No Words

I was all ready to put up a post—really I was. It was one of my usuals: some sort of cooking quest, a couple of foibles along the way, a recipe at the end. Maybe it was even a little bit funny—one can hope, right?

I was all ready to do it, then I started reading the paper.

Food shortages are the news of the day—real, serious food shortages. There’s the drought in Australia that’s shutting down rice mills. The country of Japan has run out of butter. And then there’s Haiti. From an article in the New York Times:

"In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“'It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,' said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. 'It makes your stomach quiet down'…

"Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. 'Take one,' she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. 'You pick. Just feed them.'”

How can I write about silly kitchen escapades when people are eating dirt, trying to calm their aching bellies?

Throughout history there’s always been hunger, I realize that. I know that in the grand scheme of things I have been fortunate beyond belief, rarely having to think where my next meal might come from. But things feel tenuous to me these days—perhaps also to you. Call it the climate change, the oil crisis, the biofuel situation (don't get me started), but there are those who say it will impact us all soon, if it hasn't already. I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to dig up my teeny-tiny lawn and plant cabbages.

Right after I send all the rice I can find to Haiti.

At a time like this, I just don’t have it in my heart to tell you how dreamy French feta cheese is when you mix it with fresh herbs and heirloom tomatoes and how you really must give it a try. It all feels so superficial suddenly.

This is something I struggle with sometimes. When people learn that I keep a website and ask me what it’s about, I always feel awkward when I say it’s about food. It sounds superficial—and yet, at the same time, I know that food connects us powerfully. It is a vehicle for traditions and culture, a way for us to celebrate, to care for ourselves and each other. I know that where we get our food and how it’s grown is an important and vital issue—one that we have to reckon with in a serious way right now. And while I may not have suffered real hunger, I know it can fuel wars, overthrow political parties, change the landscape as we know it. Food is important, lack of food even more so.

I read something else recently, a short piece by Felicia Sullivan that reminded me again of the importance of food (and made me look forward to reading her new book). I’d recommend reading the whole beautiful thing, but here is a teaser:

"Now, standing in the grocery store, I stared at the rows of sugar, cinnamon sticks, and flour, and I remembered why I set out to bake in the first place: to make mistakes and learn from them, to realize that even with the best ingredients and precise measurements, the perfect cake might fail to materialize. I couldn’t control how the flour was milled, but I could revel in the process of making something from nothing. It’s the journey that’s miraculous, not the results."

This food thing, it has depth and breadth.

I’ll be back soon—writing about food and life, I’m sure. But these days I’m feeling a bit more sober about things. Feeling like I want to live close to the ground (I haven’t been planting cabbages, but there have been some kale seedlings, arugula, broccoli, leeks).

And—as if in answer to my concerns—this weekend in the New York Times Michael Pollan is telling us to plant a garden. Because food is important, never more so when there isn’t enough to fill the plate.

The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken

Once, not long ago, I dated a man who traced his lineage back to Italy. He was tall, dark, and handsome. We drank red wine under shooting star showers; he cooked romantic dinners for me; and one day he told me about how his family gathers together each Christmas, to make ravioli. It wasn't the large, warm Italian family of cliché—it sounded as if they had their fair share of struggles and conflicts, perhaps even more than most, but they all gathered at the end of each year and made ravioli.

I loved that.

This relationship wasn’t destined to last—our timing and needs were disastrously out of kilter. Once I realized this we had an amicable parting, still sending the occasional email hello even now. The only thing that truly saddens me about this story is that by breaking up in November I gave up any chance of being included in the annual Christmas ravioli making session.

I thought of this as I read Laura Schenone’s book The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. Schenone is descended from Italians, like my friend, but her family no longer gathers around the table at Christmas to make ravioli. They used to, but the family tree had splintered and her branch lost the tradition along the way. It is this quest—a search for her family’s authentic ravioli recipe—that she chronicles in her book.

