Sometimes it doesn’t work (and sometimes it does)

A while back I told the story of how I tried to recreate the caci e pepe we enjoyed so much during our vacation in Rome and how badly I failed.  Well if at first you don’t succeed…

My true love came back to Philadelphia for a couple of weeks recently and she brought back with her some fresh pasta from Marks and Spencer of all places.  If you have never been to the UK, you may not be familiar with Marks and Spencer but they are a retail chain that has outlets everywhere and they also have one of the most curious business models I’ve

ever seen.  They sell strictly middle-of-the-road clothing (think Kohl’s or the lower-middle tiers of Macy’s) and food.  Fresh, mostly ready-to-eat food.  If you lived in a flat and wanted to bring home something to prepare quickly for dinner, you could go to Marks and Spencer and get a pre-portioned piece of salmon, a packet of broccoli ready to be steamed, two carrots, a pre-made salad, and a bottle of wine.  You could add, if you were so inclined, some socks and a plain navy blue V-neck acrylic sweater, too.

The thing is, they are everywhere and they are completely interwoven into the lives of mostly (urban) Brits. If M&S were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, millions of people in Manchester, Birmingham, London, York, and the rest of the UK would be devastated and utterly confused.

But for the purposes of this story, what’s important is that she was able to bring home a couple packages of fresh spaghetti from M&S.  I have not been able to find fresh spaghetti in Philadelphia.  I live very close to two different family owned shops that can give me fresh fettuccine, lasagne, tagliatelle, gnocchi, orecchiette, and any variety of flat or shaped pasta, but not round strands of pasta.  For that, I’m told, you need an extruder and an extruder is too expensive for a mom-and-pop shop.

My first attempt at caci e pepe (spaghetti with cheese, olive oil, pepper and nothing else) was a mess and when I was trying to figure out why, the first thing that came to mind was the shape.  It turns out that I was right. I tried with tagliatelle and the cheese and oil just didn’t distribute properly and the result was lumpy and unsatisfying. With the M&S spaghetti smuggled through customs at the Philadelphia airport, the al dente spaghetti just rolled around in the oil and cheese getting coated evenly and the results were delicious. Apparently, shape matters.

One other thing matters – quantity. My first attempt was too much, so not only was the pasta the wrong shape, but there was so much of it that I couldn’t work the oil and cheese evenly through the cooked pasta. With the spaghetti, we made two individual portions separately and quickly ran the pasta through the oil/cheese mixture, added the pepper and served. Only ninety seconds elapsed between the time the pasta came out of the water and it was served but that was enough to swirl two separate servings in just the right amount of oil and cheese before adding pepper.

It’s often the small things that make the biggest differences, right?