Unfortunately, I've once again spotted a blog meme after the closing date for entries and publication of the results. D'oh! I must admit that I'm not much good at this business. On this occasion it was Retro Wobbles But It Won't Fall Down, hosted by Rachel of Food Maven and Coconut & Lime. Retro food that wiggles and wobbles was what she asked for. Despite being far too late to enter officially and not exactly compliant with the competition rules, I just had to publish this belated offering... |
| Question: | What's completely stiff, rigid and upright when you first see it, but has gone all soft, wobbly and wiggly by the time you're ready for it? |
| Answer: | Spaghetti. |
For those who gave a quite different and very inappropriate answer, you should be ashamed of yourselves. What dirty minds some of you guys have. Food doesn't come any more retro, wobbly and wiggly than a bowl of cooked spaghetti. But like many other foods, the raw product does tend to suffer from the whims of Mother Nature. Some years are great, some are good and some are simply disasters for spaghetti production. One truly remarkable European vintage occurred exactly 50 years ago. For those who have never seen this clip, here's a very young Richard Dimbleby presenting a BBC Panorama film on the subject of spaghetti production in the Swiss canton of Ticino, near to the Italian border. The film was first broadcast in Spring 1957, at the start of April. Excuse the lack of colour but the world was, of course, black and white in those days. |
2 comments - post yours here:
The Swiss spaghetti growers have a comparitively easy time of it , compared to the rigorous life of the middle-eastern couscous farmers. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to shake those bitty little things out of their seed pods.
But at least couscous seeds can be separated easily and cleaned. The people who make this stuff have a much bigger problem. They have to separate the sweet grains from the calorie grains by hand - an almost impossible job, which is why the final product still contains about 2 calories per spoonful. And they can't wash the product because it would dissolve, so they have to do it all wearing sterile rubber gloves. Life is really hard for some people.
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