Introduction

When James Beard Award–winning author Laura Schenone undertakes a quest to retrieve her great grandmother’s recipe for ravioli, she finds herself on an unforgettable journey. Her original goal was simple enough: to learn to make an authentic old family dish. But things get more complicated as she reunites with relatives, digs up buried family stories, and finds conflicting ideas about the past and what is true. Schenone takes her readers from the gritty landscape of New Jersey’s industrial wastelands and its fast-paced suburbs to the dramatically beautiful coast of Liguria—homeland of her ancestors—with its rapturous pesto, smoked chestnuts, torte, and, most beloved of all, ravioli, the food of happiness and celebration. Finding her way into the kitchens of trattorias and legendary home cooks in Genoa, she discovers the persistent importance of place and offers a perceptive voice on ethnicity in its twilight. The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken is a story of the comedies and foibles of family life, of love and loss, of old homes and new—and of the mysteries of pasta, rolled on a pin into a perfect circle of gossamer dough.

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Excerpt

Roberto is dressed in chef whites standing at the pasta board near an open window that looks out to the hills. He’s evidently waiting for me.

“Piacere,” he offers, with a diffident smile. Roberto has intense blue eyes and a handsome face, mellowing into his forties. He does not speak English, but with six months more Italian under my belt, I understand nearly all he says. Not that this is really about words anyway. Roberto is a master pasta maker, and he has spent too many years bending over the pasta board for speeches. La Brinca is one of the rare restaurants that makes all pasta by hand anymore, so he’s a busy guy with a lot to do. He’s eager to get the demonstration under way. Already he’s opening a plastic bin to reveal several round loaves of pasta dough lined up—already kneaded, stretched, and rested, already supple and smooth as baby cheeks, ready for rolling.

I am disappointed to see the pasta dough is already made. How much water and egg did he use? How much moisture? How much kneading? And what did it feel like? After years of trying it myself, I know that with so few ingredients—flour, egg, water, and salt—the secret of pasta is in the proportions you use and how you handle it. Now all this work has already been done. Alas. There is no time for regrets. Before I know it Roberto is tossing a hunk of round dough onto the board and rolling his pin rapidly back and forth.

“Wait! Wait!” I cry. My video camera isn’t fully set up. “Please.” He indulges me and pauses while I adjust the equipment. I am a hunter this visit, determined to bag the footage.

Roberto resumes his energetic pace. The pin makes a thwonk as it falls on the dough, then Roberto’s arms move expertly, rolling it back and forth. His speed astounds me. Back and forth, back and forth, with force and determination. Lots of pasta to make. Every few minutes he snatches a handful of flour and showers it down abundantly over his dough to keep it from sticking.

“How often do you make pasta?” I inquire.

“Often enough.” He barely looks up, then adds, “Every two or three days: gnocchi, lasagne, tagliarini, tagliatelle, ravioli . . . ” He rattles off more names. His arms keep moving.

I pray my camera is working properly. It’s all happening so quickly. In just a few minutes, Roberto’s circle of dough is now doubled, perhaps tripled, in size—about fifteen inches in diameter. He’s ready for the next part. He lifts up the edge and begins wrapping it around his pin, showering down more flour all over the pasta. Now, here it comes—the pulling, the stretching, the shoosh shoosh shoosh slap of dough hitting the board. Each time he unrolls, he rotates the circle so as to stretch each side evenly. It is two feet wide. Then three feet. And now it is transformed into a large fluttering white sheet, a sail in the wind. It gets air before it hits the board. The slap grows louder, and the dough grows so big it exceeds the length of the rolling pin—hanging and draping and folding over the edges. I’d panic for sure. But for Roberto, no worries here. It never sticks or gets jammed up. He tosses out another handful of flour and just proceeds, calm and cool. Only when he’s got it, only when it’s all done, does he pause and look at me with a small half smile of satisfaction.

“Elastica,” he offers, holding the dough between his fingers for me to inspect the texture. “Molto delicata . . . sottile.”

If I were younger, if I were older, if I were without husband and children, I’d throw myself at his feet this very moment and beg him for a job. I’d offer to slave in this kitchen. Yes—elastic. Yes, delicate. Yes, thin.

