The Orange Spaghetti of My Childhood

When I was little, I believed that spaghetti — what we now call “pasta” — was supposed to be orange.

The spaghetti my mother made always included ground pork, fish sausage, and green peppers, all seasoned with ketchup.
She must have seen Napolitan or meat sauce on TV and tried to recreate it with whatever ingredients we had at home.

It tasted good at first, but halfway through it always became heavy, and I would get tired of eating it.

My mother never liked cooking complicated dishes.
Even now, she says making dinner is the most troublesome part of her day.

She rarely made anything that required chopping and mixing, yet for some reason she often made potato salad — which I always thought was more work.
And in any dish where she did mix things together, there was almost always fish sausage.

Our everyday meals were simple: spinach with soy sauce, grilled meat, hot pot, sashimi, grilled fish.
Mostly single-dish meals or something you could make in one pot.

“Just cut it. Just grill it. Just boil it.”
She said she was “bringing out the natural flavor of the ingredients.”

Growing up with that, I naturally assumed spaghetti was supposed to be orange.
And among those orange dishes, the one with fish sausage was what I believed to be “Napolitan.”

One day in high school, I was unusually hungry on my way home and went into a restaurant alone.
Since I always ate “Napolitan” at home, I decided to try something different and ordered something called “peperoncino.”

What arrived was… white.
And almost no toppings.

Huh?
Is the sauce served separately
Are the toppings coming later

I felt something was off, but I didn’t have the courage to ask the waiter.
So I grabbed the Tabasco that came with it and poured it on until the noodles turned a faint shade of orange.

When I finally took a bite, it was so spicy I nearly cried.

Later, I told this story to a man sitting next to me, and he said,
“There are white pastas in the world, you know. They have flavor even if they’re not orange.”

Years later, when I started living alone and working at a café, I encountered white pasta again.
This time it was pasta tossed with olive oil, garlic, bacon, spinach, and mountain vegetables in a béchamel sauce.

It was nothing like my mother’s heavy orange spaghetti — it was unbelievably delicious.

“So this is what real pasta tastes like,” I thought.

Now I’m used to all kinds of pasta, but every once in a while, I find myself craving just two or three bites of that heavy, orange spaghetti with ground pork and fish sausage.