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Politicians making a meal of it. This week: David Cameron’s porcine pasta
One of the under-appreciated qualities of David Cameron is how much sheer effort he put into looking like a prime minister before he became one. A big challenge for a leader of the opposition is helping voters to imagine what you would be like if you were in charge, and from the moment of his election in 2005, the now-Lord Cameron threw himself into meeting it.
I didn’t fully appreciate how successful he had been at this until the day after the 2010 election, when I got a flood of messages from people telling me I’d been photographed outside No 10. I hadn’t been near the place, but I had been in the building near St James’ tube that the then-leader of the Conservatives used for his press conferences, and looking at the photos, I realised it had been chosen because of its resemblance to Downing Street. In fact, bathed in sunlight, it looked better than the real thing. Even before he was premier, Cameron looked like he was doing the job in a brighter, warmer world.
Which brings us back to Corridors Of Flour, the official Conservative Party cookbook. Published in 2021, it contains recipes from three living prime ministers, which sounds impressive until you think how many there’ll be in the next edition.
Cameron’s contribution was Italian Sausage Meat Pasta, which sounded like an ideal meal for an autumn evening. “Inspired by the River Café Cook Book,” Cameron wrote, “this is our family’s own simplified twist.” The simplification, I can reveal, is adding extra cream and sausage.
I picked up the listed ingredients from the supermarket and set to work. This was when I hit my first problem. “Throw in the chopped rosemary and red chilli,” Lord Cameron urged me. And what now? His ingredients list hadn’t included a red chilli. I hadn’t bought a red chilli. I didn’t have a red chilli to hand, because I don’t work in the River Café.
What kind of person specifies the pasta shape but doesn’t mention how you’re supposed to cook it?
I decided to do without the chilli, but I had a bigger question. How was I cooking the pasta? The big accompanying picture showed the former prime minister putting a casserole dish in the oven, which had led me to believe that I was going to be making a pasta bake. I’d got a Le Creuset dish out specially, just like the one he was using. But now that my suspicions were aroused at his recipe-writing, I decided to look at the instructions a little more carefully. He said nothing about an oven. The only reference to the main ingredient was “once the pasta (preferably penne) is ready, add together”. What kind of person specifies the pasta shape but doesn’t mention how you’re supposed to cook it?
Well, we know what kind of person. A little research reveals that Cameron’s recipe isn’t so much “inspired by” the River Café Cookbook as “copied carelessly from” it. Let’s not quibble about that. Once you’ve worked out that you should boil the pasta (preferably penne), the resulting meal was declared pretty tasty. As indeed a meal containing six sausages, half a pint of cream and “loads of parmesan” ought to be.
So we have a misleading picture combined with an idea borrowed from someone else and not properly checked, resulting in a plan that seems plausible but turns out not to have been properly thought through. Is this a metaphor for anything else with which Cameron was involved? You can make your own judgements. I can only wish that everything he did turned out as well as, eventually, his pasta did.
Dining and Cooking