But a search for authenticity is a funny thing, at least where a recipe is concerned. Schenone reunites with distant family members as she tries to unravel the knots of family and immigration and get to the source, but time and distance change things. The recipe she is given—the authentic ravioli recipe handed down from her great-grandmother who came over from Genoa—calls for two packages of cream cheese, an item that surely was not available back in the day. What then, is authentic? In her quest, she ends up tracing the the ravioli deep to its historical roots, tracking recipes back into the 12th century.

This story, however, is more than a search for a mere recipe. What unfolds in the pages of this wonderful book is a search for meaning—for family and home and a sense of belonging; it is a search for authentic values in a modern world. As the pace of life and work get faster and faster, these are the roots that ground us, if we can find them. It’s a quest I easily identified with.

Her journey takes her back to Italy, to the steep mountains of Liguria that plunge down to the sea. She meets generous Italians who bring her into their kitchens, showing her how to roll out pasta on rolling pins as long as your arm. She finds a place that feels like home to her, and characters like the young woman, high in the mountains, who gave up any hope of city life to continue her family’s production of traditional roasted chestnut flour. I am most certainly not the only reader who wants to follow in her footsteps and take the same trip—if Laura Schenone ever starts leading culinary tours to Italy, I will be the first to sign up.

But this is not one of those move to Tuscany and live the beautiful life sorts of memoirs (thank goodness). Schenone admits how hard it is for her and her family to accommodate this quest—she sometimes doubts what she is doing, questions her motives, and wonders if she is being selfish. This makes the story feel so much more real—more palatable—than other books that often seem divorced from any sense of life responsibilities.

The great pleasure of this book, however, is the beautiful writing. Passages such as this:

This all takes place long ago, during the days when huger was real—the years when children ran without shoes in summer, and when the people came out of the mountains looking thin if the chestnuts bad been poor that season, and plump if they had been good. The chestnut and the people were practically one. And the mountain people not only ate the chestnuts but built walls and tables and floors from chestnut wood. They lived with chestnuts hanging over the fire to smoke in the fall.

Schenone has a knack of weaving place and people and food together in a way that is simply gorgeous. Here she compares her own upbringing to that of her Italian ancestors:

My life was not built amid the dramatic beauty of mountains cascading down to sea. I have no memory of chestnuts and their sweet starchy taste. But I was raised on another different kind of beauty—this intense green all around. Deep green above us on the midsummer trees, lighter green below us on the lawn, old earthy forest green in the yew bushes and overgrown hemlocks that wrap around our home. Green plus red. New Jersey’s big beefsteak tomatoes sliced on the place with salt and pepper, the sweet corn on the cob—and the pungent flavors of fresh bluefish, caught in the Atlantic along the Jersey shore by my uncle, and cooked on the gas grill on the porch by my father, wrapped in foil, the skin sticky and sweet, the dark meat full of ocean.

This book was so entrancing, so lovely and interesting, that for the week I was reading it I tried to get out of social obligations—tried to find reasons to come home early so I could lose myself again in the story and prose. This is exactly the sort of book I want to read—related to food, but connected to a larger context that speaks to our dreams, joys, and struggles as well.

It also made me want to make ravioli.

I’ve tried to make fresh pasta before, back when I lived in Japan. I didn’t have a pasta machine—I didn’t even have a rolling pin—but I did my best using an empty wine bottle and produced something that was probably the best fresh pasta available in my part of rural Japan, but that’s not saying much. It was thick, awkward, and slightly gummy. I tried one other time—inspired by Yvonne’s post on making Tajarin—and used a rolling pin, but it never got thin enough. They say that fresh pasta should be rolled so thin you can read a newspaper through the sheet of dough. I'm sure mine never came close to that.

But the other fantastic part of this book is an entire section—53 pages—of recipes in the back. There are photos as well, with step-by-step instructions. There’s even a section called “Questions I Frequently Asked Myself, and You May Ask Too.” There are many recipes—cheese ravioli, mushroom ravioli, chestnut gnocchi, and a complex but wonderful sounding Christmas ravioli recipe that takes two days to make.

