Skip to main content

Giulio Cesare (the opera) and the spaghetti dish at the back of the cupboard.

It was autumn and humid, early evening. A Handel opera, Giulio Cesare, was playing on the radio on 3MBS. It had been composed in 1724, the announcer said: two years short of three centuries. Given what is going on in the world now, no one can really get their head around that.

I had been looking in the back of the cupboard. I had a packet of spaghetti, and some olives and capers in the larder. What to make?

I found a can of tomatoes. Listening to the countertenor, I fried some garlic and onion in a little olive oil and added the tomatoes to the pan. Then I threw in a dozen pitted black olives chopped in halves, and a handful of capers, and left it to reduce slightly. The aroma filled the house. It hit me when I went out to the back garden to get some oregano and parsley from the herb patch, an old concrete laundry tub. It hit Casper, too, the foster greyhound who might be staying and might not be staying, depending on his behaviour, who raised his nose to the north-west breeze that soughed over the house.

Later I cooked the spaghetti to al dente and added the sauce, a kind of 'puttanesca' without the anchovies (like most Italian sauces there are regional variations: and the Neopolitan version omits anchovies).

The opera finished. Of course, I realised - Giulio Cesare, the death of Julius Caesar on radio on March 15, hence the expression 'Beware the Ides of March': on Handel, Harvey Blanks wrote: 'Handel had a real sense of the dramatic in music, as well as a flair for memorable melody only equalled in later years by Schubert'.

Comments