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“Why not work for Gianni and Betta?” he declared. “Gianni knows everyone, he’ll figure out the visa. You only have to work for him for a few months, and, in exchange, he’ll fix you up so you can stay for years.”

Mark mulled this over. Maybe Gianni could sort out the visa. But when Mario had worked for Gianni and Betta, they’d been running La Volta, a serious restaurant with serious ambitions. Now they had a pizzeria. Why should Mark go to Italy to work at a pizzeria?

“Why?” Mario replied, with exaggerated astonishment. “Because it’s a pizzeria that serves pizza
and
pasta, and because Betta makes the pasta.”

Which was why I was in Porretta. It was also why I’d got so interested in the egg, because, on my first morning, watching Betta prepare the dough, I saw that an egg was a modern pasta’s most important ingredient, provided it was a
very
good egg, which was evident (or not) the moment you cracked it open. If the white was runny, you knew the egg had come from a battery-farmed animal, cooped up in a cage, and the pasta you made from it would be sticky and difficult to work with, exactly like the unhappy batch Betta produced one evening after Gianni fell asleep, having had too much wine at lunch, and failed to buy eggs from the good shop before it closed and had to drive to the next town to the
cattivo alimentarii,
the nasty store, and pick up a dozen of its mass-produced product. The yolk was also illuminating. The nasty store’s were pale yellow, like those most of us have been scrambling for our urban lives. But a proper yolk is a different color and, in Italian, is still called
il rosso,
the red bit, arising from a time when you ate eggs in spring and summer, the egg season, and they came from grain-fed, half-wild, not just free-ranging but virtually proprietorial chickens that produced a yolk more red than yellow, a bright primary intensity that you can see today if you’re lucky enough to get your eggs not from a supermarket but a local
mercato
or a small farm.

Betta’s pasta recipe was one egg for every
etto
of all-purpose flour. An etto is a hundred grams, one of those universal Italian measurements that might be translated as “medium-to-large-ish.” You don’t add water because there should be enough liquid in the egg (
if
you found a good one). You don’t need a flavor intensifier like salt or olive oil because all the flavor you need is, again, already in the egg (
if
you found a good one). At Babbo, Mario compensated for his being unable to find a reliable supply of half-wild, genuinely small-farm eggs by tripling up on the yolks he could get: for every pound of flour (call it four
etti
), he’d use three eggs, plus
eight
yolks, not to mention salt, a dribble of olive oil, and a little bit of water. (This recipe is not the one you’ll find in the Babbo cookbook and was, until this moment, a kitchen secret.) Was Mario’s yolk-tripled pasta better than Betta’s? No, it was different, and both are good. But Betta’s is the one I remember: one egg, one etto. I also liked the simplicity of a recipe that depends wholly on the goodness of one ingredient: one
good
egg, one etto.

I
’D BEEN
in such a rush to get to Porretta because I wanted to get there before the classroom got too crowded. I’m not sure why I was in such a hurry. Betta wasn’t. By the time Mark arrived, about ten days after me, Betta had finally consented to my touching the dough: I was permitted to knead it. Until then, I had watched.

“Watching is good,” she said. “That was how I learned as a child: hours and hours, watching my aunts.” This was a familiar lesson, but how much watching did I need to do? “When Mario was here, he wasn’t interested in watching. He wanted to make pasta immediately. Every morning, he’d ask, ‘Can I make the pasta now? Can I? Can I? Can I?’” She snorted with indignation, as if to say how could he possibly make pasta without memorizing the hands of women who have been doing this for decades?

I snorted, too, just to be agreeable, until I remembered why I was there. (The exchange confirmed my suspicions of a conspiracy: they really don’t want us to know how to do this.)

Even so, the kneading by hand was not without interest. It wasn’t done at Babbo, because there the dough was bashed around by a machine, “for forty-five minutes,” Mario boasted to me one day, much longer than anywhere else, “in order to draw out more of the glutens” (a metaphor that seemed to regard gluten proteins as garden snails that appeared when you weren’t looking). In fact, unknown to Mario, the dough was bashed for only ten minutes, which I’m sure was perfectly sufficient, and Alejandro looked at me as though I were an insane man when I asked if maybe it needed another half hour.

