Pasta in Italy

 

For as many times as I've expressed my Sicilian heritage I've never actually made pasta from scratch before, I have made Empanadas from scratch a few times for a reason that still hurts to think about, but that's neither here nor there. 

Anyway, It was tons of fun. Not life changing but certainly fun, the type of fun that one has when they learn a new skill like how to work a chainsaw or how to caramelize a Crème Brule. 

It also puts into perspective the amount of work and effort it used to take to make a simple pasta dish. Peasants in the 17th century did not have access to Barilla, they had to make every noodle by hand. Which either shows the love of mothers in Italy or the absolute state of boredom they were stuck in to spend this much time making dough into hundreds of different shapes. 

Why am I writing about this you might ask? I'm not gonna lie, I don't know. It seems like there's something here but i can't quite find what that thing is. Ya know? Like there has to be some universal truth that applies to all Italians that is hiding under the surface. 

What is it though? Maybe the labor of love from mother to child. Maybe the Italian way of making things overly artistic and fancy. Maybe its just food and I'm trying to hard to read into it. Maybe If we throw the pasta dough at the wall it will reveal some universal mathematical equation, like some absurd form of divination... Actually don't do that, you'll just make your walls dirty. 

I think the large amount of effort that Italians were putting into making pasta is indicative of one thing. That they really love food and their family and so the exercise probably doesn't seem as much of a chore to them as it does to me.

Alright to be fair, I did eat at a tiny backroom restaurant in Florence that was all home made daily and I could taste the love and care put into each noodle. It was like being hugged by a 75 year old Italian chef. I could probably learn something from this about how its not what you do but how you do it, or that effort is the true measure of love not outcome, but ill probably still buy the box stuff and just keep Italian pasta as a happy memory.