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“You add your ground-up prosciutto and mortadella to your pan. Cook them slowly. You want the flavors to mingle.” In all, there was about a pound of meat. “Let it cool, and add two eggs, some parmigiano…“

“How much?”

“Enough to thicken it. And some grated nutmeg…”

“How much?”

“A little.” She bunched her fingers together. “You mix it with your hands. That’s the filling.”

The result—like grainy sand before the eggs, cheese, and nutmeg are added; like a gray mushy toothpaste afterwards—wasn’t much to look at, but, since it was about to be tucked inside a piece of dough, what it looked like was irrelevant. The smell, however, was powerful. What was it? The Bolognese meats? The combination of the raw and the cured? I stuck my head in a bowl and my mind said: pizza toppings and eggnog and a barbecue on the Fourth of July. It was all my holidays in one. My mind also said: This is not a smell you know. It wasn’t of the mountains, which I’d now come to think of as damp and mushroomy brown. It was different. Appetizing, certainly, and wintry, and, somehow, highly specific. This was a taste I knew I would encounter nowhere else in the world. An urban medieval perfume, I concluded. This, I wanted to believe, was the fragrance of a Bologna kitchen, learned by someone in Betta’s family, preserved and passed on until it had reached the aunts in Vergato.

Betta wouldn’t show me the next step—preparing the complex pasta engineering that encased her filling—until I met a new condition. I would have to return later in the summer, my third trip. It was, I concluded, a test of my promise that I wouldn’t reveal the recipe to Mario: if enough time had elapsed and she got no reports of her tortellini on the Babbo menu, she could assume the coast was clear.

I
F YOU’RE A BOY
, your principal difficulty in making tortellini, I discovered (because of course I returned), is your fingers, which, alas, really need to be a girl’s, and not just any girl’s, but an elfin girl’s.

Your fingers need to be small because all the action occurs on the top of the smallest one, the pinky—in Betta’s case, the tiny top of her very petite pinky—where you place the puniest square of pasta. You then pack the puny square with largest amount of filling possible and fold it, corner to corner, to form a miniature but bulging triangle. You next tip the top part of the triangle forward, as though it were bowing in an expression of gratitude, and then (the crucial step) pull the other two corners forward, as though securing the bowing head in a headlock. You then press it all together to form a ring. When you turn the pasta over, you’ll be astonished by what you created: a belly button. (What can I say? It’s wildly erotic.)

Each infinitesimal tortellino takes a
long
time to make, and during the whole delicate process I found myself always on edge, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t crush the fuckers. (I crushed many fuckers.) And, given how
little
time it takes to eat the peanut-sized little bastards, you come away with an understanding of what they are: munchkin food made by people with a lot of time on their
tiny
hands. And yet, for all that, it is an angelically yummy munchkin food. You simmer it in a clear broth, turn off the flame, and let it sit for a while in the pot, doing that back-and-forth thing that a good pasta does, taking in the broth’s flavors, releasing its own starchiness, until it is tender and floppy and bloated with taste and can then be served, smelling fragrantly of Christmas.

The truth is, Betta was right. You learn pasta by standing next to people who have been making it their whole lives and watching them. It seems simple, and that’s because it is simple, but, characteristic of all Italian cooking, it’s a simplicity you have to learn. My advice: Go there. Make Betta a star. Isn’t it about time? You’ll have to put up with Porretta—very authentic because very ignored, and characterized by the temperamental irritability of a place that feels it has been abandoned (don’t even think about getting change for a parking meter) and stay at an overpriced hotel with no bathroom, occasional water (sometimes hot), plastic walls (although wood-colored), no windows (you think there’s a view?), and a dysfunctional telephone that works from noon on Sunday to early on Monday morning. And then, once you’ve settled in (hah!), wander down to the bottom of the valley, listening for the River Reno, and, near the old aqueduct (now housing a sewer—you’ll smell it), watch out for a sign, painted by hand, virtually illegible and probably fallen down. It says “Capannina.” There will be an arrow. Follow it, and after half a mile, where the river bends around itself, a peninsula of Emilia-Romagna surrounded by Tuscany, you’ll find the pizzeria. Betta gets in at about four. Good luck.

