Its carbohydrates provide quickly convertible energy, and whatever you add to it simply adds to its nutritional value. For instance, I was not at all surprised to see chez Ducasse, in Paris, dishes whose foundation - but not elaboration - was pasta.Pasta as a foundation. That runs through late 20th-century cooking like a recurring theme, and the influence here (certainly in inventiveness, in thinking up new ways of dressing up a familiar dish) is definitely American, if not more specifically Californian Pasta is also cheap, democratic, filling and nutritious. It also permitted chefs around the world to experiment and invent means by which its flavour could be enhanced. At the very least, we add butter and the Chinese cook it in stock or add pungent spices.This very combinatory capacity, of course, is one of the reasons for the ubiquity of pasta. Whatever your most prized and available flavours (fish or meat, vegetables, tomatoes) they can be combined with pasta, and this factor allowed it to migrate from its original Asian home to Italy, whose main foodstuff it has long been.

Like an egg, it is appetising or unappetising by the amount of time it is cooked, and like an egg, there is some small variation in the cooking time: you like your eggs runny, you don't; you like your pasta soft or you prefer it to retain its texture and resilience.However, where other staples (eg rice or bread) have survived and are eaten more or less as is, the almost unique characteristic of pasta is that it is no more than a savoury depository for other flavours: those of its innumerable sauces No one you or I know eats pasta plain. So, for that matter, are the French and Americans consuming more. Aye, even as Italians consume less. What is behind this is a deep revolution in the world's food habits and, indeed, in the nature of modern society, the family, work habits and much else.First let us consider pasta itself. Apart from putting a slab of meat on a fire, boiling an egg or eating vegetable kingdom raw, no dish in the world is much simpler than pasta It consists of flour (durum flour), egg and water. It is dropped into boiling water and requires no more skill in cooking than boiling an egg.

Even so, it is an extraordinary fact that last year Britons spent pounds 159m on pasta, and that sales increased by 48 per cent between 1991 and 1995. Pasta is not limited, as many foods are, by class barriers: it is eaten equally by rich and poor and, I hasten to add, cooked by good cooks and bad. In one form or another, it is a component of many cuisines, from Asia to Europe; and where it isn't part of a cooking tradition, it is still universally available, from Bogota to Bologna and from Singapore to Saskatchewan. They used the spaghetti, hot as it was from boiling cauldrons, as confetti If that is not a symbol of universality, nothing is. In 1945, one didn't, even in North America, waste food that way. The Irish foreign minister, Dick Spring, said renewed confidence was needed after a summer of unrest..