FoodStuff - Great pasta love
John Lethlean
Not spaghetti but chocolate dipped strawberries from Sunny Ridge Strawberry Farm! Yum!
Articles about the food of love almost inevitably stumble over themselves to mention oysters, truffles, foie gras and anything else ridiculously expensive. Or texturally suggestive, like strawberries dipped in molten chocolate. Yuck.
None of it here.
My – our – food of love involves spaghetti, a little old lady and a frying pan I wish I still had but which, like so many minor possessions over the years, has gone to God.
Leftover spaghetti, to be accurate; Marcella Hazan; and that superb old iron pan.
Now, I know Valentines Day, the traditional publication cycle of food articles that supposedly suggest love, lust and ultimate fulfilment , was months ago. But I find myself staring down the barrel of a certain anniversary – I think it’s traditionally recognised as the “New Vespa Anniversary”, or is it the “Bose Sound System Anniversary”? – which may not sound like much to some of you but seems an enormous achievement to me. Well, to us, really.
If we’d taken some of the odds available at the time on two kids, three homes and a still functioning (just) Labrador, I reckon the Vespa would have paid for itself.
Anyway, we were sitting in the back yard having a bite of Sunday lunch, exhausted from half an hour of moaning about the wretched possums, when my wife Margaret said to daughter Sarah “this is the first thing daddy ever cooked for me.”
And, of course, it was; I had simply forgotten, like a bloke, although it was rather lovely to be reminded.
A pile of leftover spaghetti (because who can be bothered with putting half a 500 gram box back in the pantry?) a recipe from the now 83 years old woman who opened the doors of Italian cookery to my generation - Marcella Hazan - and a solid, superb old frying pan I seemed to have acquired years earlier in circumstances that may not have been entirely honourable.
The frittata di spaghetti – my courtship special – had clearly carried cupid’s arrow far straighter than any fattened goose liver or overcooked crustacean and with a good deal less cost, too. A good catch.
We all still love it, and when I had my little shop, back in the days when frittata was terribly in vogue, every now and then I’d make my spaghetti version and it would sell like hot cakes.
It was pre-carbophobia, thank goodness. Tasty food for aspiring triathletes.
More Classic Italian Cooking, Hazan’s second book if I’m not mistaken, was published in the US in 1978 and later appeared as a paperback under the catchy title The Second Classic Italian Cookbook. It remains a book anyone who loves simple, honest food should own. Both paperbacks sold brilliantly internationally - rightly so - and were later amalgamated into a title still available new today, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. A specialty collectibles shop such as Books for Cooks in Fitzroy could probably get you a hardback from overseas if you felt strongly about it. It’s not a Vespa, but…
Basic frittata di spaghetti, to which virtually any ingredient that goes well with spaghetti can be added, using commonsense
- Start with about 200 grams of leftover (or cooked to order) spaghetti. Make sure you cook the stuff in oodles of water and plenty of salt, and when it’s cooked (not overcooked) toss it in about 45 grams of butter (after you’ve drained it, of course).
- Add to the buttery spag 30 grams of quality grated Parmigiano and several tablespoons of chopped flat leaf parsley. Mix, and allow to cool.
- Lightly beat three free range eggs with sea salt and black pepper, before adding to the cooled pasta.
- Melt 15 grams of butter in an old, solid pan, preferably one with a story attached, and when the foam subsides, add the frittata mix, spreading evenly.
- Cook three-to-four minutes over medium flame without touching the pan. Then, to ensure the edges are cooked the same as the centre, take the outside of the pan to the centre of the heat source and let it have a minute before rotating another three times, allowing all four “quarters” of the pan to have time at the hotter part of the flame.
- Get a really big flat plate, turn the frittata over on to it, cooked side up, so you can then slide the un-cooked side back into the pan to repeat the cooking procedure outlined above.
- Remove to a cutting board for slicing, and serve hot, lukewarm or at room temperature, depending on how anxious you are to eat.
It may not get you through a wedding anniversary, but it will make an excellent Sunday lunch.
From a collection of John’s food writing 2005-2008.
Follow John Lethlean and Necia Wilden on Twitter as they eat and drink their way around Australia
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