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During the dreadfully wet summer of nineteen-oh-seven I caught a chill while berating Holmes about poking around in the apparently jellyfish laden pools near our home on a southern slope of the Sussex Downs. I will not recount all that occurred in that adventure because Holmes has insisted upon writing his own version and to him I say, good luck.
The cold, however, had me laid up in bed so that Holmes was playing nursemaid. Our old housekeeper was a formidable woman but her cooking could not hold a candle to Mrs. Hudson’s. It was for this reason that Holmes insisted that he must learn to cook, for a good broth was wanted.
Our housekeeper had purchased a new cookbook penned by an American woman and we spent many evenings stealing it away to marvel over exotic entries like “Chili Sauce”. Holmes missed the Italian chef at his favourite restaurant in London and when we found a recipe for spaghetti it seemed too good to be true.
Procuring spaghetti noodles was the first challenge. Once I was well enough we enlisted the help of Signora Arete who ran a tea room in town.
“Mister Holmes,” She said, wiping her hands on her apron and patting absently at the pile of grey hair pinned up on her head. “Do you think I have time to make pasta when I have a full house every afternoon? The nerve of you.”
“Please, Signora,” I pleaded, “we thought you might know where to get it dried.”
“Dried pasta? My nonna, God rest her soul, would be appalled.” She huffed as she put down a large tray of biscuits. I reached for one out of habit and she smacked my hand. “Shouldn’t be eating those the way you sound, you want a hot bowl of soup.”
“As a doctor I have been following a strict regimen of beef tea three times a day.”
She gave me what would be described in her parlance as a “once over” and shook her head. “You English are something else. Very well, come back in a little over an hour for the spaghetti and you figure out the rest.”
“You are the soul of generosity, Signora,” Holmes declared.
“Wonderful, now you and your little spasimante get out of my sight.”
“I say, Holmes,” I said, as we went to the market to find tomato paste, “Did you hear what she inferred with her words?”
“I certainly did,” Holmes said, shaking his head. There is nothing “little” about you.”
“Quite so!”
We were back in the kitchen that afternoon, setting a kettle to boil. On the counter a tin of tomato paste and a jar of cream competed for space with a bowl of freshly cut spaghetti. We dropped it into the kettle a little at a time until the noodles nearly sprouted from the opening, and then spent the next twenty minutes kissing.
“Time to drain it,” Holmes said, checking his pocket watch. He grabbed a fishing net from it’s hook on the wall and we poured hot pasta over its fine tight threads until a lumpy mass of congealed noodles hung over the basin.
“Surely that can’t be right.”
“Well, I believe the cold water will assist in uncooking the spaghetti.”
“You are far from my equal in the sciences, Watson, but that does sound right.”
We let the horrible lump of noodles rest in cold water for another fifteen minutes but it did not improve the state of it.
“My good fellow, I do believe this is a failed experiment. Could this American cook be wrong?”
“They are wrong about nearly everything else, Holmes, I believe your theory has merit.”
“We must alert Mycroft. A failure of this level will want to be studied at the highest ranks of government.”
I stared distrustfully at the spaghetti. “I don’t believe I trust it long enough to allow anyone to make a proper study of it. I believe we should dispose of it post haste.”
Unfortunately we were interrupted by Signora Arete, bringing fresh basil from her garden that she had forgotten to give us with the spaghetti. When she saw what we had done with her efforts she chased us both out of the house and down the coast with a wooden spoon, shouting many things in Italian that Holmes could not very well translate without offending the post-Victorian sensibilities of anyone in earshot.
That night we had a sensible dinner of boiled mutton and parsnips served to us by an irritated housekeeper to whom we had to promise a brand new kettle.
Now you may be wondering what happened to the spaghetti of nineteen-oh-seven. Well, you will be relieved to hear that Holmes tossed it over the cliff in Poldhu where it landed between the shards of a poison lamp and a few old syringes. There is a reason we are banned from Cornwall.