Hacker News Reader

Comment by etothepii | Hacker News Reader

This pasta is impossible to make. A celebrity chef once spent two HOURS trying.

Jamie Oliver if memory serves well, so that doesn't exactly tell you much. Behind the scenes he's known for making food that looks good, but not necessarily tasty.

Uncle Roger looking on, unsurprised, as Jamie Oliver tries for two hours and fails. "Like Uncle Roger tried for two hours with ex-girlfriend. <I'm so sorry children>"

The Uncle Roger character is so fascinating to me.

I can't shake the feeling that the popularity is largely from playing out stereotypes for a mass audience. It feels ideologically similar to a minstrel show in ways that I don't have a vocabulary to describe accurately.

I’ve seen interviews with the comedian/actor out of character, and he insists that Uncle Roger is exactly what uncles from Malaysia are like (I assume exaggerated at least a little for comedic effect).

So maybe it’s okay? Or maybe in a few years he’ll be retiring the character the way Chris Rock retired his “N” routine.

All I know is that it’s not my place to tell him what to do with his heritage.

I grew up watching yan can cook and uncle Rodger struck me at how inauthentic it is. It feels exactly how you described.

I think it's a ridiculous claim that he tried for two hours and gave up so it's impossible, but it does tell you something that it's Jamie Oliver and not just anybody. His first job was pastry chef at Antonio Carluccio's Italian restaurant. He was mentored by Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo, also friends with and business partners - their joint high-street restaurant chain was Jamie's Italian. He did a TV show Jamie's Great Italian Escape of him touring Italy, and ten years later a one-off Jamie's Italian Christmas, and with Contaldo they did the show Jamie Cooks Italy. He's been awarded the Order of the Star of Italy, as chef and restauranteur.

That is, he's pretty familiar with Italian cuisine and making pasta compared to a random average person / cook or chef who hasn't specialised in it.

I heard about this. The famous celebrity chef, someone everyone here has heard of, traveled all the way to Sardinia to learn the intricate technique known by only three women, who presumably have spent a lifetime learning this technique. After a full two hours, the chef declared it impossible.

Mind bending.

Are we playing the Pronoun Game here? Is the famous celebrity chef in question Lord Voldemort?

> Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver also visited Sardinia in hopes of mastering the elusive noodle. After two hours, he gave up.

I heard about this too, here on this very forum, in an article about this pasta, today.

My bad.

I'm on extremely limited bandwidth right now, so I can only read the HN threads and not the links. I plead oopsie daisy.

That's OK, it gave me a chance to be snarky, which I relish these days. Honestly, I rarely read the articles myself.

I trekked for twenty miles, at night, so that I could reach the fabled TFA.

TFA - The Fabled Article. "the fabled TFA" is then like PIN Number and ATM Machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com