ketchup belongs in pasta
HEAR ME OUT! HEAR ME OUT!!!
I’m just going to come right out and say it: I put ketchup on my pasta. Willingly, ongoingly.
Like every French person I know, I was fed pâtes au ketchup growing up, a quick and cheap meal for a parent to put together after a long day to feed their child’s never-ending yearning for carbs. Reason cannot explain how this dish conquered one of the snootiest nations out there; neither ingredient is French, it’s too sweet and tangy to be considered a sensible substitute for tomato sauce, and I cannot find a single piece of information about its history.
And yet, a quick groupchat-based survey of my friends from every corner of France shows that every last one of them ate it as a kid. 20+ years later, their opinions of the dish are either “I don’t like ketchup so I never liked it”, “I haven’t thought about this in years”, or “what do you mean ‘used to’, I still eat them”. I sit in the latter group, although this happens far less frequently than it once did. Everyone I asked agreed that we don’t eat it out of a genuine taste for it, but out of a mixture of nostalgia and habit. Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps.
More bad news for the one Italy-based subscriber I have, if they didn’t snap their laptop shut in horror on paragraph one: we’re not the only ones doing this.
In a 2018 YouGov study of “ways in which foreigners have been accused of abusing Italian food”, 11 of the 17 countries surveyed found putting ketchup on pasta acceptable – and France was actually lowest on that list. Unsurprisingly, the nation least on board with the concept was Italy. Surprisingly to me, that was the “crime” they were most horrified by, ahead of drinking cappuccino in the afternoon or even putting pineapple on a pizza.
In fact, Japan (who were not included in the study) have an actual dish of pasta with ketchup called Naporitan – a slightly more inventive name than “pasta with ketchup” if you ask me. It’s part of a Japanese-Italian fusion cuisine called itameshi, which boomed in the late 90s when a financial crisis led restaurants to Italian food as a cheaper alternative. Just like itameshi, Naporitan was born out of necessity, cooked by Japanese chefs from limited ingredients available after a devastating World War II and served to the American troops occupying them.
If two of the world’s foremost food countries can embrace putting ketchup in their pasta, can we not be forgiven for our transgressions? I’m not asking Italians to start liking it – I do not have that kind of influence. But could it be treated as a harmless if slightly scandalous quirk, like a friend who tells you they show up to the airport at the last minute? Instead, a quick “do Italians put ketchup on pasta?” Google search returns many exclamation marks and, through several instances of the term “mortal sin”, promises of eternal damnation. To be clear: the entire nation of France (present company included) does deserve at best purgatory, but it’s probably not because of the ketchup.
It’s all empty threats, though. Italians’ impassioned defence of their gastronomy is as fierce as our collective memory is short. What we now know as Italian food, sacrosanct, immovable and highly codified, is at most a few hundred years old and ever-evolving. Tomatoes came from the New World in the 16th century. Basil is originally native to tropical regions. Italy itself is literally younger than the washing machine.
Pasta itself only became the face of Italian cuisine recently – according to food writer Katie Parla, speaking on The Sporkful, “the 20th century is when Italians start eating pasta regularly. Some regions still don’t really consume it in a significant way.” While it has existed for centuries, it was a posh affair. Regular people could only eat pasta “if the Duke or Noble in that town provided flour. There would be a knowledge that pasta existed, but it wasn’t a daily thing.”
Hell, Naporitan and Carbonara are the same age, and were both created to feed American troops occupying their respective countries of origin post-World War II. What makes one heretic and the other a fiercely protected heirloom?
Surely, a country with such a long history of poverty and inequality as Italy can recognise the ingenuity of food born from necessity. Naporitan exists because spaghetti and ketchup were some of the few foods available after Japan was levelled then occupied by the American troops. Pâtes au ketchup have been served to French children by tired parents with a tight food budget for decades. Is that not cucina povera?
So, dear Italians (and people pretending to be Italians on the internet), let’s stop the fight. Accept the fact that many people put ketchup in their pasta into your heart. You once fought the fascists for your right to eat pasta when they tried to make you quit them, and now it’s time to channel that fire to focus on the real enemy: small plates restaurants.
I walked in here furious and now I feel silly. Excellent argument, however, I will still be sticking to my own personal cuicina povera from my childhood — rice and butter.
I remember going to France as an au pair in 1983 and being shocked to the core that a solidly bourgeois household would consider reheated spaghetti with ketchup to be a suitable meal in certain circumstances. I had never come across it in the UK or Spain and couldn’t articulate why it felt so wrong. And this was a household that genuinely cared about food and ate very well by and large. I just knew that my own mum (Spanish living in the UK, a good cook who had always had to work on a much lower budget than these people) would consider this totally unacceptable. Food shock.