I spent four years of my life at university studying Italian Cinema and Federico Fellini. I remember the ‘life is a combination of magic and pasta’ quote popping up as an obscure piece of research for one of my essays, but back then, at the end of the 1980s, it was relatively unknown and no one paid it much notice.

 

“La vita è una combinazione di magia e pasta.”

 

Pick up almost any cookbook of pasta recipes today, though, and the chances are you’ll find this quotation displayed somewhere. But here’s the real tragedy. Hardly anyone tries to make sense of what Fellini said. More often than not his words just get left there floating in the breeze. Lazy.

 

But I think there’s a good chance Fellini was talking about inspiration, especially when you consider that a better translation for ‘combinazione’ is ‘mix.’

 

Life is a mix of magic and pasta. Better still, of pasta and magic.

 

The mundane and the sublime. The inconsequential that might be conjured into the unforgettable.

 

(And mixing. You should always mix the sauce all the way through the pasta.)

 

In life, as in cooking, sometimes the magical woo-woo, the creative spark, the flame,  is there. And sometimes it isn’t.

 

The trick is finding a way to keep it alive and allowing it to transform not just your food, but the way you create... anything!