There must have been times when you’ve found your eyes following a tempting plate of pasta across the screen. And these mouthwatering dishes might well have got you hankering after the recipe so you could impress the star on the movie, like something out of The Purple Rose of Cairo.
You’ve probably seen no end of such images, but only a few stick actually in your mind. Here are the 10 most memorable pasta dishes in film and TV fiction:
The spaghetti and meatballs from Lady and the Tramp. Let’s be honest… Who hasn’t dreamed of polishing off a plate of spaghetti and ending it with big kiss on the lips?
Clemenza’s spaghetti with sausages and meatballs, which a mobster cooks for the whole famiglia in The Godfather. For the mafia, a good plate of homemade pasta is just as important as the family’s honour.
The macaroni pie from Il Gattopardo, served as a welcome dish for the nobility in the film.
The Margherita pizza Julia Roberts eats with her hands in Eat, Pray, Love. That’s the way we like to see pizza eaten.
The spaghetti Jack Lemmon strains with a tennis racket in The Apartment. Wait to you see him serve the meatballs!
The spaghetti in No Reservations. Catherina Zeta-Jones admits she never orders spaghetti in a restaurant because “it’s awkward if you’re trying to impress someone”. In Little Miss Sunshine, however, spaghetti is the only one of her mother’s dishes that little Olive will eat.
One single recipe wouldn’t do justice to The Sopranos, so here are two: risotto with truffles and Champagne and the spaghetti alla puttanesca that always pops up in one episode or another in this superb series.
The dozen meat lasagnes that Monica lovingly cooks for her aunt in Friends before finding out she’s a vegetarian. If someone turns their nose up at a dish you’ve been slaving over for hours in the kitchen, you’re not likely to forget it in a while.
The unforgettable artichokes and spaghetti alla Mario Ruoppolo in Il postino, a cult film that celebrates Italy, Italian, pasta and poetry above all else.
