Danielle Alvarez, Laura Sharrad and Elizabeth Hewson cook pasta
For its anxiety-beating qualities, family memories and pure craftsmanship, these three queens of pasta are united in their love for Italy’s gift to the world.
If 2019 was the year of the Pasta Grannies, 2020 just may be the year their inspiration jumped a generation.
You know the Pasta Grannies, right? The octo and nonagenarian nonnas who became the unlikely stars of a YouTube channel and a book by the same name celebrating the arcane, the soon-to-be-lost, the esoteric and the most traditional of niche pasta skills in far-flung and not always glamorous corners of the unified Italian nation.
Absolute balm for the soul. It was far more than entertaining video; it has become part of Italy‘s cultural archive.
Skip a generation and the emotional power and cultural resonance of traditional handmade pasta and the inspiration of those grannies has found fertile ground in three vibrant, successful young women, each making their mark on Australia’s food landscape. All of them cook; all embrace a connection with important values and the analog fundamentals of real food as expressed through pasta.
Elizabeth Hewson is not a chef but her fascination for pasta arose as a kind of resilience therapy. Having studied in Italy early in her career, she developed a deep affinity for the culture. She has taken her obsession to remarkable lengths.
Danielle Alvarez is the American-Cuban head chef at stellar Sydney restaurant Fred’s. Her professional career has been a canvas for absorbing the influences of important mentors, Alice Waters and Thomas Keller among them. Her “coming to pasta” has been the result of a sheer love of food rather than any cultural affiliation.
Laura Sharrad, an Adelaide chef and restaurateur, grew up Italian, albeit in the Melbourne suburb of Templestowe. Surrounded by parents and grandparents all born in various parts of Italy, Sharrad (nee Cassai) was schooled in the pivotal role of food in Italian life. A two-year stint with the family in Tuscany as a child, going to school and eating three-course lunches daily with her new Italian schoolyard amici, gave Sharrad a cultural grounding and profound appreciation of the role of pasta in Italian life.
Together, they are an unlikely, talented and truly impressive generation of New World New Nonnas.
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Elizabeth Hewson
Most of all, it taught me mindfulness. I learned to focus on the process rather than the result … It nourished me and gave me the energy to fight the good fight and the tools to tackle anxiety when I felt it creeping in.
Hewson’s day job (she’s on maternity leave) is marketing some of the best restaurants in Australia for Sydney property baron and restaurant operator Leon Fink. She is emphatically not a chef. But having spent a year in Italy in 2014 doing a master’s in food culture and communication, she was already predisposed to Italian-ness before her journey down the pasta rabbit hole began in 2017.
For Hewson, as she outlines with brave candour in her forthcoming book, Saturday Night Pasta, the act of making and kneading dough, and turning it into something great, began as therapy to deal with anxiety, loneliness and uncertainty.
“On one particular Saturday night, following a grey, unremarkable day, I felt compelled to lose myself in a task. I wanted to see all the magic that comes with the process of making something simple. For the first time in many years, I decided to make pasta. It became a Saturday night thing.”
And then some. Last year she took herself back to Italy — Rome — to do a one-on-one intensive pasta workshop for a week to refine the techniques and recipes she had been working with for two years, and by the end of the year, via Instagram — mostly — the concept of SNP had developed to the point she had two publishers wanting to work with her on a book. The recipe? One part redemption and mental stability via the mindfulness of a food-related activity, 99 parts how to achieve great homemade pasta in an Australian context. “This is not a dramatic tale of overcoming incredible adversity or surviving some kind of disaster,” she writes; “this is a rather ordinary tale, my tale, of finding oneself through the love of making pasta.”
Was there a moment, a pasta epiphany? “There were few events … living in Italy for a year, I learnt to really understand the value Italians put on making good, simple food at home.
“Then working with chefs, I got to see food and cooking through their eyes. It all came together when I started to make pasta at home in a period of anxiety.
“For me it’s not about the end result but about the process, absorbing yourself in the task at hand. Challenging a bad week into the knead. When I’m making pasta, I’m in the moment and not thinking about anything else. It’s become my meditation.”
Read this book on pasta:
The Encyclopedia of Pasta by Oretta Zanini de Vita. “It explores hundreds of different shapes, detailing the origin, how each is made and how it is traditionally served. I also love Pasta Grannies, a collection of recipes from Italy’s best cooks — the Italian nonne. You can’t get better teachers.”
Favourite dish to make:
Agnolotti del plin. “A filled pasta from Piedmont (where I lived for a year). I find the whole process incredibly cathartic — fold, pinch, fold, pinch, fold, pinch. Perhaps also because it transports me back to that year of living la dolce vita.”
Or a pantry staple pasta such as puttanesca or amatriciana: “There’s something about pulling a recipe together from nothing that is so satisfying.”
A La Carte:
Eating out? Tortellini en brodo.
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Laura Sharrad
I was fortunate enough to be born into an Italian family, where food was, is and always will be a way of life. Every family gathering was based around food — my mum, Anita, and my two nonnas, Maria and Rosa, in the kitchen preparing feasts, while the kids ran around the house waiting to be fed what we still call the best food we’ve ever had.
