“Hey Kenickie, you want a piece of salami?” – Sonny

“Are you kidding, if I eat that, I’ll smell like you!” – Kenickie

Some of you (most probably women!), will recognise the above lines and characters from the movie Grease. In many ways this captures what it was like being the child of Italian immigrants in the 70s.  Going to school with your salami sandwiches immediately marked you out as different to other children – the other kids had jam or ham sandwiches.

This was the era that Nationwide famously broadcast a programme that showed spaghetti being grown on trees as an April Fools gag – clearly ridiculous, but an April Fools gag will only work if there’s a possibility that at least some people might believe it…which they did.

And indeed, in the excellent “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, the main character Tulla, shows that this sort of thing wasn’t just reserved for Italian immigrant children, but Greeks too. There’s a lovely scene where as a child going to school, Tulla gets out her Mousakka for her packed lunch, and the children ridicule her for bringing in “Moose Cacca”.

So here we find ourselves in 2014 in a vastly different UK in terms of its attitude to foreign foods, and in particular Italian food. We have positively embraced Italian cuisine in this country to the point that it has become woven into the very fabric of our society, but particularly the middle classes. It seems par for the course now for a celebrity chef to have at least one book dedicated to Italian food. Jamie and Nigella spring to mind for example. And you can even buy an English translation of “Il Cucchiaio d’Argento”, the most famous bible of Italian cuisine. The British Middle Class clearly loves Italian food!

Pasta with tomato sauce is no longer pasta with tomato sauce – it’s pasta al pomodoro! Spaghetti bolognaise is spaghetti al ragu’.

And for me this all culminated in reading an issue of the Evening Standard on the way home from work before Christmas which had an article entitled “Top 10 Panettone” – not only can you buy Panettone in your everyday supermarket, but now the press are making league tables of the stuff!

I can’t begin to express how funny I find all this! I love how Italian cuisine has become such a part of British culture – as my parents had an Italian restaurant in Soho from the early 70s to 2000, I witnessed at first hand how the British palate for Italian food evolved to increasing levels of sophistication to a point where some of the best Italian restaurants in the world can be found in England.

None of this would have been possible had Brits not embraced Italian immigrants and Italian culture. Immigration has brought so much to this great country, something Mr Farage and his odious UKIP party seem to conveniently forget. Let’s not forget that one of the things that makes Great Britain great is the way it has embraced other cultures – long may it continue!