May 2021: PASTA BY PROFESSION
Kahlil Gibran once remarked, “Work is love made visible.” How befitting this quote has lent and bared its truth to purpose-driven home cooking! An outpouring of effort in preparation, whether menial or intricate, elevates the food to tasting beyond personal expectations. Likewise, love justifies and motivates kitchen labor, bringing meaning, pleasure, and a sense of accomplishment to the dining table.
The May 2021 theme on pasta never fails to touch closely with culinary work being the emblazoned love served on the table. Pasta dishes are a labor of love whether offered to oneself or extended unto others. Also, half of their Italian nomenclature system in the cookery catalog even derives from traditional professions across the segregated pre-Victor Emmanuel II dukedoms. Bearing these observations in mind, I have always stuck to the belief that if cultural appreciation of Italian gastronomy needs to be taken seriously much like our ideal views on work and love, the foundation must begin on understanding the roots of career names in pasta and respecting each of their authenticities.
A noteworthy presence of titular lines of work in the name deepens the cultural, historical, and geographical narrative of pasta cookery in Italy. Some grant a specific tinge of regional identity that either the cooks based within the gastronomic locale can only bring out the best interpretation due to the inherited legacies from their ancestors or these dishes cannot be found elsewhere outside of their provenance. Other labels stem from the increasingly stringent codification of Italian cuisine to the hyperbolic extent that certain ingredients of a particular dish have transcended into divine emblems associated with the glorification of hard-working laborers in the modern culinary lexicon.
Pasta recipes, when taken as a broad and simple subject in food and cooking, can be so cliché, but intertwining half of its roster with unsung tales of satiation from different Italian professions, whether extant or obsolete, whether taboo or normative, adds a layer of complexity almost everyone has taken for granted. Through our efforts of faithful retelling and appreciating these stories, we make our love of pasta more visibly rich and profound.
