But last night, for the first time, I threw an improvised fish Ragù together with just a handful of ingredients, including TOMATOES and salmon.

And it worked. Fishy. Thymey. Tomatoey. Fresh. The world’s first RAGUETTO brought to you from still-relatively-sunny South London. In fact, damn it, from henceforth I declare the 25th August shall be RAGUETTO day. And guess what? You were here to witness the first.

SALMON RAGUETTO

FOR TWO

• one salmon fillet per person

• 270g baby plum/mini San Marzano tomatoes

• 1 small grated clove of garlic

• olive oil

• a large handful of capers

• fresh thyme

• hand-pulled, fresh pici / fresh tagliatelle / fresh pappardelle / dry spaghettoni / dry fettuccine

Grate the garlic, warm it gently in EVO for about 60 seconds, no frying or colouring. Add the tomatoes, cut in half and cook gently for 5-10 minutes. Allow the, to break down and add a splash of water if need be. In the meantime, dry-fry the salmon fillets in your best non-stick pan. Throw a handful of capers in half way through the cooking - not too early or you’ll get cremated, bitter fossils. If the capers are looking too toasted, remove them from the pan and put them to one side to use in the final plating later. Rub some of the thyme together in your hands over the simmering sauce. Give it a hint of herbs, nothing over-powering. Boil and cook the pasta, flake the cooked salmon and discard the skin. When the pasta’s past ‘al dente’ and is about to get ‘chewy’, fish it out of the boiling pan and transfer straight to the tomato sauce. Toss to combine. sprinkle on the flaked salmon and toss some more. Plate. Loads of black or cayenne pepper on the top.

TO MAKE FRESH PICI

Make a simple plain flour and water pasta dough - 2:1 flour to water (so 300g flour + 150ml water etc). Need the dough for 10 mins then cover with cling film and rest in a fridge for 30-45 mins. Roll out small sections of the dough by hand to about 3mm thickness then cut those into strips about 6mm wide. Separate each rectangular section strip and roll and tease it into a thick strand about 3-4mm wide. Keep going.

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Long before 'Spag Bol' was considered a pillar of British family food, advertisers were selling two main pasta products. Dry pasta for cooks to prepare at home and ready cooked tinned pasta. Those last 4 words probably sound as terrifying to you as they do to me. However the history of how these early convenience products were marketed gives us a fascinating insight into how pasta spread outside Italy and how Britain and America rapidly adopted it as their own food.

In the early years of the 20th century, dry pasta was almost certainly consumed in greater quantities than tinned pasta. Tinned pasta, however, may have had a greater effect on consumers' knowledge and a stronger influence on how pasta became integrated in American and British cuisine.

From an advertiser's point of view, packets of dried pasta were a relatively easy product to market.

Advertising ready-cooked spaghetti, on the other hand, meant that you had to explain the concept of an entire meal in the product's advertising. What it was, what it tasted like, why anyone should want to buy it. I find it fascinating to see how the process of educating the market for pasta developed over the decades, through recipes, serving suggestions and in the case of Heinz, endlessly repeated combinations of tomato, cheese, meat, eggs and bacon.

And from that we can see that early convenience-pasta advertising did much more than sell pasta. It taught non-Italian consumers how pasta could be combined with meals and ingredients they were already familiar with. It made it much easier for homecooks to find the confidence to try the product and experiment with it. It was a perfect way to get to know a new, exciting and exotic food.

This 1916 Heinz ad is stuffed full of wonderfully 'period' copywriting... but to modern eyes looks like a confusing mix of product and brand awareness. From a period art direction point of view, it's fascinating.. An architectural border that evokes a Victorian exhibition or pavillion but typography and illustration in the central section that wouldn't look dated for perhaps 30 years. Heinz was selling a bold new concept in convenience food and needed the style of its advertising to mirror that.

Another US ad which is heavy on education, Skinner's dry spaghetti from 1919. At first glance it's betraying some possible market resarch pointing to consumers seeing pasta as a pretty limited cooking option: "Five Sauces to Make Spaghetti Different."

