Podcasts

Rachel Roddy: An A–Z of Pasta Twenty-one letters, fifty shapes, unlimited possibilities

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Carton of mixed pasta

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:46 — 21.9MB)

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Rachel Roddy is a marvellous conduit between the many cultures and kitchens of her adopted homeland and a world that simply cannot get enough of Italy. Her latest book is all about pasta, although she wisely recognised that there was little point in trying to be encyclopaedic. Instead, she chose 50 shapes on which to hang history, culture, personal stories and, of course, recipes and suggestions.

We met just in time for me to get this episode ready for World Pasta Day, today. We talked about the book, obviously, and also about many other aspects of pasta and Italian life. She did divulge what she is thinking of making to celebrate World Pasta Day. I won’t spoil the secret; you’ll just have to listen. What will you be making?

Notes

  1. An A-Z of Pasta: Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes is widely available.
  2. So is A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce, by Massimo Montanari.
  3. And Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta.
  4. After my confession about using up bits of leftover mixed pasta, I looked closely in the shops, and discovered that more than one brand actually sells boxes of mixed pasta. What’s more, they cost exactly the same as whole pasta. I don’t understand.
  5. Transcripts are a bit delayed right now, but there will be one soon.

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Podcasts

Midnight’s chicken: Indian food evolution Insights into new recipes and new ingredients

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Sign above the door of original Moti Mahal restaurant in New Delhi

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:04 — 19.4MB)

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Podcast cover artworkAfter the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, a chef brought the tandoor oven and his tandoori chicken from Peshawar to a new restaurant he opened in Delhi, the Moti Mahal. There, he created makkhani murghi, butter chicken; tandoori chicken in a sauce that combines tomatoes, butter and cream. Seventy years later, the internet was overrun by a recipe for an “easy, authentic, creamy, spicy, and delicious” version of the “traditional Indian restaurant dish”. Urvashi Pitre, who created that recipe, shot to fame and a book deal as the Butter Chicken Lady.

The rise of the Butter Chicken Lady fascinated Sucharita Kanjilal, a PhD student at UCLA. Butter chicken is comparatively recent. Tomatoes, a key ingredient in the dish, were adopted very late in India. And the whole notion of recipes is also a relatively recent phenomenon in India. What, she wondered, could tomatoes in Indian recipes say about how new tastes are created.

Notes

  1. Sucharita Kanjilal’s paper — Beyond Bourdieu: What Tomatoes in Indian Recipes Tell Us about “Taste” — is published in Gastronomica (2021) 21(3) 1–12. There is a lot more in the paper than we were able to cover here.
  2. Here is the transcript.

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Podcasts

Sushi From necessity to ubiquity

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Detail from Utagawa Hiroshige’s [Amusements While Waiting for the Moon on the Night of the Twenty-sixth in Takanawa, showing sushi stalls serving tourists

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:29 — 23.5MB)

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Portrait of Eric Rath
Eric Rath
The California Roll was only the beginning. Or at least, the beginning of global domination. Back in the mid 1980s, when I made a documentary for BBC TV about disgust and learned food habits, we chose sushi as our exemplar of the Westerner’s idea of hard-to-understand foods. Raw fish. Cold rice. Seaweed. What’s to like? If I had known then of the rich history of sushi, I’m sure we could have made even more of its strange 1980s incarnation.

Eric Rath’s history of sushi traces the word back to its origins as a method of preserving fish through many twists and turns to today, when sushi means almost anything you want it to mean.

Notes

  1. Eric Rath’s book Oishii: The History of Sushi is published by Reaktion Books. It contains recipes old and new, in case you want to try making sushi at home.
  2. National Geographic surprised me with this article in early September: These popular tuna species are no longer endangered, surprising scientists.
  3. A popular culture view of modern sushi that I did not mention, precisely because it lives up to all possible stereotypes, is the amazing sequence in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. Almost more astonishing is the dedication that went into making it.
  4. Here is the transcript, thanks to the generosity of the show’s supporters.
  5. The banner image is a detail from Utagawa Hiroshige’s Amusements While Waiting for the Moon on the Night of the Twenty-sixth in Takanawa, which dates from the 1820s, with thanks to the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The cover image is a detail from Bowl of Sushi, also by Hiroshige. I have not been able to date it.

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Podcasts

Italian coffee: a temporary triangle Tying together Italy, Brazil and Italian East Africa

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Archive photo of an Italian overseer and Ethiopian workers on a coffee plantation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:09 — 20.4MB)

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Interior of Tomoca Coffee House in Addis Ababa Tomoca Coffee House in Addis Ababa is a lasting reminder of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. When I visited, almost 10 years ago, a somewhat ancient machine was producing terrific cups of espresso for a huge crowd, and they were doing a roaring trade in beans too. Tomoca is in some ways a symbol not just of Ethiopian coffee, but also of the Italian connection and, at one remove, of the way that coffee ties Italy and Ethiopia to Brazil.

Diana Garvin, an historian, recently published a paper that examines what she calls the Italian coffee triangle. She explains how Italy’s belated land grab in Africa sought to transform the colonos of Brazil, the 2.7 million immigrant Italian labourers who effectively tripled Brazilian production in a decade, into respectable colonialisti in Ethiopia, Italians who owned and oversaw coffee plantations in Ethiopia. Although their Fascist-inspired duplication of Brazilian methods utterly failed, still, Africa had a powerful hold on the Italian imagination.

Notes

  1. Diana Garvin’s paper The Italian coffee triangle: From Brazilian colonos to Ethiopian colonialisti was published in Modern Italy, doi:10.1017/mit.2021.26. Follow her on Twitter @DianaEGarvin.
  2. Chewing the Fat is one of Karima Moyer-Nocchi’s two published books. She’s on Twitter @MoyerNocchi, but not often. Better go to her website.
  3. Here is the transcript.
  4. Banner photo of Italian plantation overseer and Ethiopian workers, someone else snagged from the Archivio Luce.

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Podcasts

Food in post-independence India Still hungry after all these years

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Farmers protest near Delhi in November 2020

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:48 — 28.2MB)

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Poster suggesting that Indians do not eat one of three chapatis

India, like most places on Earth, suffered its fair share of famines over the centuries. From the horrendous Bengal famine of 1769, when a third of the population perished under the gaze of the East India Company, to the awful famine of 1943, this time under British imperial rule. Indian politicians gained independence in 1947, promising that they would do better for their citizens. Although they coped well with the refugees after partition, they were ill-prepared for crop failures across much of northern India in the early 1950s. Campaigns urging Indians to skip a meal seem, now, to have been misguided at best and tone deaf at worst.

Benjamin Siegel, who teaches history at Boston University, has written a terrific book on food in post-independence India. Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India explores the often contradictory and confusing history of Indian food policy with clarity and compassion.

Notes

  1. Benjamin Siegel’s book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.
  2. A paper ‘Self-help which ennobles a nation’: development, citizenship, and the obligations of eating in India’s austerity years is available online thanks to Boston University Libraries.
  3. The transcript is here.
  4. Banner picture was all over the place in November 2020, uncredited as far as I could tell.

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