Wrong Spaghetti

Crossposted from Facebook

Memorable stewed veal and spaghetti in the same anonymous apartment building snack bar whose chicken and potatoes I wrote about yesterday

This is the only restaurant in Portugal where I'll eat pasta. And I don't eat it as "Pasta," like we think of it, nor do they cook it as such. Just another starchy sponge. Which, come to think of it, is how Italian pasta started, too.

No one involved in the cooking of this spaghetti ever even saw an Italian movie. Ask the chef if it's "al dente" and she'd point curtly at her chipped incisor. This is as Portuguese as all get-out, and yet no Italian village grandma would object. They'd grok it instantly. The common DNA is in the soul, not the tastebuds.

Another way of looking at it: the chef has recreated goulash and noodles. And if it seems odd to swap spaghetti in for noodles, remember that Italy is a stone's throw from Eastern Europe. Pasta *is* noodles. That's not the 20th century marketing, I know. But go to Croatia and order fuzi (bow tie pasta) with veal sauce (basically goulash) and things will begin to clarify