Folding tortellini is a tricky pasta craft, but this school of Italian cookery knows some crafty pasta tricks.
I’ve been making my own tagliatelle, linguine, ravioli and lasagne since the 1990s when I brought back a crank-handle pasta machine from Little Italy, New York. I’ve tried any number of different flours and ratios with water and eggs. Recipes have varied from La Varenne’s one and a third cups flour and three eggs to a YouTube video demonstration using one cup of semolina (ground durum wheat) and two eggs. There is even a Piedmont recipe that uses 40 yolks per kilogram of flour!
But it took me a visit to the Rocca School of Italian Cookery to get it right.
Enrica Rocca, now based in Venice, first opened her cookery school in Cape Town in the early 1990s. Managing the school today is her friend and former student, the vivacious Emma Freddi of Genoa. She offers lessons in wine matching and Italian food, Peninsula tours, visits to wine estates, and classes in authentic Italian and Ligurian cooking.
Cookery sessions cover the creation of a four-course Italian meal, the highlight of which is making your own pasta.
In my lesson with Freddi, we made roast tomato and cream of balsamic soup, oven-baked fillet in creamy horseradish and mustard coating, an egg-rich dark chocolate tart and, of course, pasta.
The Enrica Rocca School of Italian Cookery, 5 Domira Road, Constantia. Sessions are on Tuesday evenings between 6pm and 10pm, and on Friday afternoons from noon to 4pm. Cost is R600 a person.
Tel: 082 378 8855
For full story on the art of Italian food by Brent Meersman: Mail & Guardian.
Brent Meersman is a political novelist (Primary Coloured, Reports Before Daybreak).
