The Stuff of Dreams

An award-winning writer shows how food, family, culture, and aspiration are all wrapped up in ravioli.

Posted December 20, 2007 by Eric Levin

If you think about it—and Laura Schenone has—human beings love dumplings. Almost every culture has its own variation, be it ravioli, pierogi, gyoza, kreplach, wontons, samosas, empanadas, or hundreds of others. Why?

Some of the reasons are practical—dumplings can be soup, snack, side dish, or entrée; the endlessly variable fillings help stretch precious ingredients such as meat; they are fun to eat, even for the nearly toothless, aged or juvenile. In her illuminating, personal, and even suspenseful new book, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family (Norton, $26.95), Schenone frames the question as a quest for her Ligurian great-grandmother’s fabled ravioli recipe. From the outset, she makes clear that ravioli offer more than one kind of sustenance.

“A little square of ravioli is like a secret,” she writes. “You look at the outside and see the neatly crimped dough, puffed up in the center with a lovely pillow of something mysterious inside. It is an envelope with a message.”

Schenone traces that message from the tenements of Hoboken, where her family became American; to the mountain villages outside Genoa, where pasta and ravioli are still made the old way, with a rolling pin; and back home to suburban Montclair, where she describes life with her (almost always) patient and supportive husband and (ditto) adorable two young sons.

New Jersey is also where the formidable Grandma Schenone, widowed young, raised her four children with an iron hand and conscripted her three sons into the family plumbing business. An element of tragedy enters the tale, as Laura’s father—the youngest son, independent, romantic, and musically inclined—bridles at his mother’s control, and is eventually ostracized.

Family tragedy may seem outside the realm of a book concluding with 60 pages of recipes and instructions, but Schenone’s candid narrative shows how deeply food and family are entwined. And she does it with humor. When her early experiments with the rolling pin fail, she finds solace in the high-tech kitchen of an older friend and neighbor—even though he teasingly urges her to come over to the dark side, namely electric mixers and pasta machines.

As in her first book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, a history of American women’s cooking that won a 2004 James Beard Award, Schenone proves herself a tireless and resourceful researcher—even a kind of culinary Nancy Drew. Whether blowing the dust off antique cookbooks in the New York Public Library, tracking down long-lost relatives, or videotaping great pasta makers at work, Schenone keeps the reader at her side as she tries to solve puzzles. When the family recipe crossed the ocean to America, how did Philadelphia-brand cream cheese getinto it? Should the meat for the stuffing be pre-cooked or put raw into the ravioli to cook as the squares boil? Is it cheating to use a ravioli press?

To these and other questions—including soul-searching ones about her father’s break with his family, her contentious relationships with her sisters, her ambivalence about the suburbs—Schenone finds multilayered answers as well as enduring mysteries.

One thing, though, is certain. Ravioli isn’t easy, nor was it meant to be. It is traditionally a group effort for the women of the family, who pass on the skills from one generation to the next. Schenone makes an important distinction between pasta and ravioli.

“Pasta is a food of ordinary life and ordinary people—a kneaded, boiled dough,” she writes. “Ravioli, on the other hand, is much more elaborate. It is a form of sculpture and design. It takes a lot of work to make ravioli, and therefore, it is historically a food for the wealthy or a celebratory food for ordinary people who, on special days, devote extensive energy and resources to preparing something unusual.

“I am certain,” she adds, “that this association with celebration is why ravioli—whether it’s mandu or kreplach—brings such an overwhelmingly positive response from people. Historically, ravioli is for a special occasion. It is the food of happy times all over the world.”

WALNUT SAUCE

“Walnut sauce is a dream,” Laura Schenone writes in The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. “It goes beautifully over herb-and-cheese-filled ravioli, such as pansotti, or other fresh pastas made with chestnut flour. When these special items aren’t an option, you can make walnut sauce to dress ordinary dried pasta too, for a quick and lovely dish.”

Yield: enough for 6 to 8 servings of pasta

2 cups nice walnuts (about 7 ounces)
Boiling water for soaking
Pinch salt
1 medium clove garlic, about 1/2 teaspoon, green germ removed
5 leaves fresh marjoram or basil, or ½ teaspoon dried marjoram if you must
1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus extra for garnish
1 cup, more or less, warm milk, or hot pasta water, to thin out the paste

1. Place the walnuts in a bowl and cover them with boiling water. Leave them to soak a half hour or so to leach out the bitterness.

2. Transfer drained walnuts to a food processor along with the salt, garlic, and marjoram or basil. Pulverize to as smooth a paste as possible, pausing at times to scrape nuts down from the side with a spatula. Add cheese; process. The mixture will remind you of pesto.

3. When you are ready to serve, you must thin out this paste by adding the warmed milk or some hot starchy water from the pasta pot. Ladle in a little at a time and process. The goal is a sauce that is not too thick, but not too watery either. Aim for luxuriously creamy and smooth.

4. Serve the sauce over pasta. For even more luxury, sprinkle with Parmigiano-Reggiano.

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