Maltagliati
Maltagliati are the small, irregular scraps that are left after pasta dough is rolled out and the shapes are cut and formed.
Every mistake should be an opportunity to learn something.
If you are preparing a meal and something doesn’t turn out as you expected, you either had a bad recipe or learned something.
Often what you regret most in life are the things that you could have done but didn’t do.
I have several meters of shelves devoted to cookbooks. They are often the source of my reading before turning out the light. Cookbooks have been the standard gifts to give me along with aprons, baking tins, knives, and diverse kitchen utensils. I suppose as well as they fuel one of my hobbies, the givers might expect a culinary return on their investments.
“What goes in your mouth is more important than what comes out,” my mother said, correcting one of my unruly brothers at the table. Eat!
A friend from Emilia Romagna, the home of the filled pasta that is one of their signature dishes and is eaten in a thin broth, said, "only barbarians eat tortellini in tomato sauce."
I guessed that anyone caught overcooking pasta in Italy, would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
If you are not adept at small talk, but still want to break a silence, ask an Italian a question about food, any food.
Looking at the two sorts of pasta that were being served, I longed for the metabolism of my teens.
We were sitting around the table looking at the menu, deciding what toppings we’d like. A dinner companion, who was worried about her weight, ordered a salad and water. She took up the menu again. Her expression said, “I’d rather be fat,” as she called back the waiter and ordered a Quatro Stagione and a beer.
The table is more than a piece of inanimate furniture. It’s an organic, dynamic center of the Italian culture and can be a metaphor for life.
I was looking over her shoulder while she was making risotto, slowly, pouring and mixing a little broth at a time with the rice. Coming from the coast she said, "It is ready when the rice slides down the sides of the pot like waves lapping the shore.”
There are such beautiful encounters between language and food. A friend commenting on the light snow that had fallen in the night, said, "It was like a sprinkling of parmesan on pasta."
There is a Calabrian proverb “you don’t know a person until you eat a kilo of salt with them.” The saying can be explained by the fact that when you salt a plate of food, you use only a few grams at a time. One kilo is a thousand grams.
Regarding the Italian preferences regarding food, as in Zen Philosophy, simplicity is at the core. I asked a friend, who is an adept and experienced cook, what her favorite meal was. “A sun warmed tomato from my garden, with a drizzle of good olive oil on a slice of fresh bread. “It doesn’t have to be more complicated,” she said.
The Italians knew about shoes and food. When there was salsa left on the plate you broke a piece of bread and wiped it clean. They called that “fare la scarpetta,” make the little shoe. A friend told me that the expression originated in a time when people were so hungry that they could eat the souls of their shoes. “Fare la scarpetta” was a ritual and an essential part of cucina povera: enjoy the meal, don’t waste anything, but it was frowned upon by the more refined.
Our lives are like a soup made from what we have in our cabinets and refrigerators - a little bit of this and a little bit of that - some happiness, some sadness, some good, some bad, opposites that in the best of cases give life balance, like spices that complement each other.
Fine dining is a privilege you pay for. You know it when you see it: small portions on large dishware decorated with a sprig of this and a squiggle of that, with elaborate descriptions that border on the ludicrous. Italians are people with large appetites. I’ve seen restaurants with fashionably square plates and small portions, and they are not so popular.
We were eating dinner in a hill village at the base of the high Apennines. Three floors below us, a neighbor walked by and heard the meal-time chatter from the open balcony doors. He called up to us, “I baked bread this morning, I’ll come up with a loaf.”
More than once, I’ve eaten lunch in a restaurant where there has been a birthday celebration. My friends and I have been invited to join in the birthday song, and afterwards the celebrants have shared their cake and goodwill.
I’m old enough to remember how meat, poultry, fruit, and vegetables used to taste, before industrial agriculture found monoculture more profitable.
What affects the sense of taste? Essential ingredients are mood, hunger, company, and presentation.
I grow tomatoes every summer, just to remember what tomatoes used to taste like.
If an Italian cut themselves while cooking, a squirt of tomato juice will come out before the blood.
I often cook for my friends who are political liberals and humanists, but gastronomically conservative. I’ve often said that if you cook for them, you need to have a lot of confidence in your abilities, or a good portion of self-deception.
What I lacked in culinary education, I made up for with ample portions of curiosity and inquisitiveness, mixed in with some aptitude.
I’m not quite sure if you can serve Italians a meal without a pasta dish. After all these years, when I’ve prepared a dinner with rice or another starch, I sometimes wonder if my guests eat some pasta when they get home.
I asked a Vasto vintner who had recently returned from California’s Napa Valley, what he thought about the wines that were produced there. Knowing that I was born in the U.S., he said diplomatically, in case I might feel some loyalty, “I suppose you could get used to them.”
I felt at times that I needed the stimulation, challenge, and even the stress and adrenalin rush of cooking for twenty discerning Italians.
Food is a catalyst that not only nurtures but binds people together and stimulates friendship. A friend said to me that the dinner table is the best place to educate and foster your children.
We all have a dish that reminds us of a person, a place, or someone we love.
We were the working poor, before there was a name for people on our end of the economic ladder, but we never went hungry. Somehow there was food for the day’s meals, and somehow, always something for the next.
My Mom said, “everyone can eat but only a few can cook.” Okay Mom, I won’t mention the gelatinous oatmeal that I scraped into the trash when you turned your back, but your meatloaf made up for it.
Knowing that we were leaving for home the next day, a friend said with a smile, "you know that the Italian border police ask every departing traveler if they have taken proper leave of their friends and families. If they hadn't, they had to return home and do it before they were allowed to leave the country.”
“Is there anything you don’t like about Italy,” he asked? “Yes,” I answered, “leaving it!