Pasta

Appears in
Floyd on Italy
Floyd on Italy

By Keith Floyd

Published 1994

  • About
My first experience of pasta was in the late fifties in a coffee bar in Bristol. It was a dish called Spaghetti Bolognese – a mountain of spaghetti with a tomato-flavoured, minced meat sauce topped with melted Cheddar cheese. I was wildly impressed by this meal – it cost, I think, about one shilling and nine pence – so I scoured the Bristol shops for spaghetti to cook at home and was amazed and baffled to discover it came in dried sticks in a blue paper packet.

Problem. How to get the stuff into the saucepan without breaking it (it had been in long pieces at the coffee bar). Did I soak it first or what? My mother’s Mrs Beeton was no help. And Mum didn’t know either. Eventually, I phoned the restaurant and asked. Simple – you fed the sticks into rapidly boiling water as they softened. Terrific. I made my sauce with mince and a tin of tomatoes and declared myself a cook ... I was sixteen and working as a cub reporter on the Bristol Evening Post. But the seed was sown.