We were living abroad and my mother comes to see us and tries to stuff us italian style. I knew it was coming, so when my mother calls me at work for the 60th time to ask: and ragu, did you want ragu, knowing damn well I am veggie, I called my husband and said: you grab someone, anyone from your work and bring them home, my mother has gone mental in the kitchen again.
So he brings this couple, expats like us, who were a bit too genuinely enchanted by my mother's cooking, apparently they had no functioning kitchen. Eternally grateful, they invite us back to theirs, italian mother in tow, as their kitchen had been fixed.
It was freezing in their house/kitchen, absolutely could see your breath, mother starts muttering. I placate her, once the oven is on, it'll warm up. They bring tealights on the table, bread chunks, and various little dishes with stuff like raw onion, beans from a tin, really and I mean really disintegrated boiled to death pasta and cheerfully ask me to translate for my mother. The hostess then proceeds to do an impersonation of Nigella on a cookery program, I kid you not, with commentary on tossing the beans into the pasta ever so carefully till the full flavour and juices run together etc. my mother is getting agitated: whAAt is she doing, madonna, the hostess continues undisturbed, mixing the cold beans, cold congealed pasta and onions, my mother hyperventilates: she is not serving THAT is she? Oh yes she is! I kept shooting daggers at my mother: eat, crissake, she made an effort to cook for you, my mother: like hell she is, she is deranged, I am not eating, translate that without saying it is SHIT, eh?
I honestly can't remember how we ended the whole spectacle, but on our way out the hosts gleefully told us the problem with the kitchen was that the sewage pipe burst into the kitchen, took a week to clear up. To which my mother looks at me and through gritted teeth says: ragu. You will have the fucking ragu now.