For me, the hand kneading alone may have justified the journey to Italy: crushing the dough under my weight, folding it in half, crushing it again, warming it slightly with the heat of my skin, stretching it with each repetition. Bread makers know these moments and get all lyrical about their tactile sensuality. Slowly the dough becomes shiny and more pliable, stretchy, just as the wheat proteins themselves are being stretched, and after a few minutes you can actually smell the glutens coming together, an evocatively fragrant perfume. In a poetic spasm, I thought of it as an oven at the far end of my memory. For the longest time, bread and pasta were also both made with water. Now pasta makers use an egg instead. And for me, naggingly, the question was: When?

I
WAS CONVINCED
I’d discover the first recipe in Bartolomeo Scappi. I had first consulted Scappi’s
Opera
for precorn polenta preparations and, having then acquired a two-volume facsimile edition of the 1570 text, I couldn’t stop myself from peeking at it, a page here, a page there, struggling with the ornate sixteenth-century script until eventually I was enjoying what seemed like an unmediated glimpse into a disciplined Renaissance kitchen. Scappi, proud and a little vain—his portrait on the cover looks like Plato with an appetite—includes meticulous accounts of his grander meals, and I lost hours in the menus, like the one for a lunch on October 28th: no indication of the year or occasion, the tongue-in-cheek implication being that it was like any autumnal
pranzo,
this year’s, last year’s, ho-hum, the sort of thing whipped up every October 28th. According to Scappi, the meal was a bit of everything,
di grasso e di magro,
fatty and lean, non-fasting and fasting, and consisted of eight courses, 1,347 dishes in all. Some were quite rustic—hams boiled in wine, for instance, or clams cooked on the grill. Most were pretty elaborate, like the meatballs made from capon breasts served in a veal-foot jelly; or the pigeons, boned and filled with rooster crests and pork jowls; or something called
sommata dissalata,
a bittersweet tummy delicacy, a mishmash of meaty bits, conserved in brine, stuffed into a stomach like a beach ball, cooked on a spit, and served with lemon and sugar. There were a hundred and sixty tiny grilled birds (
ortolani
in Italian;
ortolans
in French—the item prepared by Marco Pierre White in the early pub days), two hundred fried frogs, eight peacocks, plus unspecified numbers of turkeys, guinea hens, wild ducks, pheasants, geese, doves, thrushes, woodcocks, larks, and just about everything else that flies. Only a few people, the deadpan Scappi concedes, worried about dinner.

Soon I was reading Scappi for instruction, especially for lessons in what goes with what: familiar themes like game birds with fruit (pheasant stuffed with prunes, crab apples, bone marrow, and nuts), or the raw with the cooked, or the raw with the cured, as in a pork terrine that Scappi wraps with slices of prosciutto. His tortellini were made with a veal and capon filling—bovine and fowl, an unmodern pairing, and one I associate with the meats you find in a Bolognese ragù. One ravioli stuffing combined beets and spinach, another blended peas with three cheeses, and
that
was the kind of thing I liked learning, that you could add ricotta, parmigiano, and pecorino to summer peas and fill a pasta with the mix. But when I found Scappi’s instructions for the dough that encased these fillings, I was disappointed. Apart from a splash of rosewater, butter, and some sugar, it was the familiar two-thousand-year-old eggless preparation.

Elsewhere the egg makes an appearance. A yolk shows up in Scappi’s gnocchi. It reappears in his Roman macaroni (a thick hand-rolled noodle that takes half an hour to cook). But the important moment is in a tagliatelle soup. The recipe is simple: two pounds of flour, the ubiquitous warm water
(acqua tepida),
and—hark!—three eggs. The amount of water isn’t specified, but you can figure it out. Scappi is using medieval measurements, and two
French
pounds of flour—the pound then was twelve ounces—was about 700 grams. Scappi then adds three eggs: three eggs for 700 grams of flour? I tried the mix at home. To get the requisite wetness, you need enough water to match the volume of the eggs and probably a little more. The liquid used to make the dough, therefore, wasn’t wholly water or wholly egg, but a mix of roughly equal portions of each. Eggs had not replaced water, but, for the first time in pasta history, they had an equal billing. I closed my book. I hadn’t discovered the egg moment, but I had to be close. As they say in blindman’s bluff, I was getting warm.

