Of course, I would never dream of serving pasta any other way than al dente . Social ostracism might ensue, if you’ll pardon the sarcasm. I was standing by the pot, watching the steam rising frantically in baroque curlicues; little parallel curves like a Don Martin cartoon in a magazine circa 1968. I turned it down to ‘simmer’ and wondered how generations of Italians managed to instantaneously transport themselves from the threshing fields, the horse and plough, the FIAT production line, or the corner garage at the very moment nonna drained the cooked-to-the-second yellow strands. Maybe they did, but it seems unlikely. Forgive me, padre, for I have sinned (SFX: jiggle of rosary beads—use uncooked rigatoni if unavailable: shaken, they sound uncannily like chunky wooden beads). The sin : I once broke the al dente mantra, enthusing on this weblog about well-cooked pasta—in that instance a thick, muscular, robust bucatini paired with a meat ragu made from the leftover semi-solid fluids f...
In 1948 she was already 27; over the hill, as her American-slang-talking buddies might have said, jokingly; or not. Some of them had actually married American soldiers during the war. Years later, when I was writing a history of the college she had attended, a clear-memoried ninety-year-old who knew every stitch in her darned woollen gloves told me one or two had returned to Melbourne after the war accompanied only by a child. Kathleen was an amateur thespian; local theatre companies, play-reading groups, poetry recitations, that kind of thing. She was tall and willowy, and had a face that smiled crookedly; she was no beauty. She lived with her parents and wrote diaries. She worked in a city office and wore fawn gabardine coats in winter on the tram into town and home again. The house was an untouched Edwardian, of the kind you expect still to be lit by gas, on a triangular corner block below the rail bridge in Ascot Vale, and from the east window of its heavy-sofaed sitting room, you ...