The Duchess of Sussex once sparked controversy among Italians with her spaghetti recipe featured on her Netflix lifestyle show, but this week, the Princess of Wales garnered admiration for her pasta-making skills.
During her two-day international visit, 44-year-old Kate was lauded as a ‘natural Rezdora,’ a term used locally for a skilled matriarch or homemaker, as she expertly crafted fresh dough by hand.
She impressed chef Ivan Lampredi by combining flour, oil, salt, and water to prepare tortelli, a type of stuffed pasta.
Chef Lampredi was so taken with her skills that he remarked he would gladly ‘hire’ her. “I’ve taught many people this technique, and she excelled,” he enthused.
“She picked it up swiftly and was remarkably easy to converse with, just like one of us. Hosting the princess in my kitchen was a tremendous honor. It’s hard to believe, and it carried a great sense of responsibility,” he added.
The future Queen also shared insights into cooking at Forest Lodge, revealing that she makes her own pasta at home.
‘When I do this at home it’s without a big bowl and it goes everywhere,’ Kate admitted, later laughing when she rolled her pasta through the machine and the handle fell off by accident. ‘Is there a technique for this?’ she asked.
It’s a far cry from the Italian reception to the Duchess’ pasta-making endeavours in her Netflix show, With Love, Meghan.
Fans expressed their horror over the dish she whipped up with her close friend, make-up artist Daniel Martin.
Kate, 44, was dubbed a ‘natural Rezdora’ – the local term word for a matriarch housewife – as she rolled out freshly made dough by hand during her two-day trip overseasÂ
‘When I make this, I make it for my family,’ Meghan explained, before clarifying ‘not that my children are eating heaps of noodles but I will make enough so that I can put leftovers in their lunchbox’.
Describing how the cherished dish harks back to her days of creating lifestyle content for her previous website The Tig, she said: ‘This skillet spaghetti would have been on there’.
To make the meal, Meghan removed the dry pasta from a jar and laid it into the dish, which had feta and cherry tomatoes already in a layer on the bottom. Â
There was scant detail on measurements, except to say ‘an entire pack of spaghetti’ is used – and ‘three and a half cups of boiling water, give or take’ should be added.Â
After adding lots of lemon zest, she told viewers: ‘You just pour boiling water on top and that’s it’. When the cooking is almost done, chard and kale are added.Â
It’s a far cry from the Italian reception to Meghan’s pasta-making endeavours in her Netflix show, With Love, Meghan
She wowed chef Ivan Lampredi, kneading flour, oil, salt and water in a large bowl to make tortelli – a type of stuffed pasta
The pro even later said he would ‘hire’ her. ‘I have shown many people how to do this exactly right and she was very good at it,’ Mr Lampredi gushed
Meghan said she left it for ‘four or five minutes until the noodle is done, al dente…’
However, while the final result looked tasty, many appeared baffled by the cooking methods.Â
‘Netflix paid a lot of money just to let us know Meghan Markle doesn’t know how to cook pasta,’ one person wrote on X.
‘Next she’ll show us how to make frozen pizza!’ another joked.
Another lamented: ‘She overcooked the noodles. Slimy looking.’
‘Wtf is that? It looks like she made some sort of soup, cooked the vegetables to hell, tossed in some spaghetti and called it a day,’ a user commented.
‘The pasta looks fine in the end, but I think Italians screamed at their TVs when she poured water into the sauce,’ someone else observed.
Others, however, came to the Duchess’ defense.
‘It looked delicious to me,’ one person wrote.
In another moment that likely annoyed an entire European nation, the Duchess called the popular Italian pasta ‘noodles’ more than once while prepping the meal.