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The Rest is Pasta: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Mark Gowen
I'm not a chef or a food historian. I don't have a restaurant or my own brand of pasta sauces. But I have spent an awful lot of my life eating and reading about pasta.The Rest Is Pasta is where I get to share all of that with you.A Pastaphilia podcast by Mark Gowen.www.pastaphilia.com www.pastaphilia.com
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- Today12 min
The Mystery of the History of Carbonara — Part One
Why does a seemingly simple pasta dish provoke so many arguments about how it should be cooked?In Part One of The Mystery of the History of Carbonara, we travel back through the dish’s surprisingly tangled past, uncovering a forgotten newspaper report from 1939 and following a trail that leads to the mountains of Umbria — and a pasta tradition considerably older than the carbonara we know today.Cover photograph: with thanks to www.love-logs.com Get full access to Pastaphilia at www.pastaphilia.com/subscribe
- 2 weeks ago10 min
What Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back
Britain has fallen in love with Italian food. But what happens when recipes travel from one country to another, adapting to new ingredients, tastes and traditions along the way?In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta, I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo. 9hf48abcFile SettingsDoneTitleDescriptionThumbnailWill be cropped to a 3:2 aspect ratioUploadThe Rest is PastaWhat Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back0:00Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -10:51-10:51PodcastTranscriptPreviewCoverDownloadRemoveBritain has fallen in love with Italian food. But what happens when recipes travel from one country to another, adapting to new ingredients, tastes and traditions along the way?In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta, I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo.9hf48abc2026/09/21Media settingsEdit audioTranscriptThe Rest is PastaWhat Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back[music]A few years ago, James May ended his television series Our Man in Italy by saying there’s a huge part of every one of us that wants to be Italian.But I think he should have also said perhaps we just haven’t realised howItalian we already are. Today we are buying more pasta, pesto, and ‘nduja and burrata than ever before. We are already eating more like Italians, and if social media is anything to go by, we’re already arguing about food more like Italians too.And study after study keeps coming back to the same conclusion. Britain loves Italian food more than any other world cuisine. In 2022, research from Kantar found that British households were eating the equivalent of 46 million Italian meals every week, more than twice as many as Indian dishes, even before adding pizza.More recently, another survey from UK supermarket Waitrose confirmed Italian as Britain’s favourite cuisine to eat at home. In that survey, 46% said they preferred to eat Italian, with 44% voting for both Indian and British. But while Italian food has emerged as Britain’s favourite overseas cuisine, the situation in Italy is a little different.Because if we look at research into Italian eating habits, we see that, of all nationalities, Italians are the least likely to enjoy what they see as foreign food. In terms of Britain and Italy, then, there does seem to be a little unrequited love going on. We are clearly more in love with bolognese, carbonara and lasagne than they are with roast dinners, fish and chips or sausage rolls. However, the imbalance in the Italy-Britain relationship begins to make sense the moment we realise that those 46 million Italian meals weren’t cooked in the same way or even in a similar way to how they would have been prepared in Italy.Because for centuries, while British cuisine has done a terrible job of copying foreign dishes, it has done one thing fantastically well, and that is borrowing foods from around the world and making them, sometimes even claiming them, as its own. Chicken tikka masala, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, donna kebabs, even fish and chips. All of them foods arriving in Britain originally in very different forms, and definitely not in the ways we see them being cooked on British high streets today. And I wonder whether the same process of Anglicisation has also been going on in cookbooks and written recipes over the decades too.Sometimes food writers had little choice but to adapt foreign recipes because the original ingredients simply weren’t available in Britain. But at other times,the changes really were deliberate, altering not just the ingredients but entire dishes, simply because that’s what they thought British people wanted to eat.And I think that that process has had an enormous effect on British recipeswritten in periods like the early 1950s, When pasta is very much new andexciting and exotic. But I also think it’s particularly hard for us to imagine the escapism in cooking a plate of pasta when you’ve just lived through 14 years of wartime food rationing. But that’s what happened and that’s what people did. British cooks started to experiment and copy recipes in books and magazines and slowly these new dishes start to get embedded as British staples.The part that I find really fascinating in all of this is actually the fact that in less than a generation, there are so many more British cooks making Italian dishes so regularly that they have the confidence to invent Italian and reinvent variations of dishes or just simply debate whether a recipe is authentic or not.Incidentall
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About The Rest is Pasta
I'm not a chef or a food historian. I don't have a restaurant or my own brand of pasta sauces. But I have spent an awful lot of my life eating and reading about pasta.The Rest Is Pasta is where I get to share all of that with you.A Pastaphilia podcast by Mark Gowen.www.pastaphilia.com www.pastaphilia.com
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