"When you look and feel gorgeous while cooking, it always tastes better." Nadia Caterina Munno aka The Pasta Queen
Back early from our supposed three days away in the goldfields of Victoria because of a broken wrist - not to mention COVID as well. Not my broken wrist, or my COVID but a tragedy nevertheless.
So today I am back at the computer escaping the hot sun out there, and turning to the hot sun of the Pasta Queen. Why? Well as usual I am uninspired, so eventually decided on my last year's Christmas present from my daughter-in-law as cooked on TikTok and one of the little yellow stickers that have highlighted things of interest.
So what could cheer you more than a look at the Pasta Queen? You can mock the clothes, and the tossing of the hair, and the over the top presentation. But do watch this video on TikTok - it's a mere minute and a half long and you might get sucked in - like me.
She calls the dish The Whipping Sicilian, but it's sort of an aglio e alio - very simple, garlic, chilli, olive oil, parsley - and cheese of course. The language is exaggerated, the Italian accent is emphatic, the earrings are ridiculous and the dress is sexy. She even has a really kitsch olive oil pourer that looks like a teapot. Sort of a modern day Fanny Cradock in a way. But pay attention. She has a wonderful trick with the chopped garlic, over which she pours a trickle of olive oil and then mashes it all together, there are little anecdotes, more tips and tricks and a reference to the pasta water as the tears of the gods - the full story of which is presented in my TikTok book on her page, because her contribution to the book is a series of tips. The tears of the gods?
"Legend has it that the Roman Gods saw someone serve dry pasta and began to cry. The tears were captured to make the pasta moist - and this became pasta water! When mixing your pasta and sauce together, add pasta water and cook a little longer. True beauty will created before your eyes."
Obviously a ridiculous story but charming and one that might make you remember to:
"Take the pasta out of the water before it is ready. I am talking almost too chewy to eat. Now put the pasta into the sauce, add a cup of pasta water, and let it cook. Then add another cup and repeat. The sauce will absorb into the pasta itself, making you a pasta master to your friends and family." Nadia Caterina Munno
In the last couple of years I have been doing this - yes I know - I should have been doing it sooner - mostly thanks to Rachel Roddy, but I don't think I quite realised the bit about doing it before the pasta was cooked. I can certainly attest to the fact that it adds to the creaminess of the sauce. No actual cream needed.
In her page of tips she also emphasises the need to salt the pasta water:
"a handful of salt in the pot will bring out amazing flavours and ... our inner Italian. Don't ask me about the measurements of salt to use. I never measure. It should just tickle the tongue and make you sigh." Nadia Caterina Munno
I confess I don't do this - mostly because of the problem of salt - of which David is very rigid. But maybe I should start adding just a little.
Before I go on with a couple more recipes, just a few words about who she is. She is genuinely from Italy - from Rome and also from a family that can go back to four generations of making pasta. They owned small pasta factories near Naples, although still living in Rome. The factories were sold after WW2. Her husband is English, and together they ran a cybersecurity company which eventually took them to America - Tampa, Florida, where they now live with their four children. He still runs that company. Whether she has time to still help or not I do not know. She has so far produced two cookbooks and has recently finished a series on Amazon Prime in which she travels around Italy looking at and cooking regional foods. She has almost four million followers and I'm sure she has made a fortune.
It's interesting isn't it, how some people who try to achieve major success on TikTok, Instagram et al. do and how some don't. You can sort of see how this lady did it. She is obviously intelligent, having already succeeded in entrepreneurial business with her husband. She looks gorgeous, wears glamorous clothes - Dolce & Gabbana I believe are responsible for a lot of them and uses the glamour to the hilt but in a very self-knowing, self-mocking kind of way. She's more Nigella than Nigella but actually, slightly more fun, because of her schtick teetering on the ridiculous - especially her signature hair toss as she pouts 'Ingredients' at the camera. Yet she is serious about her food. Her recipes are not super original, and are often minor twists on classical recipes, but those very short videos generally teach you at least one small thing. How to chop garlic, twist your spaghetti on to the plate just so - and so on.
So let's look at a couple of her recipes. In one interview she said that her current favourite was pasta al pomodoro - tomatoes garlic basil. You know the thing. Just three ingredients - no four - there is always cheese - preferably pecorino - the Roman cheese - for her - but you can do a lot of different things with three ingredients as we have all learnt over the years. In that interview, she described the dish thus:
"My favorite one is pomodoro, so tomato, basil, and garlic. I could eat that forever. And one thing I do that is different to make it really extra ... [is] I strain the tomatoes so there's no seeds, no peels. This makes the tomato a lot sweeter because the seeds themselves are very acidic because they're basically unripe future tomatoes. They make the sauce very, very, very acidic. You take peels and seeds out [and then] put it through a strainer"
However when I went looking I found at least three recipes for Spaghetti al pomodoro. There are probably more: Number one is the one described above, In Number two the tomatoes are cherry tomatoes and stewed beforehand with chilli and garlic, before mixing with the pasta; in Number three the pasta is merely mixed with a tomato sauce made from tinned tomatoes and garlic which is just mashed.
Still on the tomatoes there is another dish for which she is famous which is called Assassin's spaghetti, and whilst she is famous for it, it's a classic dish from Bari in Puglia in which the spaghetti is cooked in the tomato sauce until charred on the bottom, folded over slightly and continued to cook with a tomato paste stock being added as it dries up - rather like a risotto. And I have to say that this looks delicious. The trick is to get the spaghetti charred but not burnt which requires a mix of patience by not moving the spaghetti around as it cooks, and judgement as to when to add more liquid and to stop it really burning. And again I wonder how does a classic recipe become associated with one Instagram/TikTok influencer?
Last dish - The Angry Baroness - which is a very slight variation on that other TikTok sensation - tomato and vodka pasta. Why is it called The Angry Baroness? Well she doesn't explain but I have probably explained before because I know I wrote a post about it or featured it in an oddments post. It comes from it's Italian name All'abriata - Abbriata - means 'angry'. But why the baroness bit? I cannot find out, and I think it is only applied to the Pasta Queen's recipe so I guess it's just a name she gave to it, that's loosely associated by sound to arrabriata. Her words to describe the dish? "classy but sassy" with the vodka being "a chemical reaction of love - just like you are"
Which is just typical of her purring delivery to the camera. Everything screams at me to ignore, ignore, ignore such obvious marketing, but I confess I am a bit of an admirer after my brief look at her Instagram and TikTok tiny videos, which nevertheless present delicious looking dishes, and teach you something along the way. Maybe she's right when she says:
"I found that there's one thing we can agree on – Pasta. You can't hate it. You can't attack it. You can only love it." Nadia Caterina Munno
A clever lady anyway.
YEARS GONE BY
November 21
2023 - Noble thistles
2022 - Nothing
2021 - Nothing
2018 - The thermos flask
2017 - Lucky dip - apple fritters
2016 - Corn soup and corn
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