Forging Health and Heritage

We unwittingly ingest a lot of plastic. Aside from hidden amounts that leach into every pore of our petroleum-based lives, the stacks of peeling non-stick cooking utensils in any thrift store are an obvious visual confirmation.

Too convincing to ignore, evidence about the hazards of consuming synthetic polymers is reviving an appreciation for all-metal cookware that endures, and can even improve, through generations of use. Of course, ingested metal is not always benign.  A classic example is the likelihood that lead leached from water pipes and pewter wine goblets caused the insanity that helped to end the Roman Empire. And everyone today should be aware of hazardous mercury levels in seafood.

Parmesan Cheese Kettle - Bra, Italy

Many common metals, though, are proving to be the best choice for use in the kitchen, especially those that are a natural part of the human body. A growing food safety awareness is polishing the gleam on copper cookware for its inherent microbial properties which is old news to traditional Parmesan and Gruyere cheesemakers who may still be using the same copper production kettles their ancestors forged generations ago.

Credit: Blu Skillet

Blending art with utility, hand crafted metal cookware casts its beauty on everyday life. For artisan level producers, such as Blu Skillet Ironware in Seattle's Ballard district and Brooklyn Copper Cookware in Brooklyn, New York, the greatest challenge has been keeping pace with customer demand.

Credit: Brooklyn Copper

Brooklyn Copper Cookware (BCC) was deluged with orders soon after it opened near the abandoned site of America's last great copper cookware manufacturer, the Bruno Waldow Company.

In response, BCC expanded its business model through partnerships with other artisan coppersmiths and expects to soon launch a new chapter in the history of hand made American cookware. The BCC website is brimming with reverence for the art of heirloom kitchen tools.

For those looking to try their own hand at working metal, the Farm to Table concept outlines a logical path for learning the craft. Start with simple (and forgiving) garden tools before taking on the more demanding pots and pans.

Every Summer in Montana, brothers Mark and Dennis Van der Meer of Bad Goat Forest Products offer affordable workshops on forging your own garden tools.  The Van der Meers are thorough but entertaining instructors with a contagious passion for metal work. Even the distraction of earning advanced degrees in various sciences didn't pull them away from the hammer and anvil. The Farm Hack video below is an overview of a typical workshop experience.

Durable handcrafted metal tools for the kitchen and garden are a bridge between preserving our heritage and sustaining our future. In the present, they are the essence of timeless pleasure.

Copper Cais ~ The Milk of Ireland Ripened in the Heart of Butte

Veronica Steele

In 2010, I took a break from work in the digital world to explore the ancient, multi-sensory realm of artisan cheesemaking.

While employed as a cheesemonger at Cowgirl Creamery in Northern California's Point Reyes Station, I read an article in Culture magazine about County Cork and Irish farmhouse cheesemakers on the Beara Peninsula who make a variety of “washed-rind” cheeses with a distinctive red hued rind. It struck me that the color much resembled that  of smelted red copper which is the economic mainstay of Butte, Montana, where I grew up.

The Irish immigrants who worked in the copper mines of Butte more than a hundred years ago mostly came from County Cork. Thinking it would be wonderful to introduce Butte to this savory variation of copper, I wrote to Veronica Steele of Milleens Cheese in Eyeries, Ireland, and asked about her willingness to teach cheesemaking classes during An Ri Ra 2013, Butte’s annual Irish Festival. Her response opened a whole new understanding for me about the Butte - County Cork connection.

Hi, Cynthia, It would be amazing to go to Butte, Montana to conduct a class. This area of Ireland has huge connections to Butte. It's spoken of as though it were the next village. If you ever get the resources together, I'll be over in a shot! Best wishes, Veronica

Allihies Copper Ends - Butte Copper Begins

 Allihies, Ireland

Everyone with Irish ancestry in Butte grows up hearing about County Cork, but no common mention is made about the bulk of Irish miners coming from Allihies, a small copper-mining village on the southwestern reaches of the Beara Peninsula.

Beara Ancestry Record

Copper mining began in Allihies as early as the Bronze Age. In the Industrial Era of the 1800's, it became a full-scale commercial production.  Then, in the 1870's, the veins began to play out just as the Copper Kings in Butte, half a world away, were getting started.

With enticement from copper barons like Marcus Daly, the exodus of miners from Allihies seemed to take place overnight. Veronica's comment about Butte being "spoken of as though it were the next village" was no exaggeration. This story captured my imagination. Six months later I was seated with Veronica at a table in her house, enjoying Milleens Cheese and learning about the very people I knew while growing up.

Midway through our visit, Veronica and her husband Norman introduced me to volumes of Beara family histories compiled by Riobard O'Dwyer.  Called "My Ancestors (Annals of Beara)", the words "Butte, Montana" echoed through the pages like a supplication. That day, Veronica and I outlined a nascent plan, called the Copper Cais Project. Cais is the Gaelic word for cheese. Given that the most common association to Ireland in Butte is about alcohol, we intended to diversify that bond with the addition of fine food.

