Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  Betta’s pasta recipe was one egg for every etto of all-purpose flour. An etto is a hundred grams, one of those universal Italian measurements that might be translated as “medium-to-large-ish.” You don’t add water because there should be enough liquid in the egg (if you found a good one). You don’t need a flavor intensifier like salt or olive oil because all the flavor you need is, again, already in the egg (if you found a good one). At Babbo, Mario compensated for his being unable to find a reliable supply of half-wild, genuinely small-farm eggs by tripling up on the yolks he could get: for every pound of flour (call it four etti), he’d use three eggs, plus eight yolks, not to mention salt, a dribble of olive oil, and a little bit of water. (This recipe is not the one you’ll find in the Babbo cookbook and was, until this moment, a kitchen secret.) Was Mario’s yolk-tripled pasta better than Betta’s? No, it was different, and both are good. But Betta’s is the one I remember: one egg, one etto. I also liked the simplicity of a recipe that depends wholly on the goodness of one ingredient: one good egg, one etto.

  I’D BEEN in such a rush to get to Porretta because I wanted to get there before the classroom got too crowded. I’m not sure why I was in such a hurry. Betta wasn’t. By the time Mark arrived, about ten days after me, Betta had finally consented to my touching the dough: I was permitted to knead it. Until then, I had watched.

  “Watching is good,” she said. “That was how I learned as a child: hours and hours, watching my aunts.” This was a familiar lesson, but how much watching did I need to do? “When Mario was here, he wasn’t interested in watching. He wanted to make pasta immediately. Every morning, he’d ask, ‘Can I make the pasta now? Can I? Can I? Can I?’” She snorted with indignation, as if to say how could he possibly make pasta without memorizing the hands of women who have been doing this for decades?

  I snorted, too, just to be agreeable, until I remembered why I was there. (The exchange confirmed my suspicions of a conspiracy: they really don’t want us to know how to do this.)

  Even so, the kneading by hand was not without interest. It wasn’t done at Babbo, because there the dough was bashed around by a machine, “for forty-five minutes,” Mario boasted to me one day, much longer than anywhere else, “in order to draw out more of the glutens” (a metaphor that seemed to regard gluten proteins as garden snails that appeared when you weren’t looking). In fact, unknown to Mario, the dough was bashed for only ten minutes, which I’m sure was perfectly sufficient, and Alejandro looked at me as though I were an insane man when I asked if maybe it needed another half hour.

  For me, the hand kneading alone may have justified the journey to Italy: crushing the dough under my weight, folding it in half, crushing it again, warming it slightly with the heat of my skin, stretching it with each repetition. Bread makers know these moments and get all lyrical about their tactile sensuality. Slowly the dough becomes shiny and more pliable, stretchy, just as the wheat proteins themselves are being stretched, and after a few minutes you can actually smell the glutens coming together, an evocatively fragrant perfume. In a poetic spasm, I thought of it as an oven at the far end of my memory. For the longest time, bread and pasta were also both made with water. Now pasta makers use an egg instead. And for me, naggingly, the question was: When?

  I WAS CONVINCED I’d discover the first recipe in Bartolomeo Scappi. I had first consulted Scappi’s Opera for precorn polenta preparations and, having then acquired a two-volume facsimile edition of the 1570 text, I couldn’t stop myself from peeking at it, a page here, a page there, struggling with the ornate sixteenth-century script until eventually I was enjoying what seemed like an unmediated glimpse into a disciplined Renaissance kitchen. Scappi, proud and a little vain—his portrait on the cover looks like Plato with an appetite—includes meticulous accounts of his grander meals, and I lost hours in the menus, like the one for a lunch on October 28th: no indication of the year or occasion, the tongue-in-cheek implication being that it was like any autumnal pranzo, this year’s, last year’s, ho-hum, the sort of thing whipped up every October 28th. According to Scappi, the meal was a bit of everything, di grasso e di magro, fatty and lean, non-fasting and fasting, and consisted of eight courses, 1,347 dishes in all. Some were quite rustic—hams boiled in wine, for instance, or clams cooked on the grill. Most were pretty elaborate, like the meatballs made from capon breasts served in a veal-foot jelly; or the pigeons, boned and filled with rooster crests and pork jowls; or something called sommata dissalata, a bittersweet tummy delicacy, a mishmash of meaty bits, conserved in brine, stuffed into a stomach like a beach ball, cooked on a spit, and served with lemon and sugar. There were a hundred and sixty tiny grilled birds (ortolani in Italian; ortolans in French—the item prepared by Marco Pierre White in the early pub days), two hundred fried frogs, eight peacocks, plus unspecified numbers of turkeys, guinea hens, wild ducks, pheasants, geese, doves, thrushes, woodcocks, larks, and just about everything else that flies. Only a few people, the deadpan Scappi concedes, worried about dinner.

