The Food Section reminds us of the most hilarious food-related April Fools’ joke ever: a three-minute BBC segment aired in 1957 spotlighting the fictitious Swiss spaghetti harvest.
Presented on one of the most authoritative news programs in Britain, and narrated by highly respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, the dummied-up spaghetti video purports to show Swiss farmers bringing in a bumper crop of homegrown spaghetti.
According to the Museum of Hoaxes, “Hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this query the BBC diplomatically replied, ‘Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.’”
Well, it’s a better gag than Soy Bomb, anyway.
The story of how the British reacted to this BBC Panorama show, first broadcast on 1st April 1957, is in my new book The Spaghetti Tree, Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution;
Before the Trattoria Revolution, we in Britain knew so little about foreign cooking that many viewers believed the BBC “Panorama” 1957 April Fool story that spaghetti grew on trees. But today in Britain, everyone loves eating Italian. In a BBC survey of the nation’s favourite meals, three Italian dishes were in our top ten.
The Spaghetti Tree, Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution, by Alasdair Sutherland, a former restaurateur, charts how Britain’s post-war love affair with Italian food has been largely shaped and coloured by the extraordinary influence of two Italian men. Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla opened their famed La Trattoria Terrazza in London’s Soho, fifty years ago in 1959.
By the early 1960s, Mario and Franco’s friend, the designer Enzo Apicella, had transformed the restaurant into what became known as “Trattoria Style” – the tiled floors, white plaster walls, arches and atmospheric lighting of southern Italy. Nothing like it had been seen before and La Terrazza became the most famous and influential restaurant in London, attracting American and international celebrities such as Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor and Burt Lancaster.
With its authentic dishes, informal style, and its cool, modern interior, La Terrazza launched a revolution in our social culture.
Before Mario and Franco, expatriate Italians were not yet proud of their own food and still bowed to the perceived superiority of French cuisine, so the food found in Italian restaurants in the UK was ‘Mock-Italian’ – an eclectic combination of pasta and French dishes given Italian names. But at La Terrazza Mario and Franco offered the authentic dishes of Southern Italy, such as Linguini alle Vongole (Linguine with clam sauce) and Fracosta alla Pizzaiola; (sirloin steak simmered in tomato and oregano sauce) Later, as they built on their success, they offered specialities from other regions, such as the robust Tuscan favourite, pasta e fagioli (pasta and bean soup). Although these dishes are now appetisingly familiar to us, Mario and Franco were the ones who first introduced them to British diners.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the UK’s “Trat Scene” spread as many of Mario and Franco’s employees, including their famous manager, Alvaro, (still going strong at La Famiglia in Chelsea) left La Terrazza to open their own places, copying the Mario and Franco formula. Dozens of similarly styled trattorias eventually spilled outside London, and as the “godfather of modern British cooking,” Alastair Little, comments “the Trattoria Revolution was the biggest leap forward in Britain’s culinary development since Escoffier”
Today, fifty years after the opening of La Terrazza, as the author discovered when he visited the kitchens of Giorgio Locatelli’s Michelin-starred Locanda Locatelli, Mario and Franco’s legacy lives on.
The Spaghetti Tree is a deeply evocative piece of social and food history which maps the extraordinary Italian invasion of Britain’s food and restaurant culture. With its cast of flamboyant characters spliced with high drama and an ear for the mood of the times, this is a missing piece of the social jigsaw which was the London in the sixties.