The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken by Laura Schenone

Author:Laura Schenone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Esoteric

YOU’VE GOT TO BE kidding me,” mutters Lou. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Laura, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

We are standing in his kitchen, and he has his nose in the bag of Franca’s chestnut flour, which I have brought directly to his kitchen. It is ours to share, and we’ve got a lot of gnocchi to make. I have also brought him Franca’s light golden olive oil, and a bag of dried Genoese porcini, so big and white they seem almost fresh.

So begin our gnocchi forays. Hot potatoes, riced, then spread out on a tray to cool.

We try it with egg. We try it without. We try it with hard flour. We try it with soft flour. We try it with a combination of soft and hard. We want light dumplings. We try and try again until we get it. We roll out ropes of dough and argue over size. (Lou makes his bigger. I like them small.) After we cut them into little pieces, we imprint them so they can catch sauce. Lou likes his imprinted with the tines of a fork. I like mine with a thumbprint—as I had at La Brinca.

And we fuss over how much egg. Lou will not give up the egg. But I see that in my old Genoese cookbooks, there are no eggs. So I hold out, though this kind of dough is much harder to work.

We share the results with our spouses and kids, who like them all just fine and give us their votes until they can stand gnocchi no more. Only when we have the basic recipe down do we try replacing half the flour with Franca’s ethereal chestnut. Our favorite, of course. We cover it with pesto that Lou’s wife, Susan, made the previous summer and froze for future occasions. Beautiful, all of it.

But there is a serious problem. I have only brought back one ten-ounce bag of flour. This precious stuff won’t last forever.

We begin calling specialty shops, but there is no such thing as smoked chestnut flour here in New Jersey or even in New York. We have found unsmoked chestnut flour in a local supermarket, but we don’t like this very much at all.

Lou goes up to the ethnic market in nearby Paterson where the neighborhoods are poorer, the streets more dangerous, but the food more full of variety and quirks and life on account of the many immigrants living there. He locates some dried chestnuts in a market and calls me by cell phone, as though on a military mission, to let me know of his success. Back at home, he soaks them until they are tender, cooks them on the stove for about a half hour, then runs them through a meat grinder. They come out something like dry potatoes. (And now it’s easy to see how, when the potato came from America to northern Italy, Ligurians quickly and vigorously embraced it. Yes, they were hungry and potato gives a high yield, but also its mealy texture must have reminded them of the chestnut they had lived with forever.

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