Someone once asked me if it was possible to say that a food is simpatico. This is not a word that translates easily from Italian. It is usually used to mean that a person is nice, congenial, friendly, though something essential is lost in translation. You wouldn’t use it to describe food, but it would go some way in beginning to explain the Italian nation’s love affair with pasta.
A friend suggested to me that being simpatico is like an embrace. So a simpatico food would be one that embraces you; a food for all occasions; a food that can be elegant, simple, rustic or contemporary; a quick meal for the family, or for that special occasion; a food that makes the very best of seasonal variations, warm and comforting on a cold winter’s evening, light and revitalizing on a warm summer’s afternoon; a food that can be as inexpensive or as expensive as you choose; one that can stretch the creative imagination to the limits, or that can be prepared as simply as boiling a kettle and grating a little cheese. Have you ever met anyone who has not cooked a plate of pasta? From children to students, home-cooks to Michelin-starred chefs, it’s quite simply universal. In other words, it’s simpatico!
It should come as no surprise to hear that we Italians eat more pasta than any other nation in the world. The International Pasta Organization estimated that Italians eat on average 28kg of pasta per person per year. To put that into perspective, the average person in the UK consumes a mere 2.5kg. Broken down, the figure of 28kg per year translates as approximately 80g of pasta per person, per day, 365 days of the year. So the figures suggest that the average Italian really does eat a bowl of pasta every day!