Apparently Sharrad, the energetic chef behind Adelaide’s excellent trattoria Nido (with husband Max) and a new CBD Adelaide restaurant opening next year (Fugazzi) was on MasterChef. Twice. Her biggest fans know her as the person in the kitchen responsible for dishes such as gnocchi with bible tripe, raviolo with a filling of potato, charred leek and yolk, or squid ink cavatelli with Goolwa pipis and mulloway.
As we said when reviewing the place last year: “You can actually taste the love and enthusiasm this young duo generate with their food.”
Hers is the cultural distillation of an extended Italian family from Tuscany, Sicily and the Veneto all relocated to the New World, an almost unique set of circumstances. Post MasterChef 2014 Sharrad did some fancy cooking round town in Adelaide before knuckling down with her (then) boyfriend to channel shared Italian roots. It was a move that allowed her to express herself fully.
“I grew up actually thinking I was never going to get into food, maybe because I was around food so much and didn’t really think of it as a career path,” she says. “It was just a way of life.
“My Tuscan nonna taught me how to make gnocchi and my other (Sicilian) nonna taught me how to make pasta.
“They were two very different experiences. Maria (the Sicilian) taught me that every single pasta has to have semolina flour, she doesn’t use many eggs. My other nonna was into big heavy ragus, everything very rich, just like a big warm hug. Gnocchi and tortellini in brodo. I feel like I learned two different cuisines growing up, and they were both Italian.
“My most vivid memory of food is when I was six years old, in Tuscany. My nonna Rosa came over from Australia to stay and she taught me how to make gnocchi for the first time. Flour everywhere … And I feel like now every time I make gnocchi it’s never as good.”
Another pasta rite of passage for Sharrad was visiting Agira, the village in central Sicily her nonna Maria came from, last year for the first time.
“There’s a dish popular there called pasta Modica and it’s basically macaroni pasta tossed through a simple tomato sauce and then when the wild fennel is in season they braise that down with garlic, chilli and white wine.
“It was the first time I’ve had that dish outside of my nonna’s house. It was like . . . one mouthful, I’m in my nonna’s house right now. It was such a cool experience. Max was blown away by how humble it was, yet so good. That’s Sicilian cooking.”
Read this book on pasta:
Trullo, by Tim Siadatan, the bold pasta dishes that inspired the London restaurant Padella. Or Flour + Water by Thomas McNaughton.
Favourite pasta to make:
It’s a memory-associated one: agnolotti filled with silverbeet and ricotta with a basil pesto and braised artichoke and crispy pancetta.
When someone else is cooking:
Lasagne. “Every Italian will tell you that their grandmother made the best version so I have to tell you my nonna Maria made the best version ever. Chicken, veal and pork mince, heaps of bechamel, lots and lots of Parmigiano. It was one of those lasagnes you felt like you could have three slices and still go in for more. Indulgent and rich yet still so light at the same time.
“It was like: ‘How did you do that?’ ”
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Danielle Alvarez
I love the art of mixing egg-rich pasta doughs with strength and force, followed by that delicate dance of moving thin pasta sheets through the machine while cranking the handle.
Alvarez moved to Australia earlier this decade to open Fred’s for the Sydney-based Merivale group. It was a first-class bit of talent spotting on the restaurant’s part. Although Alvarez comes from a Cuban family and grew up in Florida, her food expresses the sunshine and optimism of California and everything that represents, from California cuisine to Chez Panisse to growers markets and the roots of the organic movement. “This is the … food that made me want to start cooking in the first place,” Alvarez says in her soon-to-be-published first book, Always Add Lemon. “I wanted to know why, time and time again, the simplest, humblest of ingredients ended up producing the dishes people gravitated towards.
“I would say if you had to distil the reason of why I cook anything down to one thing it is because it makes people happy … and pasta is a sure way to put a smile on someone’s face, if it’s made well of course. Pasta is something most people absolutely love, but I think we have all probably had great and bad versions of it. The difference between great and OK is all in the technique. How a pasta that comes together and just before it is served has a lot to do with it.”
“Pasta to me is Italian but there are so many other cultures that have their versions of ‘pasta’, from egg noodles to ramen to rice noodles to dumplings. I do think a starchy, slurp-able noodle or dumpling is something loved the world over.”
For Alvarez, reading mentor Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook was a light bulb that illuminated the road to pasta devotion. “Thomas Keller is not known for his Italian cookery … but he wrote a chapter in the book about agnolotti, which are little filled pasta pillows, and how they are the ‘perfect’ pasta shape. He waxes on about the silkiness of the egg yolk-rich dough and the folding technique to seal them shut.
“I was hooked from then on. This may have even been the thing that pushed me into cooking professionally, not just pasta making.
“I remember so many moments and conversations while I was standing next to someone making pasta. That is pretty rare in a busy restaurant, where speed and urgency is the order of every day. Making pasta gives you the opportunity to slow down and talk. I see the importance of this now, more than ever and I hold those precious pasta-making moments very close to my heart.”
Read this book on pasta:
Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli and Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan.
Favourite pasta to make:
Pici.
To eat?
Pici with a meaty ragu.
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