Before going to the Emirates Stadium yesterday, I had a very pleasant lunch in the restaurant Ask in the Gloucester Arcade next door to Gloucester Road tube station. It's a pleasant restaurant with good service. I had spaghetti bolognese and whilst it was tasty enough, it lacked something both in the sauce and especially with the pasta. Whilst in New York in the summer, I had some pasta in a (not inexpensive) restaurant in the World Financial Center adjacent to Ground Zero and this too was disappointing. Those of us who have been fortunate to eat good pasta in Italy know what the benchmark is. These two experiences have got me thinking - why is it so hard to cook pasta well?
2 comments:
I believe that cooking and speaking are in some ways, two very similar actions. There are millions of people around the globe who are able to speak English but they inevitably have a particular accent, which is usually not quite the same as the British one. And in the same way that it is very difficult to eliminate these accents and to speak in the proper way (considering the proper as the original), it is very difficult to cook pasta in the proper way, which is the Italian way. You can try to do it, you can follow the recipe step by step, and you can even listen to Italian music when you are cooking but it will never be the same. Pasta is the way that Italian people cook, just as English is the way that British people speak.
What a perceptive and thoughtful comment - I'm impressed!
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