In the history of the world, humans have prepared their fair share of truly repulsive foods. It was only a few decades ago that our go-to cooking method for Brussels sprouts was boiling them, a crime against vegetables; to this day, hot-dog-stuffed pizza crust still exists. But in GQ’s June cover story, Robert Pattinson attempted to create a pasta dish so unholy that God herself had to step in to prevent its conception.
In the profile, Pattinson says he found himself wondering last year, “How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?” He, for reasons that are unclear to me, then decided it was his duty to conceive of a pasta “business” idea, which he is actively trying to sell, and even gave his product a name: “Piccolini Cuscino,” which translates to “little pillow.”
During the interview, which was conducted over FaceTime over the course of several days, Pattinson decides to demonstrate how one might prepare this dish. First, he pulls out the ingredients: penne (substituted for his preferred pasta, which he cannot name but knows to resemble “a sort of squiggly blob” and “the hair bun on a girl”); cornflakes (he prefers bread crumbs but ended up buying cereal after concluding that they’re “basically the same shit”); sliced cheese; sauce (any kind will do, any kind at all); a hamburger bun; and sugar.
With each step, the recipe becomes increasingly horrifying. As Pattinson microwaves the penne and water for eight minutes — yes, microwaves — he begins layering sugar and sliced cheese in an aluminum-foil nest (“you really need to congeal everything in an enormous amount of sugar and cheese”). But, shit! He then realizes he’s forgotten the outer cornflake layer, so he lifts up his cake of cheese and sugar to tuck cornflakes underneath it. After this, he dumps on his unspecified sauce and the pasta, fresh from the microwave. “There’s absolutely no chance this is gonna work,” Pattinson proclaims, but he perseveres nonetheless, pouring more sugar on top. To finish, he tops his creation with a hamburger bun he has burned with “PC” (for Piccolini Cuscino, of course) using a lighter.
It’s at this point that divine intervention occurs. Although GQ writer Zach Baron strongly cautions against putting the aluminum-shrouded pasta ball into a microwave, Pattinson ignores the warnings — apparently, because he holds the conviction that his microwave is, in fact, an oven. Predictably, a “lightning bolt” erupts from the microwave oven, which then emits a resounding bang and goes dark. “Yeah, I think I have to leave that alone,” Pattinson says of the crime scene. “But that is a Piccolini Cuscino.”
And so we live another day on an Earth unmarred by the genesis of the dreaded cornflake-crusted Little Pillow.