The smile fades, and Roberto briskly picks up his sheet of dough and carries it to another work-top area, laid out with floured wax paper, and proceeds exactly as Giuseppina did when I’d seen her six months earlier in Lumarzo. This is the way nonnas do it. And so Roberto explains that it was his nonna who taught him how to make pasta, and that all the recipes of La Brinca come from home.

“How much water do you use in your flour?”

He laughs. “It depends on the day. It depends on the heat. It depends on the hands.” And he holds out his hand for me to see. “Each person has different hands. Different heat.”

Pasta circle ready. Next, the little glass bowl with foil on top. The foil is lifted to reveal a bright green fragrant mush—ripieno all prepared this morning—all secrets folded in, and buried in smooth green mystery.

“Meat?” I ask.

“No.” Roberto looks up, and shakes his head and smiles slyly. “No meat.” He wags a finger no.

“Prescinsêua?” I press on.

“No.” Again a shake of the head. A smile. “Non prescinsêua.”

Okay. I get the game. He will not give the recipe outright. But I can guess.

“Cheese?”

“Si,” he nods, conceding. “Parmigiano.”

Chard?

Si.

Egg?

Si.

In this way, I deduce that this filling is made of minced borrage and the chard called bietole. It is mixed with egg, and parmigiano. But the secret is really in the herbs.

“Wild herbs of the countryside,” Roberto adds, waving his hands in the air, one of those Italian hand gestures, to show the mysterious unspecificity of it all—just “wild.”

“And a little marjoram—not too much!” he is quick to add, but I believe this precision is theatric decoy. Any fool knows not to add too much of this perfumey herb. I also know that back at home in New Jersey, I will hunt high and low and grow my own borrage and bietole and search for wild and cultivated herbs. I will use leaves of purslane from the farmer’s market, parsley, dandelion leaves, spinach, and yes, marjoram. And it will never be like this. Never. Yes, I see it all before me.

“Herbs are the difference in Liguria.” He offers the same old theme I’ve heard before. “In Piedmont, they make ravioli. But they don’t have our herbs.”

He picks up a spatula and begins rapidly spreading ripieno in a smooth layer over his half moon of dough. The other sheet of dough gets sealed on top, and then comes the checkered rolling pin—just like Giuseppina did it. I tell Roberto I’ve seen all this in Lumarzo, “where all persons are Schenone.”

He nods, pleased. Yes, there are still families in these mountains that make pasta by hand, for Sundays or special occasions. His eyes light up. “Bella cosa.”

Yes, I agree. It’s a beautiful thing.

Now, Sergio returns to the kitchen, and I look at the two brothers together and think of my own father and his siblings and the struggle that defines family from the moment of birth. Most of the restaurants and food shops and farms I encounter here are based on family businesses with unending hours of work. Here at La Brinca, there can only be one brother in the front of the business. The others have to be in the kitchen or trenches. How to decide? How to keep the delicate balance of power so that each brother can succeed and be content, and so that the parts can add up to a whole?

In Italy, more than eighty percent of all businesses are family owned. And sure enough, every single food enterprise I visit here is a family enterprise. How do they succeed this way? I cannot help but wonder, coming from the experience I witnessed.

“We work all the time,” Sergio explains. “We each have a house across the street. We are here until one in the morning many nights. I don’t see my kids as much as I should. But I hope they will understand.”

Roberto doesn’t comment. He continues to demonstrate, showing me next how to make gnocchi, and then thin strands of wheat tagliarini. All the while, my camera is on. When he is done he goes back to the ravioli, still sitting on the board, imprinted with squares. Now it’s time to cut, and when Roberto does so, I see that a couple of ravioli break in the process.

“Made by hand,” he shrugs. “They’re not supposed to be perfect.”

Do I detect a little irony? The customers need to see some broken ones, some irregular shapes as proof that they are handmade? Nearly everything in our lives is mass produced now and uniform, never touched by human hands. Even people’s faces are starting to look the same with plastic surgery. Of course customers yearn for the handmade. Roberto knows it well.

