Fred Plotkin is an expert on both Italian opera and Italian food. His regional Italian cookbooks on the cooking of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and of Liguria have already delighted users of ckbk, and we pleased to also now make available The Authentic Pasta Book, his canonical work on real Italian pasta. Below Fred recalls the journey which led to the writing and publication of this much-loved work.

By Fred Plotkin

Back in 1983, when I began to draft notes for the book that came to be known as The Authentic Pasta Book, I was in some ways a different person and the world’s knowledge of the diversity and methodology of pasta cookery was scant most everywhere—even in Italy itself. An Italian might know the traditional preparations of her town or region and perhaps a few of the national classics such as spaghetti with a tomato sauce. But there were even variations from place to place as to what constituted a tomato sauce.

I had lived in Italy for much of the 1970s, mostly in Bologna but also Florence, small-town Tuscany, Rome, Ravello, Pavia, Milan, Trieste and the province of Genoa. I spent a great deal of time in Venice, the first great capital of opera, because most of my education was pointed toward the career in opera (everything but singing) that I had already begun and would continue to expand to this day.

In the 1970s, an American in Bologna was—more often than not—a medical student who did not gain admission to a school in the USA. Bologna had the oldest medical school in the world and was not only a paradise for students but a culinary paradise with amazing markets in which each seller of produce, cheese, meat, fish and other comestibles had extraordinary knowledge of how each ingredient should be used and took pride in selling the very best in the whole market. Food shopping in Bologna was serious business but also joyous and I did it every day. But most of the Americans  there never discovered that.

Bologna had the European branch of the Johns Hopkins School of International Affairs, where education was done in English. The Hopkins students lived in something of a bubble and food was available to them. The American medical students lived slightly out of the center and local food shops offered then-exotic items such as peanut butter and corn flakes to cater to Americans who came to Italy by necessity rather than by choice.

I was fortunate to be part of an exchange program at the University of Bologna run by the Universities of Indiana and Wisconsin. We wanted to be in Italy and, moreover, in a place where we had to speak Italian and negotiate the rigors of education Italian-style, complete with strikes, oral exams and dealing with a library system that was rich in holdings but nearly impossible to access. Yet we learned and loved the Italian way of life and few, if any, of us made forays to San Lazzaro to stock up on peanut butter.  Most of us lived with Italians, made wonderful friendships and some acquired Italian girlfriends or boyfriends.

Bologna attracted students from all over Italy and most commuted home on weekends or longer and usually wanted me—l’amico americano—to come along.  For an Italian, being made welcome in someone’s home is the ultimate gesture of kindness and hospitality, intimacy and confidence. You became part of the family.

This was a time without mobile phones—it took years to get a landline—and television only had a few channels. Social life was at the table and people savored what they ate and talked about it with great and opinionated passion. Discussions on trains (everyone conversed on long, frequently strike-delayed railway journeys) centered on food. What did you eat? What are you going to eat when you get home? I quickly learned that I would pack food for six persons (six pears, 600 grams of mortadella) because I would share it with the other five persons in my compartment on the train.

People traveling from elsewhere loved the animated platforms of the Bologna railway station, where you could stick your head out of the train window, proffer a 500 lire bill (about $1) and get a bag with a hot wedge of lasagne verdi alla bolognese, a roll, a piece of fruit and a quarter liter of red wine or mineral water.

In those years I traveled the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula to my many Italian families and went further still to explore villages, landscapes and treasures of antiquity that most Italians had never seen. I came to love the whole country and was dazzled by the linguistic, historical and culinary diversity I encountered from one town and one region to the next. In each place I seemed to acquire an adoptive mother, grandmother, aunt, sister or cousin who was only too happy to show me what she was preparing in the kitchen, including all manner of hand-made pastas. Although the shapes and fillings varied widely, the method of making pasta by hand was quite standard wherever I went.

After doing some initial literature and history courses in Bologna, I enrolled in DAMS, a then-new interdisciplinary performing arts institute at the university that in short order became Italy’s Juilliard. This meant that I not only had Italian friends who invited me to their family homes but invitations to famous and tiny opera houses all over the country to watch and learn and sometimes work on productions. We had to eat—opera builds an appetite—and there was usually a restaurateur in each town who loved opera and wanted visiting casts and crews to sample local specialities in their trattorias and locandas. This was fabulous eating rather than “fine dining” because the food was served with pride and love. I often found my way into their kitchens to learn how things were made. In all my early years in Italy, I never set foot in a cooking school.