  Soon I was reading Scappi for instruction, especially for lessons in what goes with what: familiar themes like game birds with fruit (pheasant stuffed with prunes, crab apples, bone marrow, and nuts), or the raw with the cooked, or the raw with the cured, as in a pork terrine that Scappi wraps with slices of prosciutto. His tortellini were made with a veal and capon filling—bovine and fowl, an unmodern pairing, and one I associate with the meats you find in a Bolognese ragù. One ravioli stuffing combined beets and spinach, another blended peas with three cheeses, and that was the kind of thing I liked learning, that you could add ricotta, parmigiano, and pecorino to summer peas and fill a pasta with the mix. But when I found Scappi’s instructions for the dough that encased these fillings, I was disappointed. Apart from a splash of rosewater, butter, and some sugar, it was the familiar two-thousand-year-old eggless preparation.

  Elsewhere the egg makes an appearance. A yolk shows up in Scappi’s gnocchi. It reappears in his Roman macaroni (a thick hand-rolled noodle that takes half an hour to cook). But the important moment is in a tagliatelle soup. The recipe is simple: two pounds of flour, the ubiquitous warm water (acqua tepida), and—hark!—three eggs. The amount of water isn’t specified, but you can figure it out. Scappi is using medieval measurements, and two French pounds of flour—the pound then was twelve ounces—was about 700 grams. Scappi then adds three eggs: three eggs for 700 grams of flour? I tried the mix at home. To get the requisite wetness, you need enough water to match the volume of the eggs and probably a little more. The liquid used to make the dough, therefore, wasn’t wholly water or wholly egg, but a mix of roughly equal portions of each. Eggs had not replaced water, but, for the first time in pasta history, they had an equal billing. I closed my book. I hadn’t discovered the egg moment, but I had to be close. As they say in blindman’s bluff, I was getting warm.

  Then I had a thought: I should write the secretary of the pasta museum in Rome, Amelia Giarmoleo. She would know. We’d been in touch before, and I cursed myself for not having written earlier.

  “Gentile Signora Amelia Giarmoleo,” I began, in an e-mail entitled “Domanda urgente”—urgent question. When did the egg replace water in pasta dough? I summarized my findings: nothing in the fourteenth century, a little egg white in the fifteenth, and then, toward the end of the sixteenth, this almost eggy moment in Scappi. When did pasta go all-egg? Who was the first?

  A reply arrived three days later. Signora Giarmoleo didn’t know. She put the question to her colleagues. They didn’t know. She did not know who had first used the egg.

  She didn’t know? She runs the pasta museum. How can she not know? And why didn’t she say, “I don’t know but I’m going to keep looking”? Could she receive a question of this magnitude and abandon it because she didn’t have the answer to hand? I didn’t understand: How can you run a pasta museum and not be interested in the first eggy pasta?

  WHEN I WAS finally permitted to roll out the dough, I tore it.

  “Ha!” Betta cack
led. “You did a Mario!” (Hai fatto un Mario!) Doing a Mario was tearing the sfoglia, the rectangular sheet you make the dough into. “When Mario was here,” Betta explained, “he was in such a rush to learn how to make pasta he always tore it.” Betta took over, pressing my torn pasta back together with her thumb and forefinger, and rapidly rolling over the injured dough with her matterello. “Mario,” Betta added with undisguised pride, “was not very good at pasta.”

