As a parent I have always wished for my children to grow up thinking independently, become loving partners and eventually supportive parents. I have also encouraged them to be happy, thoughtful cooks too.
Never more so than when they first left home.
Early Autumn is the time of year when pupils will have vacated their childhood homes and morphed into something approaching adulthood. In a good year many will have flown the nest and started their university education. Hundreds will have been transported in their tearful parent’s SUVs, traditionally packed to the gunnels with tins of processed food, jars of ready made sauces and kilos of dried pasta.
I was reminded of this when strolling the aisles of an A-list supermarket and passing the parade of B-lister’s pasta sauces and chemically stabilised foods. The growing roster of film and TV stars, celebrity chefs or sports personalities that have trooped along to Unilever, Nestlé, Kraft or Rank/Hovis/McDougall to add their grinning faces to the labels of processed foods, all whilst shamelessly turning up on chat shows to espouse their concerns over the well-being of our planet, our human species in general and the younger generation in particular. Seasonal and sustainable cooking, alongside crucial issues of self sufficiency, frequently get second billing after the royalty payments and the vanity profile. Our present, destructive food ‘system’ is skewed enough, without the rich and famous trying their opportunistic hand on the tiller.
And lest we forget, that most prominent member of our present Royal family was once intimately involved with some gratuitous retail activity that still managed to add loss-making to its dubious culinary credentials. Notwithstanding, you still needed an overdraft facility to purchase the biscuits. Now, further down the regal ranks, and with increased time on his hands and less civil list income, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that even an estranged prince might consider taking up the gastronomic baton – perhaps with a line in pizza sauces. ‘No Sweat’ might offer a suitably catchy brand name.
It seems many students, away from home and surrounded with dried pasta, are constantly targeted to buy expensive, high intervention, quasi-convenient celebrity sauces, whilst simple home-cooking would work so much more profitably every time. So I was not surprised to find that Spaghetti Bolognese, a dish unheard of in Italy, was a clear winner in the student residential pod. A dish inevitably accompanied by a famously publicised ‘cook-in’ sauce. But if the requirement is substantially more nourishment and more taste, with a concomitant reduction in expenditure, then perhaps during the weekly ‘phone call, we might encourage them to try the recipe below.
And with my plea for more young people to cook, rather than merely assemble, it was whilst I was in the company of a northern Italian nonna that I was granted the essential mantra of the ‘three O’s’ when it comes to pasta dishes. “Don’t Over cook, don’t Over drain and don’t Over sauce”. I might add, don’t over spend. At least not by bolstering celebrity bank accounts.
Penne alla Carbonara from The River Café Cook Book (1995) Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers
Serves 6 (if memory serves, that’s most of a dormitory)
200g pancetta (or streaky bacon)
1 tbsp olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
6 egg yolks
120 ml single cream (completely optional)
150 g Parmesan (or hard cheese), freshly grated
250 g penne rigate
In a large pan, fry the pancetta in the olive oil slowly, so that it releases its own fat before becoming crisp
Add some pepper
Beat the egg yolks with the cream and season with salt and pepper
Add half the Parmesan
Meanwhile cook the penne in a generous amount of boiling salted water, then drain
Combine immediately with the hot pancetta and the oil then pour in the cream mixture
Stir to coat each pasta piece, the heat from the pasta will cook the eggs slightly
Finally add more cheese as required.
Wine thoughts
Staying with the regionally inexpensive, but sourced from the warm hills below Rome, a simple, refreshing Frascati might fit an Italianate supper in student accommodation. A bit more of a grown-up white in the form of a Vermentino from Sardinia would be my choice if there’s a carefully made bottle to hand. If pushed and the local supermarket is a little staid, then a crackling dry Picpoul de Pinet from France would work well.
