Salty, savoury and simplicity itself, this pasta dish will be a hit with Marmite lovers
I came across this recipe in Anna Del Conte’s memoirs, Risotto with Nettles. Now, there are so many recipes I could borrow from her, and many I have, but this is the one I have to show you here. She introduces it as “hardly a recipe, but I wanted to include it because I haven’t as yet found a child who doesn’t like it”. The minute I read its title – once I’d got over my crossness that she hadn’t told me about it during many years of friendship – I was charmed. Of course it helps that, being a Marmite-addict, I knew it would work. And how it does. I have recently turned traitor and shifted towards the Vegemite side of the world, and this works as well, unsurprisingly, with the antipodean ointment.
I know the combination of pasta and Marmite sounds odd to the point of unfeasibility, but wait a moment. There is a traditional day-after-the-roast pasta dish, in which spaghetti is tossed in chicken stock, and I have eaten shortcut versions of this in Italy (recreated guiltlessly in my own kitchen) which use a crumbled stock cube, along with some butter, olive oil, chopped rosemary and a little of the pasta cooking water to make a flavoursome sauce for spaghetti. If you think about it, Marmite offers saltiness and savouriness the way a stock cube might.
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