The Milk of Ireland Ripened in the Heart of Butte

From Allihies, I went straight to Butte and began laying the foundation for Veronica to conduct cheesemaking and cultural history classes there the next year. As a long-term economic incentive, we also proposed to experiment with using an old Butte copper mine as an aging cave for cheese made in Ireland. Abandoned mines have been used successfully as aging caves throughout the world so this was an achievable dream. In fact, our slogan - The Milk of Ireland Ripened in the Heart of Butte - had the ring of a perfect marketing campaign.

I built a project website, made arrangements for Veronica's classes, and even scouted an old Butte mine shaft as a possible affinage site. Back in Ireland, Veronica researched ways to bring her cheese through customs without fear of confiscation. All was proceeding on target until fate took control of our plan. Less than a year after I met Veronica, she developed Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), a fatal neurological disease. Though we tried to move forward with modifications, it was soon obvious that our vision was no longer possible.

Veronica and I kept in touch over the internet as she survived a few more years. Despite extreme physical and psychological challenge, she remained an active member of her family and community. Cheesemakers from around the world paid ongoing tribute to her.

Of course, I felt deep disappointment at the loss of a new and magical friendship with Veronica whose depth and force of capability created an international legacy, all from a remote farmhouse on an ancient island; and of the opportunity to share her inspiration in the place where I grew up. But the insight to be gained from such turns lies in appreciating the voyage from a wider view.

Locations at the outer reaches of Ireland are served by infrequent public transportation. Most people simply rely on car rides with others. So Veronica and Norman arranged for me to stay overnight in their daughter's house in Allihies before returning to Cork City. (The Steele family, by the way, personifies the kind of relationship that will only be an aspiration for most of us.)

North Star beckons to Allihies

In a small village with no artificial night light, Polaris shone bright above the black horizon of the North Atlantic. It called my attention to the West, and I saw what they once saw, those ancestors who braved their way from Allihies to Butte. The phrase "beacon of hope" will never have a more fitting rendition in my mind.

Now I'm taking this experience to life through animation.  The working title is CopperMind.  Let the stars be my guide.

Making Pasta in Bologna

Fresh Laid Italian Eggs

Fall was the season for holiday food preparation in my mother’s Italian family. Raviolis were the centerpiece. Through October and most of November we made hundreds of them. All rolled, stuffed, and closed by hand on a massive kitchen table.

In 2013, I decided to deepen my childhood ravioli memories during a trip through Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region and registered to attend an official pasta making school in Bologna, the place even Italians recognize as the source of authentic Italian cuisine.

Cooking schools are an industry in Bologna and are plentiful since just offering lunch in a home kitchen could qualify. Visitors looking for particular experiences, especially with time and money constraints, should do as much research as their satisfaction level demands.

Francesca Prepares Dough

Being on a limited budget, value was a significant part of my decision mix. But I also wanted to "live" the culture of an Italian kitchen.  So I chose the Vecchia Scuola Bolognese primarily because of its very affordable five day immersion course, allowing me to spend an entire workweek absorbing the sights, sounds, and sensations I craved.

Minimum research suggestions:

• Identify your parameters for the experience, including cost, location, and particular food interests
• Use guide books, magazines, and a variety of Web resources in your research.
• Pare down candidates using available reviews. Interact with reviewers whenever possible.
• Correspond directly with the schools by email or even by phone. This can assure you that the school is still operating, will give you a sense of their customer service standards, and help you to better understand important details such as payment options.
• Finally, as a general rule of travel, be open to making the best of whatever actually happens.

Ancient but Accurate Scale

I didn’t fully appreciate Vecchia Scuola Bolognese as a serious culinary production and training facility until I arrived. They do offer a casual half day tourist course with lunch included, but their primary students are those beginning or extending professional careers in Italian pasta and pastry making.

The five day course I took is actually considered the first step toward earning the school's three month professional culinary certification. Vecchia Scuola is also an ongoing pasta production facility supplying food establishments throughout the region. Students are expected to practice their skills creating usable product. Nothing is wasted. What may not be “beautiful” enough for sale to an outside client will certainly be used in the school's student staffed Trattoria.

Basic Riccota Filled Tortelloni

I paid for the class about six months before my trip. Arrangements such as available course times and dates were made through email in both Italian and English, using Google translate when necessary. Payment was sent and confirmed via an international wire transfer made through my bank.

My hotel in Bologna, Albergo Rossini, was a short portico covered walk from the Vecchia Scuola. Class started at 9 AM and lasted about four to five hours. The only new students on the day I started were myself and a twenty-four year old Israeli pastry chef who had just completed a four month certification in gelato making. He was planning to open his own cafe on a beach in Tel Aviv.

Alessandra Spisni (shown above in a screenshot from their website) is the unifying force of Vecchia Scuola. Though she was traveling outside of Bologna during the time I were there, signora Spisni was none the less a constant presence in the many attractive product displays throughout the school. Alessandra Spisni and her entire family are endowed with an insatiable appetite for life.

