A cure for melancolia

Thursday, our first full day here in Fidenza, dawned way too early. Thanks to the nine-hour time change I was wide awake at five in the morning, bone tired after only five or six hours of sleep but unable to burrow back into unconsciousness. This put me on more or less the same sleep schedule that Pam and Romano normally seem to follow, so at 7:45 we ended up going to breakfast with them across the street at La Strega, our favorite cafe.

Danny at La Strega. He was in a good mood as soon as we arrived in Italy.

A lovely cappucino and a brie-and-arugula sandwich on a rich, salty roll chipped away at my jet-lag-induced gloom. So did watching the Italians all around us gab and gesture to each other, with as much panache as if someone had ordered them all to act like Italians.

But what really pried me loose from my nostalgia per la California was going food shopping.

After breakfast Pam and Romano invited us to join them on a walk to the pastificio a few blocks away. Filled pastas are a required feature of most holiday meals here, and our friends were picking up a few kilos of frozen tortelli--the local pasta specialty that looks like slightly undersized ravioli--for Romano's family's Easter dinner. The place was at the end of a rather grubby courtyard we'd walked by hundreds of times without ever noticing the "Gelopasta" sign on the gate. (Gelo means frost.)

Apparently the majority of Gelopasta's customers are restaurants, but they sell to civilians, too. Pam said the pasta isn't perhaps as delicate as in the best restaurants--that is, the ones where Grandma is still in back rolling out the tagliatelle by hand--but the prices are reasonable and the quality is very high.

Gelopasta's production facility, in the back of the courtyard next to all those cars, turned out to be two small, sparkling-clean rooms with a lot of equipment and freezers full of pasta. The business was started in 1978 by two Fidenza matrons named Adele and Paride. Their web site, www.gelopasta.it, boasts that anyone can come in and inspect the place because "our only secrets are Signora Adele's recipes."

The founders' business strategy was to use only high-quality local ingredients and remain true to the area's long-standing culinary traditions. It seems to have worked. "Only this philosophy enabled them to convince people that filled pasta could be bought ready-made," their web site says, "overcoming the general skepticism." Such is Italians' culinary conservatism that they were still wary of ready-made frozen food as late as 1978, decades after Americans began inhaling frozen TV dinners.

The firm offers the two most traditional local versions of filled pasta,  tortelli erbetta (with ricotta and chard) and di zucca (sweet pumpkin). They also make plenty of other things, including tortelli filled with potatoes or truffle-flavored cheese or spalla cotta, a local corned-beef-like specialty, plus round Parmesan-filled anolini, potato gnocchi,  and little nubs of spinach-potato dough called chicche della nonna ("Grandma's goodies"). 

Pam and Romano were buying tortelli erbetta and di zucca for Easter, plus a version with a filling of cheese and culatello, a fancier and vastly more expensive variant on prosciutto di Parma. Danny and I got a half-kilo each of the erbetta and the tortelli di culatello, and a third package of tortelli with a radicchio filling. The radicchio ones had a sell-by date only two weeks hence (everything else is good till sometime in the fall), so they gave us a second half-kilo of those ones for free.

Romano and one of the Gelopasta pastaioli. That's a half-kilo of tortelli he's holding.

We dropped the tortelli off at home, in the freezer. Then Romano drove us out to the big Conad supermarket outside of town, so that we could stock up on some necessities without having to haul them back on foot. Pam and Romano had some shopping to do, too.

Danny and I got some good bread, a chunk of pork for a stew, beautiful carrots and fennel and lettuce, a leek, a cabbage, and some peppers for a vegetable soup, eggs, milk, yogurt, and wine, a total of two large, heavy bags stuffed with good things to eat. I felt a surge of joy. And as I surveyed all the delicacies that we didn't buy--rabbit roasts, hunks of provolone and mozzarella, focaccia with zucchini, beef-tendon salad, big bunches of bitter chicory and sweet chard--I was glad I'd have a whole three months to enjoy as many of them as I can manage. 

That evening we had some of the radicchio tortelli, sauced with an excellent ragu bolognese that Danny had made and stored in the freezer when we were here last. It was a blasphemous combination--these tortelli are supposed to be eaten "drowned in butter," not sparingly anointed with meat sauce--but it was delicious nonetheless. The tortelli lived up to Pam's recommendation, and the two-euro white wine was delicious. So was the salad of startlingly fresh fennel and lettuce.  

Embarassingly enough, this appears to be all it takes to make me happy. I still miss my friends in California and the rest of my life there, and I'm glad I will eventually be going back to them. But the prospect of living in Fidenza for a while now seems thoroughly delightful. How could I have ever thought otherwise?