A few days ago I finished reading The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. If you'll pardon the pun, I practically devoured it night after night before falling asleep dreaming of exquisite homemade pasta and nebulous family histories.
More than a cookbook, almost an ethnography of one family through food, Laura Schenone is at turns funny, passionate, vulnerable and single-minded in her pursuit of something tangible (and edible) to cull from her family history. The result is a memoir of sorts told through the visceral senses of the hands, mouth and stomach.
It's the kind of book that you talk about at the breakfast table, and so Daniel was intrigued by my descriptions of homemade pasta and made it clear that he wanted to make AND EAT some pasta from scratch.
We were going to do this on Sunday. But when I arrived home from work on Saturday, I found that they couldn't wait, and had made their own version of the ephemeral delicacies Schenone describes in the book.
Ephemeral was not a word you would use for the pasta they created.
Daniel came up with his own word for it:
Knuckelsta
As in, "I made it by pounding the dough with my knuckles!"
Honestly, their creation looked more closely related to spaetzle,(tasty in its own right) than to anything Ms. Schenone went in search of in her journeys through the Italian landscape of her ancestors.
But Daniel ate it.
Proud of his accomplishment, and the work it took to make the food that satisfied his hunger.
I was disappointed to be left out of the creation process. After all, I was the one who had read and talked about the book. I had put the notion into their heads.
But as my husband noted,
It was better that I wasn't at home to witness the boundless glee (and accompanying mess) that Daniel brought to the pasta board.
Perhaps though, when no one else is at home, I will try my hand at making some pasta myself.
And now, my husband is busy reading the book himself.
