02. Be a fool
Balance. How much is enough? How much is too much? How are we to know?
Gnocchi. Specifically, gnocchi di patate. A potato and flour dough rolled into dumplings, boiled briefly then bathed in a sauce, it is one of the simplest of dishes. Or is it?
The ingredients are few but the variables are many. A potato is not just a potato (golden, red, Idaho, blue, freshly harvested or in a sack for months: they are not the same). How ‘wet’ is it, how dense? The flour: is it fine or rough milled? And if you’ve got all the windows open on a muggy afternoon in your small house less than a mile from a mountain lake, this too must be factored in. Quantities given in recipes are only approximate suggestions. Ada concedes as much.
Her advice for its preparation is filled with an amalgam of melodic, sparkling verbs. One after another they pop:
Lessare - Sbucciare - Schiacciare - Lasciare - Impastare - Amalgamare - Rotolare
In English, the action reads like a jump rope chant:
Boil
Peel
Squish
Leave
Kneed
Combine
Roll
Of utmost importance, Ada concludes, is an abbondanze di condimento (a good amount of sauce!).
THE TABLE WAS RECTANGULAR, maybe 30 inches deep, 70 inches long, collapsible with heavy metal legs, a white laminate top. White: an absence of color, a purity on which all possibility could be born. Originally purchased as a work surface for my father-in-law, an artist, it had over the years inspired the creation of numerous watercolor paintings. The table, folded flat, was wonderfully portable, and it travelled with us from the D.C. suburbs to two apartments in Germany, and then on to Italy where it was, somewhat unlikely I think now, set up in our kitchen.
It was late summer, uncomfortably hot and muggy. The doors leading from the tiled kitchen to a small front porch were open wide. No air flowed, but there were the flies: beefy buggers that thrived in the lakeside village of Sangiano where nearly every residence had a small garden of vegetables and fruit trees, and some had chicken coops, rabbit sheds, and horse barns.
I was seven months pregnant; my daughter, Sophia, two months from turning two. Good friends from Germany were staying with us in our small house for the week.
And I had decided to try to make gnocchi.
Strewn across the table were flour and boiled potato in various stages of combination. I had a recipe. How hard could it be?
I’d weighed the potatoes, boiled them, put them through a potato ricer. I blended the potatoes with the flour, and I had... glue. The recipe I was working with said to add more flour until I had a dough (but what kind of dough?). I did, and the glue firmed up but was no longer elastic.
I’d made double the quantity knowing Sophia would be helping. She stood on a chair on the opposite side of the table, her dolly, Big Baby, propped on a stool beside her, its oversized head (the doll itself was half Sophia’s height) flopped on a mound of hardening gnocchi pat-a-cakes. A cup of loose flour placed in the center of the table had found its way onto Sophia’s clothes, into her blond hair, and pretty much all over the kitchen floor.
Debating whether or not to start over—cooking a fresh pot of potatoes—I rolled out what I had, sliced it into small dumplings, and dropped a few into the boiling water.
Was there music playing? I think not. I remember only Sophia’s clear voice, speaking alternately to me and to her dolly, kneading dough with a fervor, rolling and shaping her patties, completely alive in the process, the embodiment of serene contentedness.
I, though, was battling the flies, a thickening perspiration clinging to my face and neck, and my neighbor’s cat (one of eleven) who’d slunk in and was now rubbing his hot fur against my hot legs. Every minute or so he freed a low, disturbing meow-howl.
A few months earlier, we’d driven across Italy to my grandmother’s brothers who lived in a farming village north of Venice. Zio Paolo asked what I wanted to eat. Gnocchi! I said. When Paolo cooked, instinct and inspiration were his guides. His hands were his measuring cups; an internal balance was his scale. The gnocchi were finished in no time, with no mess. They were sublime. The process seemed easy. It was, to him. He’d been making gnocchi for sixty years.
Into the kitchen dusted with flour walked Erwin, one of our house guests, a dear friend, wearing an insatiably contagious grin, bare feet, and madras shorts. He scooped a risen dumpling from the water, popped it in his mouth, and kept it there for a while. He didn’t need to tell me the gnocchi were miserably hard, a failure.
He sampled then the sauce (an abbondanze di condimento...) simmering on the stove, which I’d prepared earlier in the day from fresh tomatoes, broth, and basil. His face brightened. Köstlich! he said. Now this is delicious.
Erwin was a big guy. He was hungry. We were all hungry. And it was getting late.
I wasn’t one to ever give up, but when my soon-to-be-born son weighed in with a sudden, breath-stopping kick, it was time for the white flag. I shoved the cat out of the kitchen and slid the remaining dough toward Sophia’s end of the table, and while Erwin joined her in making a couple final pat-a-cakes, I emptied two boxes of Barilla spaghetti into the boiling water.
Gnocco, the singular, is translated as dumpling. Colloquially, it also means a fool or a simpleton. And curiously, this seems about right: thinking like a fool—or rather not over-thinking—may be the key here.
With gnocchi, you simply have to know. Watching, I learned, is not enough. A recipe is not enough. You have to be in it, feeling it, sensing intuitively when you’ve reached the optimum paring of ingredients. Like other soulful life experiences (making love, giving birth, jamming in a jazz band), getting it right is all about unwrapping the senses. Staying attentive. Less thought, more letting go.
It would be another 24 years before I tried to make gnocchi again, just recently in fact, using Ada’s wisdom as a guide. My son, Alec, now a young man, was on hand to give them a try. He cleaned his plate, claiming they were excellent, though he admitted he didn’t really know how gnocchi were supposed to taste.
Un digestivo....
A final thought (and hoping not to offend): The feminine form of gnocco is gnocca, slang for cunt in Italian, though it takes on a less vulgar, marginally more flattering definition, i.e., ‘piece of ass,’ or even ‘babe,’ when used simply, as in, “Che bella gnocca!”. Wrote one Italian (gender unspecified) who commented in an urban dictionary online: A gnocca is a very beautiful woman. It is vulgar, but I think it’s a praise somehow.
