Even though we are constantly being bombarded with change, there are some things that change on much longer time scales than cell phones and the other technology that we interact with on a daily basis. Traditions are one of the great social constructs that allow us to bridge the gap not only between generations, but also between the decades of an individual’s life. It’s like reading an old, loved book. Every time you read that book, you noticed something different, it means something different to you; the book seems to change. In actuality, the book hasn’t changed at all, you, the reader, are the one who has done the changing. The book, however, offers a sounding board for our changes, and allows us to find an anchor, and sometimes even a roadmap, back to the person we once were, back to those ever important foundations that we build our lives on.
These traditions are different for every one, obviously. None of us have a complete set of shared experiences. My favorite tradition is one that my grandmother taught me, and her mother taught her, and her mother taught her, and back for enough generations that the birth of this tradition is unknown. She taught me the art of gnocchi ( pronounced, “n-yuck-ee”) making. Gnocchi are a potato based pasta that you make with your hands, as opposed to a paste press. My aunt, grandmother and I have made gnocchi together since I was seven years old. I remember my first time rolling the individual pasta pieces; I can still hear my grandmother correcting me and re-rolling the pieces that I had left as misfit blobs.
For an event, I taught some house members and friends how to make gnocchi, along with the correct way to pronounce gnocchi. We went through the traditional steps of cooking the potatoes, creating a potato and flour volcano, adding the egg, kneading, and finally the step of utmost importance, rolling. If the gnocchi is rolled incorrectly, the pasta is heavy and feels like lead in your stomach. But, when they are correctly rolled, the are light and smooth. This is where the art came into play. Although not everyone mastered the rolling technique, we all ended covered in flour and laughing at the failures. All in all, we cooked five recipes, spent three hours rolling, and fed 40 people.
After the event, I called my grandmother and expounded the successes and failures of the day. She is always impressed with how many people I feed and proud that other people are learning traditional Italian cuisine. In my opinion, making gnocchi is much more than feeding people or eating. Every gnocchi made is a shared bond, and shared memory and something that years down the road might act as an anchor for some larger life event (only time will tell, I never would have guessed at age seven that the highlight of my year in college would be teaching people this age old tradition; who knows where it will take me). But, then again, maybe it is nothing more than what my grandmother taught me.