  “Mario,” Mark whispered to me, “would almost certainly disagree.” Mark was now with me in the kitchen, having secured his slave visa. As Mario had predicted, Gianni knew somebody who knew somebody who owed someone a favor. Because Mark was going to be in Italy for a long time, he let me do the first pasta lessons on my own. I had given myself three weeks. I had a week left.

  The second time I was permitted near the pasta, I was left alone with it for several minutes, rolling a sheet around the matterello like a jelly roll and unrolling it, back and forth, over and over again, something I’d always regarded as a pastry-chef trick and one I never believed I’d live long enough to do. In my limited experience with dough, I hadn’t succeeded in doing any tricks. The dough usually stuck to my hands, to the board, to the rolling pin, to itself. But here I was, rolling up dough on a matterello and unrolling it. I don’t think I ever felt so cool. I was so caught up in my revelry—already making an imaginary video of myself, rolling and unrolling, determined not to tear the sfoglia, not wanting to do a Mario—that I failed to notice that Betta had folded her arms across her chest in disapproval.

  “You look like an old woman,” she said. She hit me, smacking a shoulder. “Why are you behaving like an old woman? You don’t have old woman’s arms. You will never learn how to make pasta if you roll it out like an old woman.” She sighed, took the matterello, and attacked the pasta with vigor, until it was so thin you could see the board underneath. She stepped back and pointed to the sheet.

  “See?”

  “I see,” I said and made a promise: I will not be an old woman.

  By now I knew what to do—I had watched Betta enough to understand the principle—but I kept having trouble with the implementation. The principle was that the dough needed to be stretched as thin as you could make it, and, once it had reached that condition of thinness, you made it thinner. In fact, the principle was that you would never be able to make it thin enough, a daunting prospect, like a mathematical problem involving infinity, and you stopped rolling it only when you couldn’t do any more. The whole enterprise, once I’d ceased being an old woman, turned out to be surprisingly physical, and I was in a sweat by the end. There were additional anxieties—like doing a Mario at the last second and ruining everything. After so much huffing and puffing, the dough, even mine, got pretty thin (which you want), but it was also very easy to tear (which you don’t want), and if it tears when it’s so thin it’s impossible to repair, and you have to throw the torn bit away, unless it’s a big tear, and then you throw away the whole thing.

  “I will never make it thin enough,” I confessed to Betta. I was trying to be witty. “Air!” I declaimed. “Why go to all this trouble to make air?” The conceit was Betta’s wanting a pasta so thin it consisted of only air, but the sentence I intended wasn’t the one I uttered. I don’t know what I said. By now, I’d completed all the language classes offered at the Scuola Italiana in Greenwich Village, but my Italian was a pretty fragile achievement, and this exchange was one of my first conversations without my wife nearby to rescue me. Why did I think my Italian was so good I could make jokes?

  Betta looked at me blankly. Then she cackled uproariously and turned to Mark. “Che pazzo dialogo!” she said. What crazy speech! “Who knows what will come out of his mouth?”

  But Mark had no idea what she was saying, which was, of course, that she had no idea what I was saying. “Che?” he said. “Cosa?” “Sometimes,” he whispered to me, “I have no idea what Betta is saying.”

  We were a curious threesome. By now we were spending every day gathered round Betta’s pasta board. It was large—square, almost four feet across—and a crafted object, made of pieces of inlaid wood, designed, I assumed, to produce that grainy-in-the-mouth feel. Underneath was a strip of wood. This was like an anchor—it fit against the edge of a table—and kept the board from sliding. It was also covertly used to keep the dough from moving as well. This was a pasta maker’s secret and the most important lesson I learned from Betta. The trick was in the strategic use of your belly: by positioning a flap of dough over the edge of the board—just a couple of inches—you ended up pressing against it when you rolled it out, squishing it and holding it in place. This made it easier to stretch your pasta. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, it was one of those finesse maneuvers that wasn’t so easy for me to master. The problem was my belly, which was otherwise being subjected to an ambitious culinary education—many pedagogical plates of pasta had been deposited inside in it, what I regarded as a program of tummy tutorials—and it had grown a little unwieldy. Or else I just wasn’t accustomed to using it to cook with. Initially, much pasta was maimed. Actually, most of it just dropped to the floor, having been cleaved against the edge of the cutting board from the slam-bam force of my body as I tried to roll the whole thing out to its impossible thinness.