A
FTER LEAVING
P
ORRETTA
, I became a tortellini student. I was curious to see if I’d find Betta’s recipe elsewhere. I didn’t. But I can’t say there’s a lot of difference between hers and, say, the twenty-five other recipes I came upon. Since the sixteenth century, the filling of this tiny folded pasta has almost always involved a bird (capon, chicken, or turkey), a cut of pork, a cured meat (or bone marrow and cured meat), cheese (almost always parmigiano), and occasionally herbs. And, since forever, it has been cooked either in broth or with cream
(panna).
But the quantities of these ingredients vary from recipe to recipe, even if only minutely, and these variations are what one generation passes to the next, always as guarded secrets, each family convinced that its recipe is the definitive one. The arguments about what constitutes a genuine tortellino were so passionate that, in 1971, a convention was held, La Dotta Confraternita del Tortellino, the Learned Confederation of the Tortellino, to determine once and for all the correct preparation. With considerable ceremony, the preparation was published three years later, on December
7, 1974
, and then locked away in a vault in the Camera di Commercio di Bologna, the city’s chamber of commerce. Today you can find it on the websites of various agricultural and official-sounding institutions, introduced by appropriately solemn injunctions about the dangers of not following the instructions precisely, but the effort is to miss the point. The Learned Confederation cannot tell you the one recipe because it doesn’t exist, and to go looking for it or to experiment with the many variations until you persuade yourself that you’ve arrived at the definitive one is to miss the intimate ideology of the dish. There is not one recipe; there is only the one you’ve been entrusted with. “You are not to tell Mario this recipe,” Betta instructed me again. “This is my gift to you.”

I honored the terms of the gift and didn’t pass it on to Mario, while knowing that he had no use for it anyway and that the injunction would have baffled him and made him sad. Would he have understood the resentment implicit in it? Gianni and Betta have long been accustomed to not getting their due. They’re mountain people. There is a hardship in their cooking. In their eyes, they took in a man they genuinely believed couldn’t cook (probably because they themselves understood only one way of cooking) and taught him what they knew. When he returned to America, he became rich and famous, telling the story that he’d learned everything from his “second family” in the mountains. But Mario hadn’t come here to learn a region’s cooking in order to reproduce it faithfully, as though from a textbook. I find myself thinking of the Mississippi Delta and the visits made by students keen to learn the mournful lyricism in the music that you can still hear in the juke joints there. Mario is forever making food his own way, not just griddle pizza or a porky linguine alle vongole or carbonara with raw eggs on top, but his whole approach, that nightmare display of contorni that I worked with at the grill, the secret sauces, the ingredients never revealed on the menu, the squirter bottles of syrups and acids and juices, the performance: like a musician.

For my part, I’d come for the textbook and was glad to have it. Betta’s tortellini are now in my head and my hands. I follow her formula for the dough—an egg for every etto of flour, sneaking in an extra yolk if the mix doesn’t look wet enough. I’ve learned to roll out a sheet until I see the grain of the wood underneath. I let it dry if I’m making tagliatelle; I keep it damp if I’m making tortellini. I make a small batch, roll out a sheet, then another, the rhythm of pasta, each movement like the last one. My mind empties. I think only of the task. Is the dough too sticky? Will it tear? Does the sheet, held between my fingers, feel right? But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I’m back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can’t hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that’s handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.

A
ND THE EGG
?

I hadn’t given up, although it now seemed obvious that the pivotal recipe that had changed the nature of pasta probably didn’t exist. After all, writing has a better chance of survival than a piece of food (can you imagine the misfortune of coming across a five-hundred-year-old tagliatelle with ragù?), and chefs are rarely writers, and if the Eureka event occurred when no scribbler was in the kitchen the discovery would have gone unrecorded.

But I pressed on, even after my discouraging exchange with the pasta museum. After Scappi’s
Opera
in 1570, the next known food book was
Il Trinciante,
in 1581, by Vincenzo Cervio. A
trinciante
was a “carver,” an important person at a Renaissance banquet, and Cervio’s book—in effect, the first autobiography of a butcher—deals with meats, including useful advice about castration, addressing a range of questions such as which animals need it and which ones don’t (you’d hate to do the wrong one). But Cervio, a dedicated meat guy, is silent on the issue of eggs.

