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Betta looked at me blankly. Then she cackled uproariously and turned to Mark.
“Che pazzo dialogo!”
she said. What crazy speech! “Who knows what will come out of his mouth?”

But Mark had no idea what she was saying, which was, of course, that she had no idea what
I
was saying.
“Che?”
he said.
“Cosa?”
“Sometimes,” he whispered to me, “I have no idea what Betta is saying.”

We were a curious threesome. By now we were spending every day gathered round Betta’s pasta board. It was large—square, almost four feet across—and a crafted object, made of pieces of inlaid wood, designed, I assumed, to produce that grainy-in-the-mouth feel. Underneath was a strip of wood. This was like an anchor—it fit against the edge of a table—and kept the board from sliding. It was also covertly used to keep the dough from moving as well. This was a pasta maker’s secret and the most important lesson I learned from Betta. The trick was in the strategic use of your belly: by positioning a flap of dough over the edge of the board—just a couple of inches—you ended up pressing against it when you rolled it out, squishing it and holding it in place. This made it easier to stretch your pasta. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, it was one of those finesse maneuvers that wasn’t so easy for me to master. The problem was my belly, which was otherwise being subjected to an ambitious culinary education—many pedagogical plates of pasta had been deposited inside in it, what I regarded as a program of tummy tutorials—and it had grown a little unwieldy. Or else I just wasn’t accustomed to using it to cook with. Initially, much pasta was maimed. Actually, most of it just dropped to the floor, having been cleaved against the edge of the cutting board from the slam-bam force of my body as I tried to roll the whole thing out to its impossible thinness.

You don’t have to have a board with a stopper. Scappi didn’t use one. He made his pasta on a long table but the operation involved two people. One person rolled it out, leaving a bit of the sheet over the table edge, Betta’s trick, and the other held on to it from the other side, stretching it further. You also don’t need a matterello, although I’m pleased I own one, big enough to be used by two people at once, like playing piano with four hands. I purchased it at a Saturday market in Porretta, when I returned later in the summer (pasta, according to Betta, could be learned only in installments), on a memorably damp morning of oppressive humidity. By evening it had gathered itself into a ferocious five-hour thunderstorm and canceled a
festa
Gianni had planned to inaugurate the pizzeria’s summer season, with live music, outdoor grilling, and hundreds of paying diners. Days of preparation went for nought, which confirmed for Betta the fickleness of life there and her belief that, in this part of Italy, nothing is ultimately in your control. (Its history, I would learn, was a punishing roller coaster of good and bad fortunes. Even the modern prosperity of Porretta—building airplane parts in a rugged, inhospitable terrain, an unexpected bounty—had been a dictator’s whim and had arrived as fortuitously as it had then unexpectedly disappeared, as though a debt collected by the Devil.) The Appennines, Betta said, teach you a “mountain fatalism.”

Sometimes I was struck by a sense of many people having learned all this before me—not an unpleasant feeling, akin to making a turn in an unknown landscape and discovering a horizon-filling view of natural beauty. The sensation was of being made wonderfully small. When Betta taught me how to make tagliatelle, the easiest of fresh pastas—you let the sheet dry for a few minutes, then roll it up like a paper towel and cut across with it a knife (
tagliatelle
means “little cut things”), shaking the noodles out afterwards, like so many strands of golden hair in a magic trick—I noticed that her phrasing was almost identical to words used by Scappi. “You let the sheet dry out, but not too dry,” she said—
si asciuga ma non troppo.
(“The sheet will be dry, but not too much,” Scappi writes—
sarà asciutto però non troppo.
) Have people been passing on the instructions, word for word, for five hundred years? Sometimes this sense expressed itself as so many ghosts looking over Betta’s shoulders. One day, she said she’d like to show me how to make tortellini—the region’s most famous pasta—but stopped herself. “You will tell Mario. Mario did not learn how to make tortellini when he was here.”

“No, no, no,” I said, with a hearty butter-couldn’t-possibly-melt-in-my-mouth irony. “Of course I won’t tell Mario. Why would I do that?”

