"If you measure, you have no feeling."

Today was pasta day, in a big way. I started this morning by rolling out the reserved dough for the two dishes our team has on this week's menu: an appetizer called "liquid ravioli," which is pasta filled with braised oxtail meat, a cube of glace de viande, and a little morsel of foie gras; and sautéed chicken with fettuccini, in a sauce made with chicken velouté, tomatoes, capers, and lemon. Miggi brought in her motorized pasta maker, which turned out to be the life-saving gadget of the day. But first thing this morning, I wasn't thinking about gadgets. I was thinking about Grandma.

My grandma was the kind of person who needs to keep her hands busy, and when she came to visit us when I was little, she was often mending. Mom would toss holey socks and shirts missing buttons into a laundry basket, and Grandma would settle into a chair with the basket at her side. One of the first lessons I learned from her was about threading a needle. While it may seem expedient to thread on a really long length of thread, so that you don't have to do it again for a long time, you inevitably end up tangling it and you spend more time trying to unravel your mess than you've saved. Rolling pasta is much the same. You may think you should start with a big lump of dough, but each successive pass through the rollers makes the dough longer and thinner and that big lump turns into a strip of dough too long to handle. It's a big mess. Resist the urge.

I ended up rolling and cutting six more batches of fettuccini. Turns out the kitchen was responsible for "tasting plates" following today's special guest lecturer. The CCA hosted a visit by Lorenza De'Medici, a noted cookbook author who showed us how to make fettuccini and "ravioli gnudi," or spinach gnocchi. She's a lovely woman in her 70s, able to roll out pasta by hand without getting a spot of flour on her lovely purple silk shirt, chatting all the while. She definitely comes from a different place and time. She told us that she learned to cook by sneaking into the kitchen and watching the family chef. And after she married, she often called that same woman to learn how to make certain dishes, so that she could instruct her own chef. So I guess the teaching comes naturally. After watching her roll out the dough, methodically turning and flouring it, I was certainly glad we had "the machine."