It was around Christmas when I read this book, and I immediately decided to make ravioli for my family. My mother was in town for a few days, on her way back from the island, and I thought my nieces might like ravioli as well. Mostly I loved the idea of the whole family sitting down at the table together. It happens so rarely.

I chose to make the pansotti recipe. As Schenone explains, “Pansotti is a descendant of the ravioli magri—filled with herbs and cheese—for Lent or for lean times…generously filled, corners pinched together and pasta so delicate that the pansotti seemed to flutter on my fork.” Upon first tasting pansotti she says, “I believed I had found the food of my dreams.”

I shopped for the various herbs and greens that make up the filling. I even attempted making the Italian cheese prescinsêua—I say attempted, because apparently rennet is a hard thing to come by on short notice. I ended up substituting ricotta that I had made, smoothed with some crème fraiche. I then started on the dough.

Fresh pasta dough is actually quite fun to make—cracking eggs into a well in the middle of a mound of flour.



Slowly mixing flour in until you have a soupy lake.



Pulling the dough together.



Until it becomes something rough but kneadable.



And kneading it until it’s smooth and supple.



Then it rests, before you roll it out (I don’t remember doing this step in my prior attempts, perhaps that is why they never rolled out very well).

I borrowed a proper pasta roller for the occasion (the great benefit of having food-loving friends such as Molly and Brandon—thanks, guys!). Based on my track record, I had no confidence I would be able to roll the pasta thin enough using a rolling pin. It took a few tries to get the hang of it. Some of the early attempts ended up with shredded dough.



But soon I got the knack of it and was turning out sheets of fresh pasta. Sheets of fresh pasta! In the beginning it was useful to have an extra set of hands, to help feed the sheets in and guide them out of the machine—those sheets get rather long as they are pressed thinner and thinner by repeated passed through the machine on increasingly higher settings. If you have the KitchenAid pasta attachment, or a motor driven pasta roller, you won’t need this, but for the hand crank it’s helpful.



The machine was magic—such a difference from trying to roll it out with a rolling pin (or, ahem, a wine bottle). My pasta grew so thin that, while you might not have been able to read the newspaper through it, you could certainly see the text through the sheets of fresh pasta dough. Success was mine!



But not sooner has I triumphed in the pasta department than I hit a snag. As much as I tried to craft the pansotti, they weren’t coming together smoothly. I’ve never had pansotti and I wasn’t sure I was doing it properly. Mostly I feared that the edges of the little triangles wouldn’t seal well enough and they might split open while cooking and spew their filling. They looked a bit sad and lopsided and were taking quite a long time to hand cut and seal. I decided to shift gears.



I didn't have a ravioli rolling pin, so I placed spoonfuls of the filling (called ripieno, in Italian) on the sheets of pasta and used a small glass to cut the ravioli, this way the pressure would seal the edge and set my mind at ease as to exploding filling. And I cut, and I cut, and I cut. Making ravioli is a fairly time consuming process, particularly when you are hand cutting each one. It was at this point when I happened to flip to the front of Laura Schenone’s book and reread the second paragraph:

You’re not supposed to make Christmas ravioli alone, really. It’s too hard. It takes hours of work. Far better you should have people at your side, probably the women of your family—daughters, mothers, and sisters helping you, nagging you, and bumping into you in the kitchen. The men too—the husbands or fathers who periodically come in to peer over your shoulder and give (tolerated) supervision, or better yet, an extra hard to help press (gently, gently) the dough packets shuts, or lift them to a place where they will dry. All this, plus perhaps some gossip, will help the job go faster.

Yet there I was at home, alone, while the rest of my family was at my brother’s house, hanging out and playing and waiting for me to show up with the dinner I had offered to bring. Note to self: draft family members next year; also, don’t hand cut each ravioli, such would be the path to maddness.

A family's worth of ravioli is a lot of work. But they are oh, so cute. I mean, really. How can you resist?



