What Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back

Britain has fallen in love with Italian food. But what happens when recipes travel from one country to another, adapting to new ingredients, tastes and traditions along the way? In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta , I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo. 9hf48abc File Settings Done Title Description Thumbnail Will be cropped to a 3:2 aspect ratio Upload The Rest is Pasta What Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back 0:00 Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -10:51 -10:51 PodcastTranscriptPreviewCoverDownloadRemove Britain has fallen in love with Italian food. But what happens when recipes travel from one country to another, adapting to new ingredients, tastes and traditions along the way? In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta , I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo. 9hf48abc 2026/09/21 Media settings Edit audio Transcript The Rest is Pasta What Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back [music] A few years ago, James May ended his television series Our Man in Italy by saying there’s a huge part of every one of us that wants to be Italian. But I think he should have also said perhaps we just haven’t realised howItalian we already are. Today we are buying more pasta, pesto, and ‘nduja and burrata than ever before. We are already eating more like Italians, and if social media is anything to go by, we’re already arguing about food more like Italians too. And study after study keeps coming back to the same conclusion. Britain loves Italian food more than any other world cuisine. In 2022, research from Kantar found that British households were eating the equivalent of 46 million Italian meals every week, more than twice as many as Indian dishes, even before adding pizza. More recently, another survey from UK supermarket Waitrose confirmed Italian as Britain’s favourite cuisine to eat at home. In that survey, 46% said they preferred to eat Italian, with 44% voting for both Indian and British. But while Italian food has emerged as Britain’s favourite overseas cuisine, the situation in Italy is a little different. Because if we look at research into Italian eating habits, we see that, of all nationalities, Italians are the least likely to enjoy what they see as foreign food. In terms of Britain and Italy, then, there does seem to be a little unrequited love going on. We are clearly more in love with bolognese, carbonara and lasagne than they are with roast dinners, fish and chips or sausage rolls. However, the imbalance in the Italy-Britain relationship begins to make sense the moment we realise that those 46 million Italian meals weren’t cooked in the same way or even in a similar way to how they would have been prepared in Italy. Because for centuries, while British cuisine has done a terrible job of copying foreign dishes, it has done one thing fantastically well, and that is borrowing foods from around the world and making them, sometimes even claiming them, as its own. Chicken tikka masala, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, donna kebabs, even fish and chips. All of them foods arriving in Britain originally in very different forms, and definitely not in the ways we see them being cooked on British high streets today. And I wonder whether the same process of Anglicisation has also been going on in cookbooks and written recipes over the decades too. Sometimes food writers had little choice but to adapt foreign recipes because the original ingredients simply weren’t available in Britain. But at other times,the changes really were deliberate, alterin