A pasta interlude

This post’s going to be a little different.

It’s not a book review, or 600 words of me fawning over a book cover I’m especially fond of. It’s not about Coronaviruses or lockdowns as such, although it’s quite possibly partly inspired by those things.

This post is about a pasta recipe I’ve been using since I was sixteen. And that means it’s also about a lot of things that remind me of being sixteen, not least of which is the feeling I belonged nowhere in the entire world.

Ingredients: dried pasta shapes, 29p from the bottom shelf. Tinned tomatoes - try to get the ones with the white, ‘no-frills’ label. An onion; or two if you’ve only got those little cheap ones. 2 rashers smokey bacon - cooking bacon’s fine, since that’s what we’re going to do. Cook it.

Method: put your pasta on to boil; the sauce only takes as long to cook as the pasta does to go just beyond al dente. Chop your onion, bacon and tomatoes into small bits and cook them together in whatever way seems sensible. Combine with the drained pasta; eat hot.

Especially good when it’s the only thing you’ve eaten all day.

I’m not here to talk about why I ended up living on my friend’s bedroom floor for ten months, or the reasons I eventually ended up ‘intentionally homeless’ for the summers in-between studying at university. Maybe another time, another post. No, this post is about the pasta recipe, because it’s possibly one of the most precious things I have.

So, I’ve got this notebook, right? It’s A4 size, and each leaf is lined on one side and blank on the reverse, I guess with the idea that you might sketch on the blank side and then write notes on the lines. It’s a pinky-dusky-red colour, with an illustration of a gangly woman wearing barely-there lingerie. I don’t think it’s meant to be sexy, it’s too cartoonish for that, but it’s still an incongruous notebook to have become the house for my go-to recipe collection.

The thing is, when you know what it feels like to not have things (like money, and food), there’s a tendency towards… hoarding, I think. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me - I don’t consider myself materialistic but my belongings are precious to me in a way I suspect things just aren’t for most people. It’s actually worse with things I’ve been given rather than things I’ve bought; at one stage every item of furniture in my house was a hand-me-down from my dad, my gran, aunts, uncles and cousins - I even had a dining table and matching chairs that was a gift from my A Level Theatre Studies teacher. She still gave us all Ds in our final performance, the cow.

The point is, I get sentimental about stuff. I don’t know how many people reading this will remember the seminal 80s feat of puppetry and glee that is Labyrinth, but for those that do: I’m like the garbage lady. I keep stuff no one would ever guess I’d want, and I do it because I’m worried about not having any stuff - even now, when I’m more financially stable than I’ve ever been before in my life.

Recipes were always my big thing, though. That knicker-themed notebook is full now, to the point that all the blank pages have had recipes from magazines glued on them, a veritable patchwork of ‘diet soups’, peppercorn sauces and a peanut butter fudge recipe that I’ve literally just remembered exists and might make later this week. Yeah, the diet soups didn’t take.

These recipes come from… all over. I remember sitting in my Auntie’s kitchen with a stack of her recipes books, faithfully copying out the ones I liked the sound of (mainly chocolate orange marble cake, honestly). I mined BBC Food for stuff from the Hairy Biker’s Mum Knows Best series, nabbed ideas from my Food Tech worksheets from school (still the best jam roly poly recipe I’ve ever seen). I’ve recipes from my mum, my grandma, several from an ex-boyfriend’s auntie (in fact, her stew maybe deserves a blog post of its own) - but this pasta recipe is honestly the best thing I’ve ever cooked.

This recipe fed me for a whole week when all I had was a 500g bag of Basics pasta, left to my name. I was doing my A Levels and had recently discovered I owed NPower £300. 17 year olds on Income Support tend not to have £300 knocking about, and at the time I was cooking everything on a gas camping stove because I couldn’t afford to have my cooker connected.

This recipe also fed me at university, many, many nights when my housemates were blowing their student loans on takeaways but I had bailiffs still sending me letters.

It was the first meal I cooked for my first ‘proper’ boyfriend, and the last meal I cooked for the next one.

It is infinitely customisable - more a set of guidelines than a recipe - which is a) very useful when you’re the type of cook who looks in a cupboard and says well I guess we’re having these things thrown together in a pan for tea, and b) not really surprising given that the recipe I initially copied down called for pancetta and fresh tomatoes, while I’ve been using smoked bacon and tinned for years.

I made it earlier this week with the stalk off a big ol’ head of broccoli diced into tiny chunks and added just as soon as the onion turned translucent. My boyfriend loved it, despite having ridiculed me for keeping the stalk in the fridge only that morning. His review, by the way, was ‘that was amazing, can we have that again next week?’

And maybe it is the pandemic and the lockdown that’s got me thinking about this type of cooking again after so long, because I am spending a lot more time staring into a cupboard and wondering what I can throw together in a pan for tea than I have for a while.

It will surprise no one, I suspect, that the answer is very often some variation on this.