When you’re living on your own for the first time, it’s fun to try out things you haven’t done before—like cooking a proper meal for yourself. And if you’re in Italy, cooking Italian dishes seem like a pretty good idea.
Three American exchange students in Italy decided they wanted some authentic Italian food for dinner, so they brought some pasta back to their apartment in Florence. However, cooking spaghetti turned into a recipe for disaster for these students after they put the pasta into a pot without water and caused a fire.
You would think adding water when you’re cooking pasta (or any uncooked noodles) is common knowledge, but these students said “Challenge accepted!” without even searching for “How to cook spaghetti without causing fire” on Google.
According to Italian Newspaper, La Nazione, these brilliant minds skipped the first step in cooking spaghetti: boiling a pot of water. They put those dry noodles directly into an empty hot pot and turned into it a job for the fire department to handle instead of something they could eat.
The pasta caught fire so the students had to call emergency services. Luckily, firefighters quickly responded and handled the situation.
Italians didn’t take this “honest mistake” lightly and mocked the American students for not knowing how to cook pasta. “Return to the USA to eat hamburgers & chips from [McDonald’s],” one of the comments read. “[F]rom one of those three could come the next US Secretary of State…or the next president!” another reader said.
Meanwhile, Fabio Picchi, a Florentine chef, kindly offered to give the students three hours of Italian cooking lessons in one of his restaurants.
“They will have lunch in our restaurant with two of my extraordinary cooks,” he said. “They will teach them the simple basics that are very good if done well. I think this can be useful to them, but also to us. Understanding is what is beautiful and necessary.”
Well, it’s safe to say that these students learned a very important lesson in their lives. Step one, read the damn instructions available at the back of almost every product. And if there’s none (or it’s written in a language you couldn’t understand, say, Italian perhaps), look it up online — it’s free.
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