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PASTA… IS DELICIOUS WITH THE AID OF SPICES !
Choose one or the other: Either you love pasta but you dare not say so, or you think you dislike it and your expression shows it when, by chance, your friends or your partner invite you to eat some. Prejudices can be strong! “pasta is boring and monotonous” “pasta has no taste” “pasta makes you that” “pasta is for poor people”. So, I’ll stop you there. Even in Paris (London or Roma), even in provincial France, you easily find luxurious “trattoria”, managed by cunning “padroni” where you eat expensive pasta in a posh environment. Essentially pasta, like pizza, is a victim of its own popularity. Most people imagine it to be too common to be excellent.
A botanical fact. Spaghetti is not grown on trees as illustrated in the april fools day ‘panorama’ program on the BBC in the sixties. It is a wholesome product of the soil made from wheat (hard or soft) ground and shaped into angel hair pasta (vermicelli), shells, parcels etc…
Here we praise pasta. We like it not only because it’s cheap, but varied, refined, wholesome and succulent.
Varied.
Because of its different origins. In spite of legend, there is hardly anything in common between antiquarian Chinese noodles made of rice or beans, the various Palestinian pastas, Jewish or Arabic, and Savoy “crozets” or Alsatian “spätzles”; The multitude of Italian pastas (actually Latino-Greek) from that talented peninsula means we can eat it every day and never eat the same thing: fresh or dried, spaghetti, macaroni, ravioli, lasagna, fettucini, tortellini, lumaconi, gnocchi and tutti quanti. Italians eat 28 kg per year per person. 4 times more than an English or French person; If it’s well prepared you will never tire of it.
Refined.
Because pasta was invented in a period lost in the mists of time and has since been improved by generations of cooks. The Etruscans, mysterious and delicate people who occupied Tuscany before the Romans already cooked pasta. Apicius, the equivalent of Gault Millau at the time of Christ spoke in its favor. The Medicis, the aristocrats of Florence, the ‘extreme’ aristocrats, introduced it to the French court and it remained for a long time the food of lords.
Pasta is ‘whole food’ and it gives you energy, slow release energy for prolonged effort. We have learned this from marathon runners and mountaineers. Its advantage is in its slow acting sugars and the carbohydrates in the starch gradually transferred to the blood by digestion. Remember, pasta is like diesel fuel, and diesel is used up only when you use the engine. It is not the pasta which makes you fat, it’s the television. In fact the Italians have the right approach. They don’t say “pasta”, they say gnocchi, tagliatelles, spaghetti, in the same way that we say cabbages, carrots and turnips – not just “vegetables”. Pasta is a basic ingredient, a name for variable mixtures of cereals water and eggs, with a little salt, sometimes flavored and colored (spinach, tomato, squid ink, cheese…).
What counts is how you use this basic ingredient with other ingredients and flavors. That is where Miam Miam spice cookery courses make all the difference! The mains two things to remember: cook the spaghetti 1 minute less for “al dente” (usually 11 minutes instead of 12). Cook it in plenty of salted water or some stock to taste and do not rinse it after cooking.
Delight, spices.
In two days of cooking and tasting we will bet on teaching you the delicacies of Asian noodles (Japanese sobas ad udons, Vietnamese vermicelli, Chinese noodles and won ton, Persian resteh polo, Indonesian bami goreng, pat thai from Thailand) and Italian pasta, pesto, ragù, arrabiata, carbonara (without cream as in Italy). With olive oil or sesame, ginger, garlic, basil, coriander, parsley, sage, oregano, thyme, bay, fennel, peppers, lemon, saffron…Accompanied by mushrooms, sea food or little vegetables.
Actually, everyone likes pasta – well prepared pasta.
With your children and friends, after a good day in the fresh air, or in the evening, an improvised dish of pasta around a flask of Chianti.
So, why deprive yourself of this pleasure, not only you but all the people close to you?
See you soon at the Miam Miam spice cookery courses in Aulas
Patrick du Cros
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