It is Christmas, and against all the odds, you find yourself alone in your apartment with the object of the most ardent desire of your only heart. As they mill about the living room in a dressing gown or pop off to the bathroom in order to freshen up, you incorporate the kitchen, and sing opera with gusto while preparing a simple yet sophisticated dish.
You are Jack Lemmon, the star of Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning hit The Apartment; your paramour either is or is equivalent to one Shirley MacLaine. If you’ve cooked spaghetti before you’re probably aware that you’ll be left with an excess of water. But you’ve no colander to hand, and you know what they say about the horse.
In fact these days some connoisseurs suggest that we should be reserving some of our pasta water, so that a few drops of the starchy remnants might thicken our sauce. But this was 1960: in England it was decades before they realised that spaghetti does not grow on trees. Ideas about pasta beyond the confines of Italy were still barely infant.
Gladly Jack Lemmon has the solution. He seizes a wooden tennis racket and uses the strings to strain his spaghetti, before doling the lot out onto a nearby plate. Note how he runs the noodles under the cold tap? That’s to stop them cooking, because you want your spaghetti to be al dente, which is probably something in Italian for ‘just right’.
Wooden tennis rackets impart to spaghetti a musty fragrance, an old-world charm. Without this in our house it is barely Christmas. Of course the metallic thrust of modern-day rackets suits for the heat of summer or the crispness of spring. But if you want to celebrate the festive season properly – and woo playfully but elegantly the prospect of your innermost love – pick up a wood racket from eBay, or scour the trunks at your local secondhand sale.
