“I can’t slow down.  If I slow down, I’ll get tired.” says Anna, our adopted Italian nonna (Grandma) for the day.

At 77, she has been making pasta several times per week for most of her life.  In the beginning, she’s not sure what to make of us … English speaking ladies with cameras, who aren’t so interested in actually making the pasta, but rather in photographing how she does it.

We’re in a converted monastery where Anna lives with her family, in the Abruzzo region of Italy.   It’s fitting all of the rural Italian stereotypes I have in my head – a view of olive groves and vineyards, a very noisy, big, bustling family, her grandson playing accordion, everything happening at it’s own pace, on Italian time.

Anna’s hands only move at one speed – super fast.  We keep asking her to slow down (through our translator), so we can capture it more clearly on film.  But she just finds that funny (why would you want to work slowly?), laughs at us, and continues on.  Clearly this woman knows how to make pasta.

We’re making spaghetti a la guitara.  The pasta gets its name from the ‘guitar’ like instrument used to cut the pasta.  The pasta itself is pasta all’uovo (egg pasta) which we saw all across Abruzzo.  If you want to try making pasta all’uovo, you can find recipes like this one across the internet.  But while a recipe provides the guidelines, there’s something so precious about learning directly from someone who has lived this tradition.

I’m sure you can relate to this experience.  You get the recipe for Grandma’s cookies or your mother’s jam, and even though you follow the recipe perfectly, it just doesn’t taste the same.

There’s always some secret ingredient or mis-measured quantity or special technique that just doesn’t translate into the written recipe.

I’ve often wondered if some ingredients are intentionally left out of a recipe to make sure that it can’t be recreated.  Or maybe the ingredients or technique just seem so obvious to the expert that there’s no point in including them.  (Like old cake recipes from my Grandma which just have a list of ingredients … because obviously everyone knows how to bake a cake.)

But back to our pasta-making story.  After making the pasta, it had to rest for 15 minutes … so they brought us homemade almond cake and we wandered around the monastery.

Here is the Guitara which cuts the pasta – it’s strung with metal guitar strings which cut the pasta into spaghetti.

Like so many traditional recipes, pushing the pasta through the guitara was hard work!

Finally, the pasta was laid out in little nests on a tray to dry.

Of course, we couldn’t leave without testing the quality of the finished product.

Apparently “a little” pasta has a different meaning in Italy.  Buon Appetito!

Have you ever tried to recreate family recipes and found there’s just something missing?  Did you ever have the chance to learn directly from the expert … and how did you capture that experience?  Share your stories below!