The world is just a great big tortellone

Britons bought 117,000 tons of pasta last year. Why? Keith Botsford celebrates the food that wins friends wherever it goes

Fifty-one years ago, on VE Day, I was in Montreal with an exhilarated crowd who celebrated the end of war in Europe by smashing the windows of the spaghetti emporia that used to line the rue Sainte-Catherine. They used the spaghetti, hot as it was from boiling cauldrons, as confetti. If that is not a symbol of universality, nothing is. In 1945, one didn't, even in North America, waste food that way.

Pasta is not limited, as many foods are, by class barriers: it is eaten equally by rich and poor and, I hasten to add, cooked by good cooks and bad. In one form or another, it is a component of many cuisines, from Asia to Europe; and where it isn't part of a cooking tradition, it is still universally available, from Bogota to Bologna and from Singapore to Saskatchewan. Even so, it is an extraordinary fact that last year Britons spent pounds 159m on pasta, and that sales increased by 48 per cent between 1991 and 1995. So, for that matter, are the French and Americans consuming more. Aye, even as Italians consume less.

What is behind this is a deep revolution in the world's food habits and, indeed, in the nature of modern society, the family, work habits and much else.

First let us consider pasta itself. Apart from putting a slab of meat on a fire, boiling an egg or eating vegetable kingdom raw, no dish in the world is much simpler than pasta. It consists of flour (durum flour), egg and water. It is dropped into boiling water and requires no more skill in cooking than boiling an egg. Like an egg, it is appetising or unappetising by the amount of time it is cooked, and like an egg, there is some small variation in the cooking time: you like your eggs runny, you don't; you like your pasta soft or you prefer it to retain its texture and resilience.

However, where other staples (eg rice or bread) have survived and are eaten more or less as is, the almost unique characteristic of pasta is that it is no more than a savoury depository for other flavours: those of its innumerable sauces. No one you or I know eats pasta plain. At the very least, we add butter and the Chinese cook it in stock or add pungent spices.

This very combinatory capacity, of course, is one of the reasons for the ubiquity of pasta. Whatever your most prized and available flavours (fish or meat, vegetables, tomatoes) they can be combined with pasta, and this factor allowed it to migrate from its original Asian home to Italy, whose main foodstuff it has long been. It also permitted chefs around the world to experiment and invent means by which its flavour could be enhanced. For instance, I was not at all surprised to see chez Ducasse, in Paris, dishes whose foundation - but not elaboration - was pasta.

Pasta as a foundation. That runs through late 20th-century cooking like a recurring theme, and the influence here (certainly in inventiveness, in thinking up new ways of dressing up a familiar dish) is definitely American, if not more specifically Californian. Pasta is also cheap, democratic, filling and nutritious. Its carbohydrates provide quickly convertible energy, and whatever you add to it simply adds to its nutritional value. Finally, though, there are people who don't eat some of those additional ingredients, you would be hard put to find anyone who doesn't like it.

The question now is why pasta has found new favour among us. I would like to suggest a number of factors. The first and most important of these is the new democracy of the kitchen, the fact that neither meal-times nor the symbolic importance of the dinner table retain their former formality. Pasta is a rough-and-ready, quickly prepared, food fix. As it meets with universal favour and takes no great effort, it is available to all, and at any time. One cannot underestimate what this new ease of eating, at any time, under any circumstances, for oneself (very important with so many solo eaters), means. It means freedom from planning (the ingredients are available 24 hours out of 24); freedom from the tyranny (if such it is) of the meal; it means quick and pungent satisfaction of appetite; it implies intimacy for couples (with pasta one is indifferent to quantity), allied with facility; it is uncomplicated.

As the old habits of eating - as a family, at set hours, with the usual cast of characters, with manners, with table-settings, at a table - have died out under the exigencies of modern working hours and the absence of a woman stuck at home preparing food for husband and children, so pasta has advanced, alongside, I might add, other quick fixes, from the takeaway to the stir-fry, the salad, the rapid, trouble-free grill.

The influence here, again, is American. It is Americans who invented the whole idea of the meal-on-the-move, the drive-in, the fast food outlet, the franchised, standardised meal. The move to pasta was preceded by a taste for that most ubiquitous of all dishes, the pizza, every child's favourite food, and, for that matter, the favourite food of all those who want instant gratification. Pizza, baked, is first cousin to bread; pasta, boiled, is second cousin. Both are basic to our oldest food habits.