In the end it took so much time that I rushed over to my brother's at the last possible minute, so we could get the little niecelets fed and into bed on time, calling him from the car to tell him to put a large pot of water on the stove. But the ravioli, with its stuffing of herbs and greens and fresh cheese was a showstopper. Everyone loved them— even my picky-eater niecelet had seconds. I floated out of the house that evening buoyed by my smashing pasta success.



(Actually, I tripped down the stairs while carrying the now-empty baking sheet and glass bowls. I managed to save the glassware but sprained my ankle in the process, a rather inelegant end to the evening.)

Since then I’ve made more ravioli. My favorite so far is a filling of kabocha squash, roasted or steamed and blended smooth with just the tiniest bit of salt and nutmeg. This is the dish that made me break up with butternut squash, when I discovered it’s not nearly as creamy and smooth as kabocha. I like it with a drizzle of olive oil, Maldon salt, and the tiniest bit of Parmesan cheese.



I like my ravioli stuffed as much as possible, so that there is just the barest whisper of pasta encasing the filling. Done this way, with a pure squash filling, you can almost convince yourself that this is a vegetable dish.



I also just like fresh, handmade pasta. The fresh pasta bought in the stores—the kind that comes packaged in plastic—can never compare to what you can make at home. My favorite is a wide cut rustic noodle.



Even when this pasta is then dried and stored—or frozen—it is still head and shoulders above most commercial products. This stuff is dreamy. If I could have one last meal, before departing this dear earth, I think it might have to be fresh pasta.



I’m not going to give you a recipe for ravioli today—there are plenty out there and it’s mostly a lot of technique. If I were you I’d take a look at Laura Schenone’s book, where there are pages of instructions and recipes. You can even watch her make fresh pasta online, in a segment she did for Chow.com.

What I am going to share with you is a recipe for salsa di noci, or walnut pesto. Laura Schenone includes a version of this pasta sauce in the book and it is amazing. I’ve futzed with it a wee bit (I know, so much for authenticity) and I have to say—this is seriously addictive stuff. The only drawback is that it's not the prettiest of sauces—but when something tastes this good it's silly to complain about looks.

If I could tell you anything it would be to go make this sauce. Summer and fresh pesto is still a long way off. This sauce will help you get there in style. Eat it on freshly made pasta, with a drizzle of excellent olive oil, and you might feel like you’ve reached some sort of Italian-sponsored moment of nirvana. I’m not kidding.



And while you’re at it, consider picking up a copy of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed (I was going to offer to give away my copy to a reader, but it’s so good I’m keeping it). Laura Schenone is a gifted storyteller who weaves history and place and family and food together into something beautiful, beguiling, and delicious.

Buy the book at your local independent bookseller
Buy the book through Powell’s (great, Portland-based, independent bookstore)
Buy the book through Amazon

The Powell’s and Amazon links above are through their affiliate program, so this site will get a few cents of commission if you click directly. I realize many people buy their books online, but I’d be even happier if you sought out your local independent bookstore and supported them by buying there. The top link will help you find one near where you live.



SALSA DI NOCI/ WALNUT PESTO
Adapted from The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, by Laura Schenone

2 cups walnuts or walnut pieces (good quality walnuts are a must here)
1 tsp salt
1 medium clove garlic
1/4 tsp fresh marjoram leaves
Laura says you can use fresh basil instead, but I like the marjoram version better
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (again, quality is important)
2 tsp olive oil
Hot pasta water, to thin to desired consistency

Soak the walnuts in boiling water for half an hour, to remove bitterness. Drain the walnuts and put them in the bowl of a food processor.

Slice open the garlic clove and remove the green germ (inner, sprouting portion).

Add the garlic, salt, marjoram, and olive oil and process until smooth and slightly creamy. Add the cheese and pulse to mix. I find that I like mine blended to the point of extreme smoothness. If you want a more rustic, chunkier mix, stop sooner.

When you are ready to serve, thin to desired consistency with a few spoonfuls of hot pasta water. I like a soft but still paste-like consistency (something like hummus).

