Flour marked the beginning, the first thing I knew in multitude: white, whole wheat, spelt, quinoa, rye, arrowroot and so forth. Only, I didn't know the difference. I just knew that there were rows and rows.
The co-op seemed to have more flour than the grocery store. The type of person buying the flours I didn't know or didn't understand were the type of women who could wear an L.L. Bean sweater and pull off that understated-beauty look; that I-just-went-for-a-hike-and-now-I'm-going-to-do-something-else-you-don't-have-time-for-and-still-turn-heads-without-putting-on-mascara look. I wanted to be that woman and I wanted to know those flours. I was, in fact, obsessed with knowing what those flours did, what they tasted like, and how they changed baking.
I knew flour mattered—it's gluten and proteins, its composition had physical and sensory effects that would spill over into the cookie, the quiche, the dumpling. The difficulty is the heritage of the baker, my own lineage of women: I come from a line of women who put flour on their faces to “pretend” time in the kitchen. As a child, picnics included a trip to Friendly's and my mother and I throwing away the bags, the evidence, and putting the food into a basket to surprise my father at work. An Easter meal was store bought, but we pretended the labor by dusting dried herbs and salt on the floor. We even dipped the rolling pin in the flour if there was a pie involved. Always, we put put our hands in the flour, patted our faces and clothes just a bit. Just enough for an effect.
In my childhood, I don't remember my mother buying a new bag of flour. I remember the flour, in the yellow tin labeled, in brown lettering, "FLOUR." If I think about it long enough, the flour was clumped, it smelled a bit like cinnamon or whatever else was on our hands when we dipped them in there. The flour was white, old, and ornamental.
Food making was performance art.
My mother's mother didn't even bother to perform or pretend. She left the can of canned spaghetti in full view, admitted to tuna in everything, and chewed on a butterscotch candy and a laxative instead of the meal anyway. It's no wonder my mother's relationship with food was performatory, was rooted in an idea of femininity that was exhausted by the labor of making a meal, so exhausted that she was always “too tired to eat.”
It added up to this: women worked in the kitchen and women were tired from that work. To be a real woman, you had to be really tired. If you aren't working in the kitchen, you're less of a woman, but if you are really tired, you can gain some of the femininity you “lost”. Being a woman in the age of easy and fast cooking meant being skinny, tired, and remembering to make your exhaustion seem caught up in the activities you weren't doing anymore (cooking).
This relationship with food, with femininity, and with the performance of both is something I didn't accurately notice until I left home, went to college, and made my first batch of homemade pasta. It's also something I haven't worked out in my head and something that might only be true for my own line of women—my mother and grandmother.
I never doubted, the way my mother did, my own relationship to my gender. I didn't feel an obligation to "do" anything specifically female. I didn't chew on laxatives to stay small and tired like my grandma and I didn't pretend to do domestic chores and feign exhaustion like my mother.
I did decide to make my own pasta because I moved into my first apartment. Because I went shopping and bought "basic" pantry and refrigerator items without even knowing what a basic pantry or fridge looked like. I bought flour, baking soda,butter, eggs, salt and pepper, and a few cans of tomatoes. That seemed "basic." None of this seemed “gendered” to me or caught up in gender issues; it seemed like a contemporary problem of not knowing or valuing food.
When it was time for dinner, I was helpless. I hadn't picked up anything to actually eat. The fridge had an open baking soda container (just like home), butter, and those eggs. The pantry was worse. I typed in the remnants of my basic grocery shopping into a google search to see what I could make, what recipe would come up. It was a recipe for egg pasta.
Viola! Pasta! Pasta, as I knew it, was an easy meal. An out of the box and onto the plate meal. Perfect.
I started to cook the pasta and it was my first experience with flour types: "Tipo 00 Flour." What? In other recipe searches it was called farina di grano tenero, which only made me panic more.
I didn't know, I couldn't have known that flour came in more varieties.
I used the white flour I bought, the flour that only said "White Flour" on the label and followed the directions. The recipe, as I remember it, was pretty basic, but it was the first time I learned that pasta was not something that just came in a box:
Place about 1lb and 6oz flour on a board, make a well in the center, and crack 6 eggs or 12 yolks into the center. I used 6 eggs because it seemed like a hassle to separate yolks. Beat the eggs with a fork until smooth, using the tips of fingers, mix the eggs with the flour, incorporating a little at a time until everything is combined.
I can't even explain how cool this was. The flour literally "acted," it took in the eggs and changed. I'd never seen this. Brownie mixes and cake mixes just don't act the same way the flour was acting. There was a reaction, there was some change, something to see, something happening. With a bit of work, everything bound together and I had a lump of dough. I was in love with that lump of dough and, without knowing what kneading was, I touched it enough that I probably ended up kneading it. I didn't understand the glutens or how this action was expanding the glutens, was helping the pasta firm up and become springy. I just wanted to keep touching this thing that I'd made and, every time I touched it, it changed a little. The dough started to feel silky instead of floury.
Of course, I ruined it after this because I didn't know that dough needs to rest and I didn't have a pasta machine or anything to help me shape it. I rolled out the dough and cut it into strips of pasta, stuck it all in some boiling water.
Everything stuck together. It was the most visually disastrous thing I'd ever made. I added a pat of butter to the top of the mound and ate the pasta.
I didn't care that it was terrible, incorrect, and ugly. I was so pleased with making my own pasta, so pleased with watching flour alter--to me, the meal tasted great.
After this first try, my first time really making anything from scratch, I felt really empowered. I think it usually happens around eighteen that we start to realize that our relationship with food is a mutual relationship: we have to give time to learn about food preparation, food ingredients, and flavor combinations. We have to give time and we can give time to the whole process of knowing our ingredients, even making or growing them. There's something empowering about our own hands and minds (sometimes tongues) being responsible for our own food and eighteen is a great time to recognize this responsibility, maybe even authority, over our own consumption.
What I liked about making my own pasta is what I still like about making food on my own: I developed an intimacy with an ingredient that I assumed was an ingredient on it's own. I thought pasta was pasta and didn't bother to think about what (or who) made pasta. Learning that the "ingredient" was composed of other ingredients instantly allowed me to think about eggs and flour, about how they also come from something else that I could learn more about.
This marked the beginning of my fascination with flour and flour types, with grains and how grains are grown. Since making this egg pasta, I've reached out to other types of pasta made from different grains and flours. I've also educated myself about flour components and how flour types influence a recipe in structure, texture, flavor, and aesthetics.
I don't know how this alters my understanding of a new kind of femininity, a new kind of domesticity, or any of the issues my mother was dealing with. I do, however, think that the idea that cooking is akin to knowledge, to making, and to having authority is affecting my understanding of what it means for me to be a woman. More importantly and more simple to unravel, I'm glad I've broken a pattern of sorts. I'm glad I've developed a camaraderie with food that was broken by my grandmother and isolated from my mother. Participating with food and food making has let me separate myself from the poor body image my grandmother and mother struggled with and it's let me enjoy the range of sensory experiences eating offers.
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For a great post and recipes about homemade pasta, check out Leite's site
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