The pizza, in turn, interested Americans in certain combinations of flavours: first of all, cheese and tomato, and subsequently in the herbs generally combined with Italian food - oregano and red peppers first, then basil. Pasta, best known in its tomato-and-herb sauces, is merely an extension of these flavour preferences. From this south-Italian origin (together with a strong influence from the Far East) came all subsequent developments: from the bread-dough of pizza to pasta, from that amiable combination of tomatoes to the other underlying ingredient, garlic.

The next major influence was economic. When I was much younger, pasta was what one ate in restaurants: it was what one could afford, it was a known quantity, it seldom went wrong, it wasn't pretentious, the way French food supposedly was, it didn't require manners or formality of any kind. Pasta is user-friendly food, as it is cook-friendly. I don't think the flavour revolution (from meat and brown gravy to the Mediterranean) would have happened at all, least of all in our highly conservative food habits, had not pasta been the supremely economical dish. After all, in my childhood, oysters were still so plentiful as to be, along with shrimp, cockles, mussels and fish (with or without chips) and potatoes, the cheapest thing going. When we ceased to fish, some other readily available cheap nourishment was necessary: for the trend-setters of the late Forties and the Fifties. Pasta - including that dangerous "foreign" element, garlic - was it.

But if pasta has made giant strides in the past few years, it has to be due to the emphasis placed on the "healthy" Mediterranean diet. I can remember, many years ago, that when Brian Glanville and I reported that Italian football teams trained on pasta before a game, we were thought scarcely believable. Pasta was considered a "heavy", indigestible dish. It was not long, however, before the sceptics realised that, in fact, we have few such excellent, short-term energy-providers as pasta. It is quickly absorbed, easily digested, and gives instant results. In a world increasingly devoted to health and exercise, pasta was a natural.

I like to think, however, that the clinching argument in favour of pasta, and the reason why it is the fastest-expanding food area in food-marketing - in all its aspects, from franchise pasta restaurants to the total availability of "Italian" sections in supermarkets - is its accessibility. Pasta breaks down the distinction between eating and cooking: it brings out the inventive in even the rankest amateur, since almost anything can be thrown into a pasta sauce; it does not call for manners (there is no "accepted" way of eating pasta, though once one is past the amateur stage, it is considered bad form to eat it with a spoon); it does not call for formality of any sort; it need not be served at half-past eight; it makes no demands of any sort of anyone.

The democracy of pasta is based on the enjoyment factor. It is, in fact, a delightful dish to be enjoyed by all, a convivial dish, an always-welcome dish, a leveller (for even the most modest cook may produce miraculously good pasta - as it were, by accident). If you combine that with the health- factor, its accessibility to vegetarians, its low cost, the phenomenon becomes perfectly understandable. And if Italians eat slightly less pasta, that, too, is part of the same process: as Italians discover (ever so slowly), the cornucopia of choice available in supermarkets, are enticed by American merchandising and browbeaten by the health freaks, they, too, are undergoing a breakdown of their local traditions.

I am further delighted to hear that the trend is towards "fresh" pasta, or at least semi-fresh. This is all to the good, because it is only in this form, as distinct from "dry" pasta, such as macaroni in its many forms, that pasta actually has a flavour of its own. If rules exist at all in the universe of pasta, they are exceedingly simple: that pasta not be overcooked (all labels get this wrong and cooking times can be halved) and that it always be served and eaten hot. Beyond that, as in all good cooking, it is each man to his own taste.

Nor is pasta inorganic matter. One of my adolescent memories is of the local trattoria (a mere seaside shanty) on the Ancona shore where the tagliatelle were laid out every morning early on the tables where we were to eat at midday. Two brawny women would roll it out and leave it to dry slightly in the bright sunlight before, one on each side, they cut it into the appropriate six-feet long slices. One morning I had the distinct impression that the pasta was moving. Absorbed, I watched as indeed the whole giant sheet of pasta started moving towards one end of the table: slowly but inexorably. Unperceived by the ladies, who were elsewhere stoking up their tomato sauce, an army of ants was bearing it away. Informed of what was happening, the ladies rushed out, wiped away the offending beasties and started slicing.

Today, of course, the inspectors would have at them and diners would sue them. Those were simpler days; but pasta remains a resilient, unspoilable pleasure.