You can keep the sauce in the fridge for about a week (I cover it with a thin film of olive oil) or freeze it for several months. Trust me, it won't last that long.

Serve with fresh pasta and swoon.



Walnut pesto isn’t an entirely new concept (Heidi did a version for Food & Wine; here's a sage walnut pesto; and a NYT recipe for walnut pesto crostini) but I had never made it before. If you're in the same boat, give it a try. I’m entirely addicted at this point, and even my 17-month-old niece will eat it out of the container. She knows a good thing when she tastes it.

Dos and Don'ts, with Potato Almond Soup

If I could tell you anything—if I could be the least bit bossy—I would tell you not to get sick the first really nice and sunny week that finally feels like spring.

And certainly, don’t start to get sick on Saturday morning, thereby ruining the entire weekend.

Don’t get so sick that you actually cannot sleep, your feverish and achy body tossing and turning in the night, too hot one moment, too cold the next.

Don’t get sick in a city where you don’t know too many people—where your brother says he will call to check in on you, but doesn’t for three days.

In three days time you might have died, perhaps he does not realize this.

When you finally stumble down to the kitchen late on day two, realize that your zeal for banning packaged food has left you nothing that can be easily heated and served, no quick comfort food.

(You’ve even gotten rid of the bottled soba sauce; now, in order to throw together your favorite sick cure soba noodles, you are going to have to make the stock from scratch—a process that involves dried seaweed and bonito flakes).

Go back to bed, you aren’t that hungry anyway.

Don’t think about your neighborhood in San Francisco with the shops and restaurants right around the corner where you can get Hot and Sour Soup or Tom Ka Gai delivered to your doorstep. The closest soup to you now is an eighteen-block walk, up a hill. Realize that there are drawbacks to all these lovely parks and everyone having a backyard—it means you are further away from Thai takeout!

Do buy the expensive, softer tissues. They won’t prevent your nose from turning into a scaly, red mess in the end, but it will be a kinder, gentler process. In times like these, you need what comfort you can get.

Do use Manuka honey in your tea—they say it has antibacterial qualities and this might be true, but the bigger truth is that it does a good job of coating your throat. At least until the next body-wracking cough attack.

Do be glad that you have a quart of frozen chicken stock in the freezer. If you can muster the energy to chop a carrot, a potato, and part of an onion, you'll have a simple soup.

(This is a big if.)

Understand that being sick in a house with no TV is not as much fun as being sick in a house that has TV. And that Joseph Campbell DVDs, as interesting as they may be, do not cut it when you’re feeling awful. Where are reruns of Sex and the City when you need them?

Realize that you haven’t been this sick in a long, long time. You’ll be grateful for this, just as soon as you can breathe through your nose (at least one nostril). Until then you’re pretty glum.

When you finally manage to leave the house, days later, notice all the flowers that have sprouted and begun to bloom since you were sick. It no longer feels like early spring anymore, it’s official.

And when you go to get your blood drawn (a whole six vials, thankyouverymuch), make sure to go to the lab with the nice lady, where the walls are covered with colorful postcards sent by patients; where she is so gentle you barely feel a thing; and where she says you can take home the magazine you were reading even though it’s the shiny new April issue just out. It’s a new city, and you’re still feeling crappy, and someone being so nice makes you want to cry. Appreciate it, and maybe think about sending her a postcard.

And when you get home, make this soup that’s been floating around in the back of your head—this potato soup with almonds and garlic, the description of which was so compelling that you haven’t been able to shake it. You’ll have to use chicken broth from a box, because you’ve already used what was in the freezer and you really can’t be fussed to make more from scratch right now. And you might want to skip the ham—because really, your tender tummy is in no shape for anything like that. You know this will mean a somewhat less flavorful soup, but since you can’t taste that much anyway it will be fine.

It will be better than fine, it will be delicious.

Then go back to sleep, you need your rest.

Anya von Bremzen's Potato Soup with Fried Almonds on The Wednesday Chef

Back soon—still trying to manage breathing out of both nostrils, but I have hope.