By recreating classic movie moments that look so cathartic onscreen, Eliza Janssen hopes to improve her own life: like by trying methods of saucing up the ultimate comfort food from Goodfellas, Elf, The Apartment, and Big Night.
I’ve been hesitant about attempting any food scene recreations for this column, since it’s an oversaturated field. Countless YouTubers and professional chefs have tackled the big screen’s most famous scenes of weird and beautiful meals (luckily I haven’t seen anyone attempting the final course of The Cook, The Thief, his Wife and her Lover yet). Binging With Babish comes to mind first and foremost, having made more than one of the recipes I’m tackling here today with superior skills and experience.
So for November, I got all of my culinary film attempts done at once, and with a special focus on everyone’s favourite, seemingly easy-to-make dish: pasta. The perfect recipe for a film scene that hits us right in the heart is eggs, flour, salt, boiling water, and the toppings of your choice.
And a razorblade, if you’re Goodfellas‘ Uncle Paulie. Ray Liotta’s narration in the film’s prison sequence informs us that if we carefully chop garlic cloves with a razor, the aromatic becomes so thin it’ll simply liquefy in the pan with a bit of oil. As my beef-and-pork prison sauce was coming together, I tried to shave cloves of garlic into transparent slices, which ended up taking bloody ages.
And it was kind of pointless, too, as the garlic and everything else in the meaty ragu ends up cooking for multiple hours, meaning it probably woulda liquefied whether it was chonky or not. Would be nice to make crispy garlic as a topping or on toast, though.
Once my pasta had boiled, it was time to try out another heartwarming movie cooking tip that succinctly tells us more about the character holding the pan. In Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, pushover salaryman C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is such a mixed-up dude that he uses a tennis racquet to strain his pasta rather than a sieve or colander (“you should see my backhand”, he quips). A kid’s badminton set I bought from Kmart was the most accurate, size-wise, to Lemmon’s old-timey sporting equipment.
I’ll mark this cinematic kitchen hack as another fail, as the racquet didn’t have sides to catch errant strands of my spaghetti. Plenty of the carb-heavy bounty got lost in the sink, and the little panes of the racquet were crusty with starchy water the next day, which was kinda fun to crinkle up and clean out.
My Goodfellas + Billy Wilder spaghetti meal was delicious for dinner, but breakfast the next day was a disaster. Saving a bit of cooked spaghetti, I put together Buddy the Elf‘s revolting dessert pasta. Before serving his normie NYC family this heinous breakfast, Will Ferrell’s hyperactive elf tells them that the four main food groups in his people’s diet are “candy, candy canes, candy corn, and syrup”.
The meal is meant to be a stomach-churning sight gag in the film, but for some reason I didn’t expect it to be quite this inedible. I could handle the chocolate and gummy lollies, but ugh that maple syrup. Worst of all, the colour of the M&Ms quickly turned all the pasta a corpselike blue-grey, making it look like Buddy had instead disembowelled roadkill and served up its intestines with a layer of liquid sugar on top.
My lifelong love of pasta had been tested like never before. So why not go for film’s ultimate dough-based showstopper as a mighty palate cleanser? The only film made by Timpano Production, Stanley Tucci’s directorial debut Big Night is entirely about good food: its purpose, and its constant joys when family, women, and business betray you. The ‘Timpano’ in Tucci and co-writer/director Campbell Scott’s company name refers to a complex Italian pasta cake of sorts, packing many disparate ingredients into a drum-like dough shell that acts as the most stunning centrepiece of the movie’s lavish banquet.
My miniature timpano involved two kinds of meat, two different sauced pastas, three cheeses, and most bizarrely, five hard-boiled eggs. It was a delight to put together, forcing the cook to bounce from stove to oven to fridge, juggling each of the infernal lasagne’s layers in a feat of timing and assembly.
When the timpano finally came out of the oven, I did just like brothers Tucci and Tony Shalhoub in the film, gently tapping its sides to hear whether it emitted that dense ‘cooked’ sound. I wouldn’t know whether it had worked until finally cutting into the protein-rich beast, and achieving that satisfying cross-section was extremely rewarding.
My sister refused a slice, finding the layers of egg and provolone too gross. But to me, the timpano went down a treat—and learning that Tucci apparently serves it for his actual family every Christmas drove home that pasta is the ultimate food of love, a way for characters to generously express their personality and culture.
Here’s my own movie montage of the pastabilities of carbs on screen. I thought about attempting Tampopo‘s perfect bowl of ramen too, but that wouldn’t be very mambo Italiano of me.