Then I had a thought: I should write the secretary of the pasta museum in Rome, Amelia Giarmoleo. She would know. We’d been in touch before, and I cursed myself for not having written earlier.

“Gentile Signora Amelia Giarmoleo,”
I began, in an e-mail entitled
“Domanda urgente”
—urgent question. When did the egg replace water in pasta dough? I summarized my findings: nothing in the fourteenth century, a little egg white in the fifteenth, and then, toward the end of the sixteenth, this almost eggy moment in Scappi. When did pasta go all-egg? Who was the first?

A reply arrived three days later. Signora Giarmoleo didn’t know. She put the question to her colleagues. They didn’t know. She did not know who had first used the egg.

She didn’t know? She runs the pasta museum. How can she not know? And why didn’t she say, “I don’t know but I’m going to keep looking”? Could she receive a question of this magnitude and abandon it because she didn’t have the answer to hand? I didn’t understand: How can you run a pasta museum and not be interested in the first eggy pasta?

W
HEN
I
WAS
finally permitted to roll out the dough, I tore it.

“Ha!” Betta cackled. “You did a Mario!”
(Hai fatto un Mario
!
)
Doing a Mario was tearing the
sfoglia,
the rectangular sheet you make the dough into. “When Mario was here,” Betta explained, “he was in such a rush to learn how to make pasta he always tore it.” Betta took over, pressing my torn pasta back together with her thumb and forefinger, and rapidly rolling over the injured dough with her matterello. “Mario,” Betta added with undisguised pride, “was not very good at pasta.”

“Mario,” Mark whispered to me, “would almost certainly disagree.” Mark was now with me in the kitchen, having secured his slave visa. As Mario had predicted, Gianni knew somebody who knew somebody who owed someone a favor. Because Mark was going to be in Italy for a long time, he let me do the first pasta lessons on my own. I had given myself three weeks. I had a week left.

The second time I was permitted near the pasta, I was left alone with it for several minutes, rolling a sheet around the matterello like a jelly roll and unrolling it, back and forth, over and over again, something I’d always regarded as a pastry-chef trick and one I never believed I’d live long enough to do. In my limited experience with dough, I hadn’t succeeded in doing any tricks. The dough usually stuck to my hands, to the board, to the rolling pin, to itself. But here I was, rolling up dough on a matterello and unrolling it. I don’t think I ever felt so cool. I was so caught up in my revelry—already making an imaginary video of myself, rolling and unrolling, determined not to tear the sfoglia, not wanting to do a Mario—that I failed to notice that Betta had folded her arms across her chest in disapproval.

“You look like an old woman,” she said. She hit me, smacking a shoulder. “Why are you behaving like an old woman? You don’t have old woman’s arms. You will never learn how to make pasta if you roll it out like an old woman.” She sighed, took the matterello, and attacked the pasta with vigor, until it was so thin you could see the board underneath. She stepped back and pointed to the sheet.

“See?”

“I see,” I said and made a promise: I will not be an old woman.

By now I knew what to do—I had watched Betta enough to understand the principle—but I kept having trouble with the implementation. The principle was that the dough needed to be stretched as thin as you could make it, and, once it had reached that condition of thinness, you made it thinner. In fact, the principle was that you would
never
be able to make it thin enough, a daunting prospect, like a mathematical problem involving infinity, and you stopped rolling it only when you couldn’t do any more. The whole enterprise, once I’d ceased being an old woman, turned out to be surprisingly physical, and I was in a sweat by the end. There were additional anxieties—like doing a Mario at the last second and ruining everything. After so much huffing and puffing, the dough, even mine, got pretty thin (which you want), but it was also very easy to tear (which you don’t want), and if it tears when it’s so thin it’s impossible to repair, and you have to throw the torn bit away, unless it’s a big tear, and then you throw away the whole thing.

“I will never make it thin enough,” I confessed to Betta. I was trying to be witty. “Air!” I declaimed. “Why go to all this trouble to make air?” The conceit was Betta’s wanting a pasta so thin it consisted of only air, but the sentence I intended wasn’t the one I uttered. I don’t know what I said. By now, I’d completed all the language classes offered at the Scuola Italiana in Greenwich Village, but my Italian was a pretty fragile achievement, and this exchange was one of my first conversations without my wife nearby to rescue me. Why did I think my Italian was so good I could make jokes?