This is a genuinely creative approach to selling pasta to a non-Italian market and's a tragedy that 'toothsomeness' hasn't survived in our modern pasta advertising and I honestly wish that I could get hold of the booklet of '141 recipes, each one a different spaghetti, macaroni and egg noodle conceit.' The sauce recipes themselves clearly borrow more than a little from French cuisine but the most remarkable detail is that he “Italian” sauce was not tomato-based but a milk-based white sauce with green pepper and diced ham!

Comparing Skinner's advertising to Italian press ads of the same time reveals something else. Italian brands seem to take the view that they don't need to teach consumers how to cook pasta, concentrating, instead on product awareness, and brand 'unique selling points' in quality, manufacturing, packaging and so on.

The Pianigiani 1922 poster above is a much more refined and evolved than the previous examples above, and again it's an example of a type of advertising quite a few years ahead of its time - in fact to me it already looks like mature, modern brand advertising. No recipes, or serving suggestions, just an assumption that consumers will instantly identify with the poster's theme, the character of 'Pulcinella,' from the traditional 16th century Italian popular theatre known as 'Commedia dell'Arte.'

British audiences would come to know the same anarchic rogue in street performances; first as 'Punchinello' and then later as 'Mr Punch' in 'Punch and Judy' shows. Curiously, while British Mr Punch's character is driven by violence, Pulcinella's driving force is hunger : Italian Commedia dell'Arte shows would often feature a stock gag of the always desperately hungry Pulcinella continuously stuffing his face with huge handfuls of macaroni.

And that's exactly what we've got in the Pianigiani poster - an abstract but instantly recognisable visual reference to Pulcinella, combined with more than just a tinge of Mr Punch - 'that's how we eat [how we do it] in Naples!'

Nearly 40 years later in the UK , however, and we find only a few changes in this press ad from 1958-59. Heinz is still taking an educative approach but notice that they've finally moved on from having to explain what spaghetti in a tin is. There are clues to how they're going to be positioning their product over the coming years too. The graphics and headline explicitly address younger female consumers with recipe suggestions that are clearly quick, easy meals for one. A fried egg on a bowl of tinned spagheti is 'a nourishing and perfect lunch for a busy day' and the main image obviously substitutes baked beans for tinned spaghetti on toast. Heinz almost doesn't need to add supporting copy here - beans on toast had been popular UK convenience food for nearly 20 years by this time, though I get a sense that advertisers are still feeling like they need to fight against the social stigma of convenience foods.

That's just a small part of the history of how pasta spread through American and British kitchens - but the changing food habits and social trends they reflect are enormous. And they're part of the reason your kids love Spag Bol today.

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At 9pm it’s still 29˚ in Sori and there’s something going on everywhere. Even in tucked away corners there’s music and chatter over the constant peal of bells from the church of Santa Margherita. I remember the start of the Madonna’s procession from the 1980s - first a huge crucifix and then a statue of Mary balanced on long poles
would set off to be paraded around the town,carried by the crusty, weathered cast of Pirates of the Caribbean. Sweating and shouting and jolts and gasps. Whispers of ‘Oh Dio!’ then applause and the Rosary and singing. And then repeat, all around town.
But there have been changes too; today everyone’s a little more manicured and it’s not flickering candles but a sea of glowing smart phones that greets the Madonna as she’s hauled out for her annual constitutional.

The Priest and the Mayor are there, straight out of ‘Don Camillo,’and as the Madonna sets off, she seems to be gliding through the streets. With the help of the two lead Carabinieri, the crowd parts to let the procession through, and I realise. They’ve put her on wheels! Walking just behind the Madonnamobile I watch her float above the locals, tourists, teenagers, street stalls, bars and restaurants. Not quite the opening to ‘La Dolce Vita,’ with the statue of Christ suspended from a helicopter, flying over Rome, but pretty close.

