An essential Roman dish, spaghetti cacio e pepe gets messed about with badly in London restaurants. Rowley Leigh shows how to get it right 

I was in the venerable winery at Selvapiana – located in a boring piece of Florentine countryside punctuated by industrial estates, supermarkets and service stations – sitting next to the winemaker and attempting to make polite remarks about the food before us. “Tuscan food is crap,” he intoned. “I eat it under sufferance.” He was one of the new breed of winemakers, brought in by progressive wine estates and trained more in oenological colleges and by stages in foreign climes rather than in his parents’ vineyard, not that they had one. He pined for the food of his native Rome. He longed for the bitter snap of puntarelle with anchovies, for the crunch of carciofi alla giudia, artichokes with their leaves splayed out and fried in olive oil, and he talked wistfully of spaghetti cacio e pepe.

This was 30 years ago (or was it 40?) and I’d never heard of cacio e pepe. Now it’s on menus all over London. Not the real spaghetti cacio e pepe, whose only ingredients are spaghetti, Pecorino (the hard Roman version, finely grated) and coarsely milled black pepper, but a hundred versions according to the chef’s whim and fancy. They will use a different pasta, not understanding that the bite of a good artisan spaghetti, cooked al dente and with its rough edges there to catch the emulsion of cheese and cooking water, is the best pasta for the job. They will add different cheeses and always butter or cream or olive oil or all three to help this emulsion, thus robbing the dish of the authenticity, uniqueness and simplicity that makes it a true expression of Rome.

Chefs do these things because they want to be original and because it’s easier – of course you’re going to get an emulsion if you add cream or butter – and because they avoid comparison. Every trattoria in Rome does cacio e pepe, and they do it very well because their customers can always go to the place around the corner if it’s not up to scratch. These things take skill and aren’t learnt from a book with “Fast and Easy” in the title, or from a cookery show. Given the simplicity of the ingredients, why else would someone be eating cacio e pepe in a restaurant if some goon on the telly had shown them how to do it?

But back to Selvapiana. We were eating a perfectly nice squash risotto – not crap at all – when my winemaking companion explained cacio e pepe to me. Since then I’ve always made it exactly how he told me. The risotto prompted him to think of it because that’s how you cook the pasta: after the spaghetti has boiled for about 5 minutes, use tongs to lift it out and into a large saucepan on a low heat. Add a ladleful of the cooking water and continue to cook the pasta, stirring. After a minute, add a handful of the cheese, a spoonful of the pepper and more cooking water, never letting it boil. Continue, alternately adding cheese, pepper and cooking water until the cheese and pepper are used up and the spaghetti is cooked but still has “bite”. The idea is to let the spaghetti absorb the water, while the cheese and starch from the pasta coalesce into a creamy, peppery coating that clings to each strand. The spaghetti slips down the throat with a punch of pepper and the rough salt of the cheese. You feel like a Roman centurion relaxing after a 20-mile march and a small massacre in Gaul. Pasta, cheese and pepper would have followed him through every corner of the Empire.

Once you understand cacio e pepe you should know how to cook pasta. Not the fresh egg pasta that turns to a claggy porridge in the pan and must be cooked quickly with a light touch, but all the hard durum wheat pastas in your store cupboard, all the penne, rigatoni, bucatini and spaghetti made by proper producers and not the own-label garbage you cynically give your kids. Knock a minute or two off the recommended cooking time – which is nearly always correct, insofar as it goes – and then finish in the sauce, adding pasta water and seasoning until just so.

Take spaghetti vongole. All down the Adriatic coast and back round to Naples, most restaurants on the sea will serve spaghetti with clams. There are a few tiny variations – less or more garlic, chilli or no chilli, parsley or no parsley – but they’re essentially the same because you can’t improve on the basic dish, you can only fuck it up. Two minutes after the spaghetti has come back to the boil, heat some olive oil in a large pan and stew the garlic and chilli in it momentarily, then add a small splash of white wine and chuck in the clams. Five minutes later when the clams have opened and released a lot of juice and the spaghetti is still quite hard, add the spaghetti to the clams and stir. The pasta slowly swells and absorbs the clam juice. After five minutes, chuck in some roughly chopped parsley, add a little slurp of olive oil and you’re done.

Rowley Leigh presents our Academy course The Idler History of Cooking in Six Chapters. 

This article is from Idler #107, January/February 2026 – out now.

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