Pasta for Two
Looking for a different way to celebrate a romantic evening? Impress your partner with a homecooked Italian heirloom dish from Pellegrino Artusi.
At first glance, Italian food and Filipino food seem as far away from each other as the North Pole and the South Pole. But if you look closer, you will see that they share one very important thing: At their very hearts, both cuisines come from the home. More often than not, the best Filipino food is cooked by someone’s mother, or grandmother, or aunt, or uncle, or cousin, sometimes from a recipe that has been passed from person to person. Filipino food, at its best, is fresh, seasonal, and cooked simply using the best local ingredients available. Italian food is the same way.
One of the most definitive reference books on Italian home cooking is Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, written and self-published by Pellegrino Artusi in 1891. Since then, the collection of 790 home cooking recipes, collected from home cooks all over Italy, has been reprinted again and again. It is considered a wonderful example, not only of Italian food and culture but also a social commentary of Italian life during that period.
Today, there is also Casa Artusi in Forlimpopoli, in the EmigliaRomana region of Italy. Dedicated to Italian home cooking, it has a library, restaurant, cooking school, and museum. Even better, and much closer to home, there is Casa Artusi Philippines—a collaboration with Marga
rita Fores and the very first Asian offshore campus.
I attended a Casa Artusi Philippines cooking class late last year and, among other things, discovered that making fresh pasta isn’t quite as easy as it looks. The event was called “A Tale of Two Chefs” and brought over Casa Artusi’s Carla Brigli
adori to conduct cooking classes. Carla is a Marietta, a title Casa Artusi gives to women and men who are members of the Associazione delle Mariette. They are dedicated to promoting home cookery and gastronomic traditions. They teach practical courses, working alongside the cooking school’s students and drawing on their own home cooking experiences. The title is a tribute to Marietta
Sabatini, Artusi’s longtime home cook who tested the recipes in the book.
The best thing about the class was that more than just demonstrating recipes, Carla (with Margarita as interpreter) shared the whys and hows of the recipes, dropping little nuggets of Artusi’s culinary wisdom along the way. Artusi wasn’t a professional chef. He was a foodie—like a lot of us. His advice on cooking a good meal is probably the same advice our mothers or grandmothers gave us. First, practice is the best of all teachers. Second, cook with passion. Third, always cook with the best ingredients you can find. Carla also told us to interpret recipes based on the way we cook. It’s hard to do that when you are just beginning to cook, and a recipe is your lifeline. But with practice, you learn what you can and can’t do, and you develop your own personal way of interpreting a recipe and making it your own.
I’m not going to talk about making fresh pasta because, frankly, my efforts during the hands- on segment of the class were a spectacular failure. It is truly amazing, though, how two ingredients—100 grams of flour and one large egg (In the Philippines, we are better off using duck eggs rather than chicken eggs, Carla says)— can come together to make one of the most sublime in the world of food, pasta. With lots and lots of practice, I understand, one can make pasta as effortlessly as Carla did. In less than half an hour, she demonstrated how to mix and roll the dough, and made 12 different pasta shapes by hand! Instead, let me share with you one of the very simple, but absolutely delicious pasta sauce recipes included in the handout that all the students received. This is exactly as the recipe appears in Artusi’s cookbook. It’s a great recipe if you’re planning to cook at home for Valentine’s Day! The comments in italics are Carla’s tips for the recipe. Casa Artusi Philippines will be holding more classes this year. www.casartusiphilippines.com
‘At their very hearts, both Filipino and Italian cuisines come from the home.’