Maestro Allessandro

The signora's brother, Alessandro, casually oversees the culinary school by correcting students with warnings lightly disguised as jokes. Much of his work day was spent enjoying food, family and friends. 

Our actual teacher was an impressive twenty-seven year old Sicilian woman named Carla.  She is the real head and heart of day to day pasta instruction and production at Vecchia Scuola. Alessandro even acknowledged this fact by joking about how often he loudly called her name. (CarrrrLLA!!)

Carla Instructs a Student from Texas

Fluent in four languages with a graduate degree in Cultural Anthropology, Carla led an ever changing group of students through various levels of instruction while managing overall production (rolling sheets of perfect pasta herself), quality control, and distribution for Vecchia Scuola.

During a break, I asked Carla how she chose pasta making rather than pursuing a career in her degree. She told me that she came to Vecchia Scuola to do a cultural research project then discovered she both enjoyed the physical exercise of the work and had a natural talent for it. Signora Spisni offered her a job. Carla took it, still loves it, and sees no reason that will change.

Filei Calabresi ~ Our First Pasta

Culinary Cathedral

The Israeli pastry chef and I were given official aprons, assigned lockers, oriented to the work space, and began making pasta alongside more advanced students.

We started with a batch of Filei Calabresi, a simple pasta made with just water and flour rolled by hand into a hollow tube that embraces any sauce. Using a classic industrial scale, we weighed rather than measured all ingredients. Weight, even for liquids, makes it easy to accurately increase or decrease the size of a recipe. We got a feel for how to properly knead dough and assess its readiness for rolling.

Tortelloni in Process

The most exciting part of the process was using long wooden rolling pins or poles, called matterellos, to flatten the dough. In the video at the end of this post, Carla uses a matterello to roll a double volume of dough into a translucent gossamer sheet, closely resembling fine cloth, in less than five minutes.

Both the matterello and table must be made of wood. Marble and stainless steel are too cold for pasta making. In contrast, wood warms the dough as it is worked and the grain imparts a surface texture that better holds sauces and condiments to the pasta.

Dried Spinach Tortelloni

At the start of this post I mentioned that making ravioli was my reason for taking the class. And we did make one batch of ravioli at Vecchia Scuola. But what we produced every day in quantity was tortelloni, the much larger version of tortellini.

Bologna is known for its tortelloni, pasta with a big stuffed "belly" that brings to mind the city's Medieval nickname, "La Grassa" (The Fat).  Of course tortelloni is much more popular than ravioli in Bologna!

One fundamental variation between types of stuffed pasta is the thickness of the dough. Tortelloni requires pasta that is as thin as possible because of its many layered folds.  On the other hand, ravioli doesn't have any folds and needs to be slightly thicker to hold stuffing in place with just crimping around the edges. I may not have made many ravioli at Vecchia Scuola, but I did gain a deep reverence for the skill and talent of handcrafting this seemingly simple food.

For those wanting to experiment for themselves, we used the basic recipe below for all variations of stuffed and flat pasta. A large wooden rolling pin can sufficiently flatten the dough but it's actually the length of the mattarello that makes it fun (and an art) to use.

There are no handles on a mattarello.  It moves with pressure applied from the palm of your hands, pushing and pulling like a massage as they move back and forth across the entire length of the pin. Yes. It is sensual. Lacking a real mattarello, a two inch diameter dowling, thirty-six inches long, sanded and bleached, will work.

Have fun making pasta! Even the mistakes are edible.

Basic Filled Pasta Recipe for +/- 100 Tortelloni Ingredients are measured by weight so the recipe can easily be scaled for quantity.
Pasta	Filling
Ingredient Ratio: 100 grams of "00" Flour per 50 grams of liquid. Liquid can be water, egg, broth, or a cooked vegetable such as spinach or mushroom. One shelled egg = 50 grams (Should be weighed if very large or small) 50 grams of cooked spinach = one egg.  The following mixtures allow for additional 50 grams of flour during kneading. Plain Pasta 6 eggs and 550 g flour Spinach Pasta 6 eggs, 50 g cooked spinach, 650 g flour  To Mix Form the flour into a bowl shape on the table.   Place liquids in the center of the flour. Gently blend flour into liquid. Knead until dough forms and stickiness is gone. Add flour as necessary.  Wrap kneaded dough in plastic. Let dough rest at least one hour before rolling.	Quantity Ratio:  Filling Weight = Dough Weight 1.5 kilos Ricotta (cow) 200 grams grated Parmesan cheese 20 grams salt (to taste)  1 Egg Nutmeg to taste
Roll dough into a sheet carefully but quickly to avoid drying. Cut rolled sheet into one inch squares. Place a dollop of filling into the center of each square. Fold dough corner to corner into a triangle over the filling. Squeeze the bottom tips of the triangle together to form a tortelloni shape. Practice often and eat your work!