  You don’t have to have a board with a stopper. Scappi didn’t use one. He made his pasta on a long table but the operation involved two people. One person rolled it out, leaving a bit of the sheet over the table edge, Betta’s trick, and the other held on to it from the other side, stretching it further. You also don’t need a matterello, although I’m pleased I own one, big enough to be used by two people at once, like playing piano with four hands. I purchased it at a Saturday market in Porretta, when I returned later in the summer (pasta, according to Betta, could be learned only in installments), on a memorably damp morning of oppressive humidity. By evening it had gathered itself into a ferocious five-hour thunderstorm and canceled a festa Gianni had planned to inaugurate the pizzeria’s summer season, with live music, outdoor grilling, and hundreds of paying diners. Days of preparation went for nought, which confirmed for Betta the fickleness of life there and her belief that, in this part of Italy, nothing is ultimately in your control. (Its history, I would learn, was a punishing roller coaster of good and bad fortunes. Even the modern prosperity of Porretta—building airplane parts in a rugged, inhospitable terrain, an unexpected bounty—had been a dictator’s whim and had arrived as fortuitously as it had then unexpectedly disappeared, as though a debt collected by the Devil.) The Appennines, Betta said, teach you a “mountain fatalism.”

  Sometimes I was struck by a sense of many people having learned all this before me—not an unpleasant feeling, akin to making a turn in an unknown landscape and discovering a horizon-filling view of natural beauty. The sensation was of being made wonderfully small. When Betta taught me how to make tagliatelle, the easiest of fresh pastas—you let the sheet dry for a few minutes, then roll it up like a paper towel and cut across with it a knife (tagliatelle means “little cut things”), shaking the noodles out afterwards, like so many strands of golden hair in a magic trick—I noticed that her phrasing was almost identical to words used by Scappi. “You let the sheet dry out, but not too dry,” she said—si asciuga ma non troppo. (“The sheet will be dry, but not too much,” Scappi writes—sarà asciutto però non troppo.) Have people been passing on the instructions, word for word, for five hundred years? Sometimes this sense expressed itself as so many ghosts looking over Betta’s shoulders. One day, she said she’d like to show me how to make tortellini—the region’s most famous pasta—but stopped herself. “You will tell Mario. Mario did not learn how to make tortellini when he was here.”

  “No, no, no,” I said, with a hearty butter-couldn’t-possibly-melt-in-my-mouth irony. “Of course I won’t tell Mario. Why would I do that?”

  “You will tell him. I know you will.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked hard at Be
tta. She wasn’t joking.

  The next day, Betta still had tortellini on her mind. They speak to her of Christmas, she said. That’s when you make them, and they are then cooked in a clear chicken broth, not in boiling water like a normal pasta. She will always associate tortellini with childhood. They were the first pasta she remembers being prepared.

  Betta comes from Vergato—a hill town twenty miles away, about halfway to Bologna—and grew up in an extended family of five women: Betta’s mother and her four aunts. Every December they gathered round a kitchen table and made the pasta, a warm, noisy convocation: banter, gossip, high hilarity, storytelling, the smells of food, a fire burning, everyone’s fingers busy. Making the tortellini, Betta said, was always social (she had been unprepared for the loneliness of a restaurant kitchen), and, as a child, she felt privileged when these older, cultivated women asked her to join their circle. She was twelve years old, and the tortellini she made were her first handmade pasta—no small feat. They are complex, tightly layered pieces of food sculpture, an achievement associated in Betta’s mind with bigger things: the city (Bologna), the region (her zona, the food like a flag of statehood), and becoming an adult. “My learning how to make pasta was learning how to be a grown-up and a woman.” Now, when she makes tortellini, her aunts come to mind: sometimes in the pasta-making lessons they taught her (one aunt prided herself on a pasta so thin you couldn’t eat it with a fork because it slipped through the tines) or in their preparations (another made tagliatelle so exquisitely delicate that they cooked the moment they hit hot water—“You drop them, you pull them out, they are ready”), but usually in fleeting images. The Christmas table, the sound of giggly laughter, their faces. They are now gone.