A Life Measured in Pasta

I’m half Sicilian, so pasta was never going to be optional. In my family, it wasn’t a food so much as a fact of life, like weather, or furniture.

But heritage only explains so much. Here’s what I’ve noticed: pasta doesn’t just run in my family. It follows me. It has turned up at nearly every age I’ve been, usually in a bowl, often in excess, and if you line those moments up end to end, they start to look a lot like a life.

The spaghetti photos

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There’s a series of photos my parents took of me as a toddler, eating spaghetti with red sauce.

In the first one, I’m clean. Sweet, even. A small person with a small bowl, regarding it with what look like very good manners.

The photos go the way these photos always go. The sauce advances. The manners don’t survive.

By the last one, I’m smothered. Face, hands, hair. I don’t look like a child who has eaten lunch. I look like something that has brought down an animal on the open plain and would like you to know about it. I look victorious.

I don’t remember any of it. All I have is a handful of frames someone else chose, in an order that tells a story. Clean, then not. Sweet, then triumphant. I believe all of it.

Too much pasta, at all hours

My mother has never once made the right amount of pasta.

She makes too much. Always. More noodles than sauce, a small mountain of them, and then the scramble to hide the extra before my dad could see it.

He hated it. He also laughed at it, both at once, at her years-long, unfixable inability to measure, which may be the most honest description of a marriage I know.

She doesn’t keep normal pasta hours, either, if there is such a thing.

My mother has been known to make pasta at 5 a.m., for an early breakfast. At 11 p.m., for a midnight snack. I don’t mean warming up leftovers. I mean multiple pots. I mean cans of tomatoes, opened before sunrise, as if this were a perfectly reasonable thing to do at that hour.

To her, it is. There’s something about a kitchen at those hours, the house asleep, the window dark, the water just starting to move in the pot, that makes pasta feel less like a meal and more like company.

Lunch at Nonna’s

If my mother couldn’t measure, my nonna could do nothing else.

She lived within walking distance of my grade school, so for a while, lunch was at her house. She made a small noodle, usually anelli, the little rings, dressed with olive oil, Parmigiano Reggiano and cracked pepper. That was the whole recipe.

Written down, it doesn’t look like much. Three ingredients and a pot of water. People wait for the rest of the recipe. There is no rest of the recipe.

What made it hers was the amounts, which were always exactly right, the oil just enough to coat each ring and no more, the cheese just enough to cling, the pepper just enough to make itself known, all of it measured by some private arithmetic she never explained and I never thought to ask about, because I was a child, and children don’t ask how things are made. They assume things simply are.

Cacio e pepe, and a fridge I didn’t need

As a young adult, I set out to learn cacio e pepe.

If you’ve never made it, cacio e pepe is pasta, cheese, black pepper and a splash of the starchy water the pasta cooked in. It’s simple to describe and hard to get right. The cheese and the water have to come together into something silky, and if you rush it, the whole thing seizes into grainy clumps, and there’s nothing in the bowl to hide behind.

I learned. I made it so often that the cheese stopped needing the fridge. It never stuck around long enough to need one.

I’d like to say this was about technique. It was mostly about appetite.

My son’s first pasta

My son’s first pasta was rotini with pesto.

I want to be precise about this. He didn’t eat it. He demolished it, and I suspect he did it faster than I did my own toddler pasta dishes.

Pesto is from the north. Rotini aren’t especially Sicilian, either. None of this concerned him in the slightest.

Watching him, I thought about the photos, and the mountain of extra noodles, and my nonna’s rings, and the cheese that never saw the fridge. It felt like the same moment, arriving again in a smaller body, with a different sauce.

Nobody taught him this. I’m not sure anybody taught me.

So I drew pasta

I drew pasta, and I told myself it was about shape and colour.

It wasn’t.

It was about a toddler with sauce in her hair, and a pot big enough for twice the people, and a walk to lunch, and a block of cheese, and a boy with a bowl he finished first.

Pasta has followed me my whole life. Now it’s following him.

– Daniella