I proceeded chronologically. In 1638, there was
Pratica e scalcaria
by Antonio Frugoli.
Scalcaria
means being a
scalco,
the head guy in the kitchen of a grand house. Since there were no restaurants, a scalco was the equivalent of our celebrity chef, and the 1500s and 1600s are full of scalco memoirs, often, like Frugoli’s, self-aggrandizing accounts of how my banquets are better than yours. Other books followed:
The Three Theses
of Mattia Giegher, including lessons in napkin-folding (1639); Bartolomeo Stefani (1662), the head chef at the Spanish Court in Venice. I thought of myself as a food detective, gathering up suspects so I could eliminate them. You there, what are you doing with that egg?

I wrote academics. Massimo Montanari, a professor at the University of Bologna and an authority on the medieval kitchen, understood my question and its urgency. Yes, he agreed, the egg moment was important in the history of pasta—he even introduced me to a term to describe its function, which was to hydrate the flour
(idratare la farina),
the process in which the egg’s liquid content takes the place of water—but he didn’t know when it had first occurred. In his judgment, there had probably been not one moment but several, a gradually increasing use, begun in the Middle Ages, when eggs were added for taste, until, in the modern era, they were also used for their liquid.

But when?

He couldn’t hazard a guess. He consulted a colleague, a pasta specialist: nothing.

Then I found it: a first eggy recipe. It was late in the chronology, the end of the seventeenth century, in
Lo scalco alla moderna
by Antonio Latini—another scalco fellow. The recipe was headed “How to make macaroni, lasagna, and gnocchetti exquisitely” and credited to a chef named Meluzza Comasca (a typical concession—in Italy, there are no original recipes, only discoveries). Comasca, it has been suggested by one commentator, was a rhetorical creation, and, I admit, it’s troubling that the man’s name appears nowhere else in the history of food. Everything we know is in Latini’s introductory homage: that, after leaving us with his new pasta recipe, Comasca died prematurely of an insect bite—a malarial mosquito, I suspect, although the phrase (
morì di pontura,
in its seventeenth-century spelling) calls up an image of a fat man in an apron scratching himself to death—and that his doughy inventions were so famous they were described in an epitaph on his tomb. There is no mention of where Comasca was buried, but the insect allusion suggests the Maremma, the stretch on the Tuscan coast known for fatal bugs, and not far from Da Caino, the restaurant run by Valeria Piccini (unlike Comasca, a chef who will go stubbornly to her grave before she shares her pasta preparations with me).

The recipe is mainly about the process—the taxing effort of making the dough
(un poco di fatica),
how you roll it into a sheet about six fingers in length (everything according to the hands) and roll it some more, until it reaches its requisite thinness. The pasta recipe itself was simple: four eggs mixed with about six etti of flour (not quite Betta’s proportions but not far off), plus a sprinkle of salt, and, it’s true, a little water, but only a splash. The principal hydrating role is performed by the eggs, and, until now, this role had never been recognized in Italian cooking.

Why did I find this when others hadn’t? I considered what I’d done wrong, including the possibility that my egg question was so dumb no one else was asking it. But the explanation may be that my discovery is overshadowed by a more radical one: not what to put
in
your pasta but what to put
on
it.
Lo scalco alla moderna
includes the first recipe for tomato sauce. Until this moment, no Italian had eaten tomatoes. This very recipe—a half-dozen tomatoes, peeled by blistering them on a grill and removing the charred outside (which brings out the sugar in the fruit), plus red onions, red chilies, and red wine vinegar, an early expression of the now very familiar sweet-sour-spicy approach—is what persuaded the wary people of the Italian peninsula that the suspiciously shiny American fruit that acts like a vegetable wouldn’t kill them. Could there have been anything more important? Taken together, these two recipes, the eggy noodle and the sauce that goes on top, have been at the heart of pasta preparations from their publication until today. In the history of cooking, I cannot think of two other instructions that, though seemingly modest, have had such enduring consequences.