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tradition and immigration and food and memory. Rather than wait for our stars to properly align, I jumped the gun one recent weekend and set myself to the task of learning to make pasta from scratch. I’ll confess now that when I see “housemade” pasta on a restaurant menu, I order it more often than not. I know it’s not a guarantee that the dish will be good. Still, I think the chances are better than average that a kitchen that makes its own pasta probably takes similar care with its sauces and pasta fillings. Once I stayed in a cold-water- only hotel in Nosy Be, Madagascar. The rude awakening I got taking my cold shower was balanced with the equal and opposite intensity I felt when I heard the cook running dough through the hand-crank pasta machine. I was not disappointed. All of my meals at that place were excellent. And really, who needs hot showers when you can have fresh pasta? I had had experience watching pasta being made. While I was writing my book, Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans , Kamili Hemphill and Jackie Blanchard, two chef friends, created pasta recipes for me, and I watched — and even helped a little — as they prepared the dough. I hardly considered myself an expert. Though I had the recipes from my book as well as others, I took to YouTube for step-by-step instruction. I was scared at first. I have a mixed record when it comes to the art of mixing flour and moisture. After a day spent practicing my technique, I mastered biscuit making. But even after a lesson from a pastry chef at Brigtsen’s Restaurant, I have never managed to turn out a pie crust I’m happy with. Pasta dough is very different from biscuit or pie dough, of course. Still, I feared that my pasta efforts From the Italian grandmother who could barely speak inglese, to the would-be YouTube culinary stars, to the folks from America’s Test Kitchen , I watched cook after cook explain that making your own pasta is easy. It can be made with as few as two ingredients (flour and water), and even more elaborate recipes seldom call for more than five (flour, water, salt, eggs and olive oil). The hard- est question a cook has to answer is what sort of flour and moistening agents to use. Durum wheat is the one usually used to make pasta. It is a hard, winter wheat and contains more proteins and gluten than soft wheat flour. Semolina flour made from durum wheat holds its shape particularly well when molded into pasta shapes. Flour graded 00 in the parlance of Italian millers is particularly fine and light, and some people think it adds a silky texture to noodles made with it. But many might fall short. Enter YouTube.

t hadn’t occurred to me to ask Laurel Porcari whether her father had ever chased her grandfather around the back- yard with an axe. I had met the younger Mr. Porcari and, frankly, he didn’t seem like the type. But when an old-world Italian father confronts the values of his born-in-the-USA son, occasional differences of opinion are bound to surface, if not erupt. The values in conflict had to do with optimal land use. Mr. Porcari, padre, was of the opinion that the purpose of land was to grow food. Mr. Porcari, figlio, thought his father should not come over to his Yonkers, New York home and chop down a tree in his backyard to make more room for eggplants and bell peppers. To make his point, he picked up the axe his father had been using and threatened to do to the old man what the old man had attempted to do to the tree. I imagine the same sort of disagreements have taken place over St. Augustine grass — albeit without the threat of violence — among generations of Ninth Ward residents newly arrived from rural Louisiana and, more recently, among Vietnamese New Orleanians. “What is the purpose of a front lawn?” I imagine the elders asking. “We are not cows. Why do we need to grow grass?” I called Laurel to ask about a slightly different sort of generational divide. Still, it was related to food and space. Though born in New York, Laurel, a glass artist, has been a resident of the Crescent City for more than 20 years. Once while I was visiting her Magazine Street studio she recalled the days when her maternal grandmother, Angelina DiCapri Paglianti, would make pasta and ravi- oli in her small Bronx apartment. A large extended family of kids and cousins required a lot of ravioli. Angelina, who was born in Mola di Bari, Italy, developed her own method of using available space for food production. “It was a very small apartment, and they would make the pasta in the kitchen,” recalls Porcari. “So the kitchen table had flour all over it. She would put the completed ravioli on a floured pan, take them into the bedroom and put them down an ironed white sheet. “She would put them all down in a grid. Because they were handmade, they had lots of imperfections. She didn’t use any kind of ravioli molds, but they were still roughly the same size.” Laurel and I conceived of a grand artistic project wherein she would make glass art inspired by the ravioli on her grandmother’s sheets, and I would write an essay about

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