“You will tell him. I know you will.”

I didn’t know what to say. I looked hard at Betta. She wasn’t joking.

The next day, Betta still had tortellini on her mind. They speak to her of Christmas, she said. That’s when you make them, and they are then cooked in a clear chicken broth, not in boiling water like a normal pasta. She will always associate tortellini with childhood. They were the first pasta she remembers being prepared.

Betta comes from Vergato—a hill town twenty miles away, about halfway to Bologna—and grew up in an extended family of five women: Betta’s mother and her four aunts. Every December they gathered round a kitchen table and made the pasta, a warm, noisy convocation: banter, gossip, high hilarity, storytelling, the smells of food, a fire burning, everyone’s fingers busy. Making the tortellini, Betta said, was always social (she had been unprepared for the loneliness of a restaurant kitchen), and, as a child, she felt privileged when these older, cultivated women asked her to join their circle. She was twelve years old, and the tortellini she made were her first handmade pasta—no small feat. They are complex, tightly layered pieces of food sculpture, an achievement associated in Betta’s mind with bigger things: the city (Bologna), the region (her zona, the food like a flag of statehood), and becoming an adult. “My learning how to make pasta was learning how to be a grown-up and a woman.” Now, when she makes tortellini, her aunts come to mind: sometimes in the pasta-making lessons they taught her (one aunt prided herself on a pasta so thin you couldn’t eat it with a fork because it slipped through the tines) or in their preparations (another made tagliatelle so exquisitely delicate that they cooked the moment they hit hot water—“You drop them, you pull them out, they are ready”), but usually in fleeting images. The Christmas table, the sound of giggly laughter, their faces. They are now gone.

“I don’t think Mario understands how much we gave him. You can only learn these things here—from people who have been making these foods their whole lives. Do you understand? That’s what we gave Mario. Something he can get nowhere else.”

Betta was contemplative. “Maybe tomorrow I will teach you how to make tortellini.”

P
ORRETTA WASN’T
the obvious place for lessons in making the region’s most complicated pasta. The town has never been known for its food, and there are only a few historical references to it. There is an obscure mention in Casanova’s autobiography, dating from the 1790s, when, accompanied by a Florentine beauty and in flight from her mother, he stopped nearby, rousing an innkeeper after midnight with demands for food and drink, and then found himself so sated by macaroni he was unable to perform an act of love. The side effect was not addressed in a collection of food narratives written around the same time by Doctor Luca Zeneroli. His 1771
Selection of Medical Stories pertaining to the Porretta Baths
—the food stories are the appendix—appears to be the only surviving culinary text in the millennium-long history of the town. Goethe may have passed through, crossing the Appennines via the Porrettana, but seems to have made the journey on an empty stomach. George Eliot, traveling in the other direction to Bologna (Porretta has always been on the way to somewhere else), also didn’t stop to eat.

The difficulty is the extreme winter. Some livestock survives it, if there’s an adequate shelter. I was taken to an example of one, a hut of hand-hewn stones with a thatched roof and a solid wood door, where I was then introduced to a remarkably ugly pig of gigantic proportions. (People could only guess at its weight—two thousand pounds? three?) The pig was a boar—although he didn’t seem like one boar, but several, linked together like cars of a freight train—and, for several years, had been personally, even if indirectly, responsible for most of the region’s prosciutto. Even so, I had no idea the species could be so ugly or so large. Apart from the pigs, there wasn’t much else. The land was dense forest, too cold for grapes or olives, with only one local crop, hay, which you saw growing in the few cleared areas.

But there were butchers, a proud clan. One night I found myself at a table, under a balmy starry sky, with a half dozen of them. The occasion was Gianni’s postponed
festa.
The good weather had finally arrived, and five hundred people had shown up—the first warm night of what would turn out to be the hottest summer in five centuries. (With the uninterrupted warm evenings, Gianni’s pizzeria would finally turn a profit, although the unexpected treasure raised questions about a business that relied so absolutely on the mountain’s fickle climate.) The butchers had grilled the meat; Gianni and Betta prepared pizzas; Mark and I cooked the pasta; and now it was midnight, and we were exhausted—the happy exhaustion of feeding lots of people—and were having an impromptu family meal of steak and red wine, gathered round a table by a still-burning barbecue fire.

