Spaghetti Hoopla (Honey & Miso)

on storms

If you have ever thought, I love spaghetti hoops, but I wish they took fucking ages, this is the meal for you. Well, no, not fucking ages, but longer than spaghetti hoops usually take. A bit of a hoopla, if you will. (Forgive please.)

And I guess it is also a proper meal, in a way that spaghetti hoops- even with sausages in- just aren’t. It’s very good: like every flavour note that is good about tinned spaghetti hoops souped up to 100. I used these very cute little hoops I got from the deli. I deepened it with miso, sweetened it with honey and with cream, like in the song, and we ate it sitting on the floor because I had got papers all over the table and I really didn’t want anyone to get tomato on them.

On Friday there was a storm, and also our friend the Crab was staying with us. This was kind of a symmetrical nice thing, because we have seen out quite a lot of storms with the Crab (although never in London before). Usually what happens is- and I’m generalising- we arrive at the sea, and we unpack and say things about going to the beach, and then a storm rolls in and we do not go to the beach. I make pasta with stuff from the cupboard. We make tea. We do jigsaws and stuff. Once there were two storms at once, approaching from the East and the West at the exact same time, like pincers. Lightning on all sides.

The house we stay in has a completely glass front, which is not like our Victorian terrace at all, and the only thing you can see through the glass is the Irish Sea, and the curve of bay inside bay inside bay to the open water, where the fetch of the waves come sweeping four thousand miles across the Atlantic, and when you’re making tea or doing a jigsaw or getting a glass of water at 4am in a t-shirt and knickers the great grey ocean is grumbling and rising and falling and moving directly before you, I mean just directly before you, and you’re there but so, so small, and it is so endless, and this basically makes you feel sort of vulnerable and alive and naked in a way it’s really hard to feel in London.

Which is why, maybe, I enjoyed Friday’s storm more than I should have done. I liked that the house shook. I liked when I had to go to the corner shop and I felt pushed to my knees by the sheer force of the air. I liked that my grasp on the world felt kind of diminished.

I like being in control a lot, like a lot a lot. This is probably why I cook, I guess, and actually if you really got down to it with a lot of people who cook I would bet that it’s kind of a common thing. My kitchen, my rules.

Here’s an outsize gamble of a sentence: if you like control, I am willing to bet you also live for the tiny flashes where that control is taken from you.

Even if you won’t admit it. Even to yourself.

I would bet that you know, because I do, each one of those tiny moments where there really is simply nothing- nothing- nothing you could have done, like if you were in a court of law and even in some higher, highest, court– I guess I mean like God, or whatever supreme moral arbiter you believe in– they would find that there was simply nothing you could have done to change the situation. You were whole, and then you were cracked open. You were upright, and then you were not, moved by some greater and external force that could not be avoided, and in those moments you felt something a little bit like freedom. That’s what I mean about the storm.

Maybe you don’t know what I mean, in which case, this pasta.

So what I did, basically, was cut up a packet of six sausages into little meatball vibes, and fry them off in a lot of olive oil, and when they were brown add two cans of chopped tomatoes and a tomato-can of vinegary red wine. It was quite nice last week, the wine, but also maybe the lid was off for 12-24 hours at some point, and it had become undrinkable? Apparently you shouldn’t cook with any wine you wouldn’t drink, and I think the people who think that must throw out a lot of wine or they drink a whole bottle whenever they drink, which, you know what, maybe. In the old days, before all the stuff, that was definitely how I drank. But now I am old and I put vinegar wine into my pasta sauce.

When I make pasta sauce, which is basically never now, and never in London.

I couldn’t be bothered to cut up anything else properly, after the sausages, so I just peeled a little onion and cut it in half and put that in. A big twig of rosemary, the Parmesan rind. Pepper, obviously.

I tasted it, after a bit: a tablespoon of miso, a tablespoon of honey. A tablespoon, or more like a generous splash, of double cream. Cooked the pasta in salty water, and drained it before it was all the way done, and put it into the sauce, simmered it some more. Simmer simmer simmer, over quite a high heat to reduce it to this thick rich shimmery texture. I don’t know how long for. It didn’t take an incredibly long time, and I know this because my flatmate had exactly one hour between saying to me “Can you make pasta?” and needing to leave the house, and we had enough time to cook this, eat this and watch an episode of Parks and Rec.

I put the pasta into three bowls, and put cheese and pepper on the pasta. I wasn’t really watching the telly because I was thinking about writing this: I kind of wanted to remember the moment, and I kind of wanted to remember this recipe because it had worked really really well, and also because I had been surprised while I was cooking the pasta that I had offered to make pasta. I was kind of surprised that I had had this idea about the hoops and the honey and the sausages at all, honestly, because I don’t have a fabulous track record with pasta sauce. I have, like, three I make very well, and then a history of really bad ones.

When I first started spending a lot of evenings on my own– which was when I was 23 and my boyfriend started living in the hospital– I tried to make a lot of pasta sauces, like puttanesca-type vibes, and they were simply always disgusting. In hindsight I kind of think the pasta sauces were an extremely pathetic symbol of that control thing I was just talking about. I mean my boyfriend was living in the hospital, you know, and the only thing that could be said for that as a living situation was that it was not a dying situation: living in the hospital is better, on balance, than dying at home, but honestly for us then it was not much better.

In the years since I have wondered a lot whether it was worth it, the hospital stuff, and I have concluded: maybe not, not all of it, but what else could we do? And the answer is nothing, so. When he died I had that flying feeling of, like, oh, this is completely gone from me now. Like, it wasn’t a good feeling. But it was like having all the breath knocked out of you by the wind. It was like the waves coming all the way off the Atlantic.

And like the waves it carried me, that feeling, and in some ways it still does and I think it always will. The energy in the waves and the wind just keeps going and going forever, each movement carrying with it the push of the movement before. Without that there would never have been any storms, any house in Wales, any Victorian terrace in South East London, any jigsaws, any Crab, any us. Any lil artisan spaghetti hoops from the deli in town. Any honey or miso or Parks and Rec. Any of it.

Which is not, like, a justification for bad things happening. It’s not that it’s good to be swept away by the storm.

It’s just that, sooner or later, it’s going to happen to you anyway: the sweep of the wind, the lightning strike, the sucking pull and great grey heaving undertow of the Irish Sea, and you, cracked open, on your knees.