41. A Recipe for a Quick English Pasta Dish

for Ginie (as if you need it – but for the record)

I am hopeful this dish is simple

a common resource at the tired end of the month

whose idea & principles of course I got from you

a classic English montage of flavours

– British traditional, vaguely Italian

big brands & a kick of capsicum

all the way from Singapore

(like your childhood midnight feasts)

These things you need

dirty & noisy, clean & silent

it doesn’t matter – just take this:

           ½ a red onion

           1 medium carrot

           1 red coloured pepper

           a couple of hot little chillies

                       or maybe not all

           1 small white cabbage

           3 or 4 mushrooms

           a handful of frozen peas

           3 or 4 slices of lean back bacon

           (you are appalled at anything else!)

           a dash of light soy sauce

           several little sprinkles of ground pepper

           maybe some white wine for flavour

           and 1 tin of your favourite tomato soup

           (I won’t attack here the ancient powers of capital

           but I will not say or utter the great brand names)

           plus the pasta, shell or tube

           lumecchini o penne (facere pomposo)

           a couple of handfuls or cupfuls, what

           ever you feel you need for the two of us

Cut the onions thin, & slice the carrot

orange circles like the midwinter sun

the pepper & the chillies cut & seeded

then wipe & slice the mushrooms too

cutting fine as much cabbage as you want

then fry up the onions, carrots, chillies

and scissor the bacon so the bits drop in

                                          – let them cook up luscious

next mushroom, red pepper & cabbage in

pepper sprinkled & the dash of soy maybe

even now a little wine

                       cover & let it all conjoin

oh, maybe 10/15 minutes until

it’s beginning actually to cook

add in the soup to encapsulate the peas

& let it all boil

then simmer & put on a pot of water

cook up your pasta as you want

(we don’t add salt as soup, bacon & soy give plenty

– enough indeed to swallow)

It’ll all be ready when the pasta is

– child’s play for an easy unpretentious supper

served in bowls with the soupy gloop

poured over the pasta

                      & more chilli if you want

                      & you may do

wolfed down like easy words

like actual ones

                 gnarly & lumpy

the bacon bits piquant as brick rubble

lodged in the savoury mixture

disordered into a new & better order

with what words then to greet it?

[I got this recipe from your set of instructions for a quick meal, with the genuine innocence of our youthful generation bringing in the dominant reality of industrial food & transforming it while retaining yet the childhood pleasure in it we did experience; and I think always too of you & Julie’s attempts at recreating Singapore food, tropical children exiled to working‑class Fulham in the 50s, and find that reflected too. Real food, flawed, historically flawed & heterogeneous as people & our lives.]