I was curious about the invisible culinary history of the region. I wondered what distinguished the food here from what you might eat anywhere else in Italy, and the people around me agreed that it was in theirs having to be foraged: it came from the woods.

People hate to buy vegetables, a butcher confessed, because vegetables are expensive and not from here.

And it was true. A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.

“But too many porcini,” a woman declared. “Every day—porcini, porcini, porcini.” In September, her son goes out in the afternoon and returns with fifty pounds of porcini. “What am I to do with so many porcini?” She cooks them, she dries them, she freezes them, until
“Basta!”
she throws them out.

October was wild boar. “There are thousands of them in these woods.”

“Not thousands?” I protested.

“Yes,” people answered in unison. “Thousands. And pigeons and deer and even wolves,” and at the mention of wolves I looked out into the night and studied the zigzaggy mountain crests above us, unpatterned like the broken teeth of an old comb, and the forests, black against the dark blue summer’s starry light, and felt a primitive Grimm awe for what was out there and an equally primitive comfort in being here, by a fire, surrounded by people.

They continued through their calendar, reaching chestnuts (November), whereupon everyone sighed. Chestnuts were such a problem. No one could eat them.

“This is a poor community,” a butcher explained, “and we grew up eating many dishes with chestnuts. For us, they mean poverty. We now can’t eat chestnuts. There are recipes that will disappear unless they are passed on soon, but for now, no one can touch them.”

By the end of the calendar (the cruelest month was March, when there was nothing), I understood something new about Betta’s pasta—its importance. Its value was different from pasta in the life of Miriam, say, or of Valeria. For them, pasta was a culinary tradition that they’d grown up in, a feature of their culture, their identity. For Betta, it was a tradition she wanted to belong to. She lived in the mountains, where you were always reminded of how little you controlled. This year, even the reliably over-abundant porcini, which I had finally concluded was the taste of Porretta, never appeared. The ground was too dry. Dadi, the man who ran a food shop—catering to day-trip Italians expecting to return home with bags of wild mushrooms—was importing them from Sweden. For Betta, pasta was crucial to how she thought about herself. “Mario,” she said, “is now a great success, and I am not. Mario is now rich, and I am not. But he was never very good at making pasta. He was never as good as me. I am very, very good.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
Betta was in the kitchen when Mark and I arrived. She was resolved: today she would tell us how to make tortellini, although, before she began, she renewed her conditions.

I understood them. I will not tell Mario.

“Do you promise?”

Mark and I looked at each other. (We said nothing, but what was communicated between us was unmistakable: this, we agreed, is very weird.)

I promised.

“Okay,” Betta said. She was solemn. “This is what goes inside. There are four meats: pork, chicken, prosciutto, and mortadella.” The measurements were in etti. “You start with two etti of pork, ground up.”

“Any cut?” I asked.

“The shoulder or butt,” she said, indicating her own shoulder and butt, that cook’s thing of pointing to the cut in question as though it had been butchered from your own body. “A lean piece.”

I repeated the quantity and wrote it in a notebook. Two etti is about eight ounces.

“About half as much chicken. The breast. Also ground up. You cook both meats together in a pan with butter.”

I wrote a formula: Maiale + pollo = padella con burro. Pork + chicken = pan + butter.

“Next. The cured meats. Half an etto, or fifty grams, of the prosciutto and mortadella. You grind these up, too.” Fifty grams is about two ounces. Prosciutto is found all over Italy but is at its most refined in the Po River Valley, the heart of Emilia-Romagna. Mortadella—a fatty pork mousse in a casing—is another specialty associated with Bologna (thus “baloney,” the bastardized name of a bastardized version). These were the tastes of the zona; you won’t find them in a Tuscan preparation, even though Tuscany was so close I could see it from the kitchen window.