"It's nice. It's a nice change. And it's nice to wriggle around."

Ellen Castelow writes on the Historic UK website: “By the late 60s and early 70s dinner parties had become very popular, featuring the new fashionable ‘foreign’ dishes like Spaghetti Bolognese.”

Spaghetti Bolognese cropped up in a conversation I had with my mum. I was telling her about this project and she said that Grandma cooked spaghetti Bolognese at home when none of her friends’ mothers did. 

I ask Grandma about her culinary trailblazing and why she decided to cook food that isn’t British in origin.

“Because I think it’s nice. It’s a nice change. And it’s nice to…” Grandma mimes twirling spaghetti around on a fork, “to wriggle around.”

We laugh at this. “Yeah,” I say, agreeing. Spaghetti is fun to eat.

It’s a wonderfully simple answer. I’d been thinking about what it might mean for a British family to be eating non-British food in London in the 60s and 70s, about the kind of issues we discuss in my Writing Multicultural Britain class and how food intersects with racism, integration, appropriation. I was thrown by the idea that it could simply be fun.

Nigella demonstrating that spaghetti is fun in my copy of Nigella Express. 

The other thing is that mince is a relatively cheap form of meat, and so Bolognese sauce specifically is a way of eating interesting food on a tight budget.

Grandad chips in, “But there was that song, do you remember? About this foreign food…‘macaroni, spaghetti’ and all this sort of thing and then ‘give us a bash of the bangers and mash me mother used to make.’”

I found the song on YouTube, braced myself for the inevitable xenophobia, and had a listen. I was pleasantly surprised. My initial reaction is that the xenophobia isn’t as strong as the misogyny, and even that’s fairly tame. Peter Sellers’ character, Joe, says of his fictional Italian girlfriend, sung by genuine Italian Sophia Loren, “I brought her back to Blightly just to show me mates.”

The song follows that Joe hasn’t “had a decent meal since 1944” because his Italian partner only cooks him Italian food, which he views as inferior. This superiority is, of course, uncomfortable but the song has a jocular, affectionate tone. The conflict is more like banter. It’s interesting to me how it presents British and non-British food as opposing one another, as if you have to pick one rather than appreciating both by alternating the two, like Grandma did and does for “a nice change.”

In the introduction to her recipe “Spelt Spaghetti with Spicy Sesame Mushrooms,” Nigella Lawson writes:

“Wholemeal pasta holds no charms for me, but I co-exist very amicably with spelt spaghetti. Here it acts as a rather more robust form of soba noodle, which makes perfect sense since the sauce that dresses the pasta is Asian-influenced rather than Italian. In this vein, leftovers make an instant noodle salad.” (44)

Here, there's no attempt to set boundaries between the foods of certain nations or to pit them against each other. There's also an assumption that the reader knows what spelt and soba noodles are (probably a fair assumption of Nigella-readers). Spaghetti is one of the ‘least foreign’ aspects of this recipe, being now as familiar to Britons as bangers and mash.

Bibliography

Castelow, Ellen. “Food in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.” Historic UK, http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Food-in-Britain-in-the-1950s-1960s/. Accessed 9^th March 2018.

Lawson, Nigella. At My Table. Chatto & Windus, 2017.