The brothers give me a tray of the ravioli to take home. With only a miniscule amount of arm twisting, I gladly accept. That night, we boil the water and make a simple marinara sauce and sit at the Formica kitchen table, ladling out the ravioli into four bowls.

My husband takes a couple of bites and then begins shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Honey. But you and Lou have never even come close to this.”

It’s true. This pasta is lighter and so much softer than we’ve ever achieved. What is the secret of this lightness? Perhaps it’s the special fine grade of Italian 00 flour Roberto uses? Perhaps it is the drop of olive oil he told me he mixed into the dough? Or maybe it’s his hands. Or perhaps it was that part of the pasta making I missed—the ratio of liquid to flour to make a very soft dough but then having the skill to handle it so well without tearing. The filling is rich with cheese and egg, but subtle notes of bitter and sweet greens. Each rectangle is a gem, not only delicate but small. No doubt, these are the best ravioli I’ve tasted then or now.

And yet, as good as they are, I know that what is far more important than the fleeting beauty in my mouth is the video footage I’ve snagged of Roberto. No, I cannot leave behind my children to work in the kitchens of Liguria. Thank god for modern technology. I’ve got the tape hidden away in my bag for safe passage back home. I can watch again and again. Little does Roberto know, but he will be my tutor on the video screen in my kitchen at home. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. What is the significance of each of the three epigraphs at beginning of the book? How do they relate to the entire work separately and together?

2. Of her ravioli quest, Laura writes, “It began, as many journeys do, in a small way, with an inchoate yearning, a desire for something I only partly understood—perhaps just desire itself, hitting me amidst the sound of cars whooshing by my house on a busy suburban street. Desire rising up against my two sons asking for foods they could suck out of plastic tubes, for aqua blue cereals, for iridescent red strips of corn syrup—things that I am not certain can reasonably be termed ‘food’ but nonetheless are sold as such. Desire for an inner life where advertising could not reach.” Have you ever shared any of these feelings? What do you think Schenone is really searching for, and how does her quest change as her journey unfolds?

3. After reading this book, do you believe that recipes are worthy of attention in history? Do you have recipes in your family that are significant or that you can trace “back into history, further and further back, into an ancient past”?

4. Laura begins her book with a prologue called “Myths of Origin,” presenting a tale of a mason and a talking mushroom that somewhat resembles her own family story, except with a magical twist. Considering the role of myths in families and history, why do you think the author made this decision? How do mythologies work to enable and justify claims to heritage, land, and ethnicity?

5. Laura asks after she goes to Italy, “Can a person feel connected to a place he or she has never been to before? Is it possible that we have origins inside us?” Have you ever felt this way about a place?

6. Family takes many shapes in this book. How does Laura’s search for authentic ravioli relate to her family relationships? How does Schenone’s relationship with her father affect her search?

7. “Chestnut was like a brother,” says Sergio. “It’s a good brother because it’s yours. But like many brothers, you didn’t choose it. Like a brother, it might not be the best brother but the one you have. You have to preserve it and take care of it.” Some people, especially those in less developed parts of the world, feel a connection between themselves and the food they eat. Do you feel that way? Does modern life make it harder to be so connected?

8. The culinary historian Giovanni Rebora says to Laura, “We don’t worry so much about saving traditions. Traditions change all of the time. . . . We want to save the culture of food here.” What does he mean? Do you have any family traditions that have evolved over the years? What changes? What endures?

9. From Salvatore’s serenades to the final scenes of a tape of family members singing during holidays, music has an important place in the book. How does it relate to cooking and the act of storytelling?

10. In Italy Laura writes, “It amazes us the way nature and civilization intertwine here. We are envious of such a place—aware of the void we Americans have without lack of history and traditions. And yet, we know that too much tradition brings suffocation, and burdens.” How do you relate to the traditions you follow?

11. What is the role of religion and faith in the search for ravioli? Why does the book end with a Catholic confession? Does Laura think that forgiveness is possible?

12. The book ends with a question: “Could it be possible?” What is Laura referring to? In your opinion, was her quest and it’s many journeys successful? Did she find what she was looking for?

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