As we walk around the town some of the faithful begin to peel off to eat at the community kitchens set up in each of Sori’s quarters. By the time we’re reading the handwritten menu in ‘Forlandoli’ it’s clear the Madonna is tempting us. But she must want us to be happy, otherwise why show us all this incredible food? One last Hail Mary and as we recpectfully dash to join the queue for the Cassa, I promise the Madonna that even though I might eat all the primi I can I will defintely, defintely skip gelato just for tonight, Amen. Here’s what we ate.

The freshest made Ravioli ‘al Tuccu’ Genovese. These turned out to be a summer version and less heavy on the filling (normally there’s meat including offal, cheeses and greens, like borage), in a sauce (the ‘tuccu’) that tasted a lot like an incredible ragù, but with the addition of pine nuts, served with the meat ‘pulled.’ Below, the Ravioli in Salsa di Noce were just as fantastic, the filling being heavier on the greens than the Tuccu. I’ll be including versions of both of these in the forthcoming Pasta & Magic Tomato and Pesto Sauces books.

Pasta & Magic: Oil Sauces is available to buy now at: www.pastaandmagic.com

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Not Carbonara ….

Not Zozzona….

meet Spaghetti alla CARBOZZONA …. Or ZOZZONARA…. I can’t decide.. Eggs, pecorino, smoked bacon, sun dried tomatoes, smoked bacon and black pudding.

Ok, it’s a tongue-in-cheek recipe (no guanciale pun intended) and a little dig at the ‘carbonara police,’ but it actually works. Instead of using an equally eggy and tomato base (like with Zozzona), I’ve kept the traditional Carbonara base of pecorino and yolks and toasted black pepper …. Then for a hint of Zozzona I’ve included slivers of fried, sun dried tomatoes and smoked bacon and then topped everything with fried black pudding. Some of the bacon’s rendered fat goes into the pecorino and egg mix like you would with a classic carbonara, and to be honest I don’t miss the fatty guanciale. So there you are, an eggy Zozzona with black pudding.

M

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I stumbled across this in Siena last summer and have cooked it 3 / 4 times since. It’s now one of my favourite combinations of ingredients for oil -based pasta toppings…. Now, If you’re a regular follower you’ll know I dislike heavy pasta mantecatura (wallpaper paste-style) but I have to confess that these pici from Pasta Morelli lend themselves to more of a ‘velvety glaze’ than I would normally go for , but it works quite well as a winter dish….

Why do I go on about this? For me starch equals stodge and baby food; if you gravitate towards a lighter eating pasta dish be very careful with cooking dry pici like these and use a ridiculous amount of water - because the cooking times are longer than thinner pasta dry pici dump loads of starch into the cooking water. Go easy on any cooking water you add at the combining stage too and keep combining times to a minimum to avoid the stodge ….which I appreciate is nursery heaven to some…. Fresh pici are the obvious other alternative to get a lighter result and actually exactly what I was served in Italy….

Pici from @pastamorelli via @honoroakprovender , sausages and zucchini from @waitrose

Garlic from @garlic_farm, Isle of Wight

If you’d like to be a recipe tester for any of my dishes on Instagram for my book Pasta and Magic, DM me for that recipe spread from my book.

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Pici all’Etrusca

Pici all’Etrusca / Pici in an egg, garlic, basil, parsley, pecorino and mint pesto.

It’s an unusual, summery pesto that probably deserves to be better known than it is - pici all’etrusca.

I’ve seen this sauce pop up in southern Tuscany, which, as students of pasta and history will know is where the Etruscans ate their pasta …. I haven’t worked out what the Etruscan connection to this bizarre pesto mix is yet (maybe they were big on boiled eggs?) , but pici are supposed to have their roots, like me, in Southern Tuscany. So the name fits.

Dry pici from Pasta Morelli

FOR FOUR PEOPLE

For the pesto:

• boiled eggs (1 per person)

• 2-3 large cloves garlic

• large handful basil

• small handful parsley

• 3/4 leaves mint or to taste

• pecorino to taste

• EVO to taste

• To serve: fresh ground pink pepper, pecorino

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