If you're in a place, #24: Pasta Nonnas

#24: Pasta Nonnas

If you’re in a place, download Quibi right now, sign up for the ad-free trial (it lasts 90 days; just remember to cancel it; OH and you can only watch on your phone, unfortunately), and watch all seven episodes of Shape of Pasta with Evan Funke, (head chef at Felix Trattoria in Venice).

On the show (which is only seven episodes that are only eight minutes each), Funke travels to different remote parts of Italy to learn how to make different rare, dying shapes of pasta, so he can bring back these shapes to his restaurant and pass them on to others, so he can continue to tell the stories of the people who make these pastas. The show has a very similar highly stylized vibe as two of my other favorite recent food documentary series Salt Fat Acid Heat and Taco Chronicles. So if you dug those, even more reason to check this one out.

Reconnecting with cooking over these last twenty-eight days has been a rare hopeful string to grab onto. When I moved out of my mother’s house for the first time when I was eighteen, I didn’t know how to cook anything. My mom didn't cook particularly delicious food when I was a kid, but the things she made will always have a place in my heart. By the time I was born, she was justifiably tired— from a life of work, raising my now grown siblings, dealing with the deterioration and eventual matrimonial loss of her partner of twenty-five years— and preferred cooking simple things she could throw together in fifteen minutes or so. She taught me these things. Ground beef hard shell tacos. Mexican rice. Taquitos with boiled chicken. Chorizo con huevo. Bologna con huevo. They weren’t necessarily traditional Mexican dishes, but they were, I know now, staples of any home with an exhausted Mexican mother.

Over the years, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by amazing cooks. The mother of a close friend in college taught me to make traditional Mexican salsas and dishes like chilaquiles. In grad school, Melanie taught me the simple pasta sauce recipes her mother taught her. And, a talented cook herself, she also taught me the recipes and tricks she picked up along the way. I researched and learned dishes on my own and even fell in love with baking.

I love people who love food. I love feeding people. I love to sit, tired, at a table with people I love and smile as they eat something I spent hours preparing for them. Very few things give me that level of joy. I have a rolodex of memories of people around my table. Bowls of soup. Meatballs. Groups of friends, sometimes blended. Guacamole. Korean barbecue taken hot off the grill and served to my comadre for her birthday. The first time I cooked for my best friend at my house, and she watched every move, from cutting to serving.

Food memories are transferable. They can be shared in ways that other memories can’t. When I cook Melanie’s red sauce, I am remembering each time she made it for me and our friends. Each time I made it for others. And I am remembering memories that aren’t even mine. The memories of the people to whom I’ve passed that recipe onto. And they will, in turn, pass on those recipes and flavors and smells to the people that they love.

In this fun video where Evan Funke teaches us how to make handmade pasta, he says:

There’s no better way to put it. Cooking and sharing food is sharing stories across generations, so those stories can then be handed to those we will one day be the ancestors of.

I miss cooking and eating with the people I love so much right now. I miss sharing food and conversation and wine. But, somehow, cooking, even just for myself right now, feels like some small way to reconnect with all of those people and all of the times we loved each other.