What Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back
Britain has fallen in love with Italian food. But what happens when recipes travel from one country to another, adapting to new ingredients, tastes and traditions along the way?In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta, I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo. 9hf48abcFile SettingsDoneTitleDescriptionThumbnailWill be cropped to a 3:2 aspect ratioUploadThe Rest is PastaWhat Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back0:00Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -10:51-10:51PodcastTranscriptPreviewCoverDownloadRemoveBritain has fallen in love with Italian food. But what happens when recipes travel from one country to another, adapting to new ingredients, tastes and traditions along the way?In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta, I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo.9hf48abc2026/09/21Media settingsEdit audioTranscriptThe Rest is PastaWhat Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back[music]A few years ago, James May ended his television series Our Man in Italy by saying there’s a huge part of every one of us that wants to be Italian.But I think he should have also said perhaps we just haven’t realised howItalian we already are. Today we are buying more pasta, pesto, and ‘nduja and burrata than ever before. We are already eating more like Italians, and if social media is anything to go by, we’re already arguing about food more like Italians too.And study after study keeps coming back to the same conclusion. Britain loves Italian food more than any other world cuisine. In 2022, research from Kantar found that British households were eating the equivalent of 46 million Italian meals every week, more than twice as many as Indian dishes, even before adding pizza.More recently, another survey from UK supermarket Waitrose confirmed Italian as Britain’s favourite cuisine to eat at home. In that survey, 46% said they preferred to eat Italian, with 44% voting for both Indian and British. But while Italian food has emerged as Britain’s favourite overseas cuisine, the situation in Italy is a little different.Because if we look at research into Italian eating habits, we see that, of all nationalities, Italians are the least likely to enjoy what they see as foreign food. In terms of Britain and Italy, then, there does seem to be a little unrequited love going on. We are clearly more in love with bolognese, carbonara and lasagne than they are with roast dinners, fish and chips or sausage rolls. However, the imbalance in the Italy-Britain relationship begins to make sense the moment we realise that those 46 million Italian meals weren’t cooked in the same way or even in a similar way to how they would have been prepared in Italy.Because for centuries, while British cuisine has done a terrible job of copying foreign dishes, it has done one thing fantastically well, and that is borrowing foods from around the world and making them, sometimes even claiming them, as its own. Chicken tikka masala, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, donna kebabs, even fish and chips. All of them foods arriving in Britain originally in very different forms, and definitely not in the ways we see them being cooked on British high streets today. And I wonder whether the same process of Anglicisation has also been going on in cookbooks and written recipes over the decades too.Sometimes food writers had little choice but to adapt foreign recipes because the original ingredients simply weren’t available in Britain. But at other times,the changes really were deliberate, altering not just the ingredients but entire dishes, simply because that’s what they thought British people wanted to eat.And I think that that process has had an enormous effect on British recipeswritten in periods like the early 1950s, When pasta is very much new andexciting and exotic. But I also think it’s particularly hard for us to imagine the escapism in cooking a plate of pasta when you’ve just lived through 14 years of wartime food rationing. But that’s what happened and that’s what people did. British cooks started to experiment and copy recipes in books and magazines and slowly these new dishes start to get embedded as British staples.The part that I find really fascinating in all of this is actually the fact that in less than a generation, there are so many more British cooks making Italian dishes so regularly that they have the confidence to invent Italian and reinvent variations of dishes or just simply debate whether a recipe is authentic or not.Incidentally, we’re going to be talking about how lazy I think we’ve becomewhen it comes to using words like authentic and traditional to describe ourcooking in a future episode of The Rest is Pasta. And I do promise that I willtry not to be unreasonably triggered by that particular discussion.But let’s come back to the idea of recipes being borrowed or even appropriated by other countries. And one of the best examples I can think offor that actually comes from Italy. It’s a recipe whose roots can be traced back centuries and a dish that has provoked controversy. It’s called Fettuccine Alfredo, which, if you didn’t know, is simply Fettuccine dressed with butter and parmesan. But the fascinating thing is that only a few years ago, Alfredo was hardly known by that name in Italy. And it certainly wasn’t celebrated the way it is today. Because in Italy, plain pasta or boiled rice with butter is what you eat when you’re sick and you have to ‘mangiare in bianco,’ which is to eat plainer, simpler, literally ‘white’ food. I’ve been on the receiving end of exactly that advice from Italian doctors and more than a few family members in the past, so I can appreciate why making a fuss about convalescent food might seem a little odd to older generations.Ironically though, The story of Alfredo actually begins with a convalescent dish. In 1908, the story goes, Roman restaurateur Alfredo dell’Elia creates a simple pasta dish for his wife as she recovers from childhood. They like it somuch that it goes straight on their restaurant menu. Over the following years,the dish supposedly attracts the attention of American writer Sinclair Lewis, who mentions Fettuccine in his 1922 novel Babbitt, and then Hollywood stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who are said to have discovered it on honeymoon and later served it at dinner parties in Beverly Hills.How much of that is true is another question, but by 1927, Alfredo is appearing in American newspapers and magazines and gradually finding its place in Italian-American cooking. And once it gets there, therecipe really begins to change. In the years following the Second World War,butter and cream become increasingly fashionable ingredients in pasta sauces. Plenty of 1950s carbonara recipes feature one or both of them, and by the early 1960s, cream has also found its way into Italian-American Fettuccine Alfredo, where it remains for much of the rest of the century. But the really interesting transformation comes later on. And in a similar way to what happens with carbonara, the original recipe becomes shorthand for a particular type of sauce. Carbonara suddenly gets variations like asparagus carbonara, Mushroom carbonara, Smoked Salmon carbonara, and so on, while Alfredo becomes shorthand for ‘anything you like on a buttery, cheesy sauce.’And the more inventive these variations become, the wider the cultural divide grows. In America, Alfredo is embraced as part of the Italian-American culinary tradition while on the other side of the Atlantic, Italian pasta purists can hardly believe their luck because there’s a new antichrist in town and his name is Alfredo. Chicken Alfredo, prawn Alfredo, broccoli Alfredo, even blue cheese and steak Alfredo.Now, I have to confess to having a certain amount of sympathy for those poor, tortured Italian foodies, because in cooking I’ve learnt from personal experience that… Get full access to Pastaphilia at www.pastaphilia.com/subscribe
