The Lasagne Lesson
As Valeria effortlessly whisks up a béchamel, then attends to the bolognese, Margherita—who is smaller than her sister but much more voluble, never lighting anywhere for more than a few seconds, talking all the time, explaining everything but with useful energy, not distracting frenzy—pours flour onto the table from a dark yellow paper cone to start making the pasta.
With her fist, she makes a well—no, a crater—in the flour, puts in a handful of spinach (boiled, squeezed as dry as possible, and finely chopped), and breaks eggs with luminous red-orange yolks into a bowl, then scrambles them into the spinach. With exquisite slowness, she works the flour in from the edges of the crater, mixing it gradually with the eggs and spinach, then kneads the dough into a smooth ball with the kind of grace and sureness that comes only from a lifetime of practice. Then she cuts the dough into four pieces and flattens each of them into a disk. These she feeds through her pasta machine, which she cranks with great gusto.
The lasagne go into a pot of boiling salted water and then, when they've just cooked through, into a bowl of cold salted water next to the pot, to stop their cooking (and "so they don't lose flavor," offers Valeria). When they've cooled, the sheets are laid out on clean kitchen towels to dry.
Assembling the lasagne is a matter of real precision. A baking pan is buttered, then lined with the first sheets of pasta, cut to fit the vessel and patched with the scraps; three big spoonfuls of meat sauce are spread on top of it ("Not too much, or the lasagne will be too heavy," counsels Margherita); then a thin layer of grated parmigiano-reggiano is sprinkled on. Then come another layer of pasta, covered with four spoonfuls of béchamel and more parmigiano; pasta, sauce, and cheese; pasta and béchamel; and, finally, a fifth layer of pasta, the last of the bolognese, and still more parmigiano.
The lasagne dish at last goes into the oven, where it bakes until the whole thing bubbles and seethes and the top turns brown. It emerges, looking flatter than I would have imagined but issuing aromas that make our hearts beat fast and our stomachs growl. Valeria and Margherita seem to be anticipating the first taste as much as I am, and I realize that, when they teach, the important thing isn't just the imparting of instructions; their mission is to get finished food on the table and then to sit down and eat it. "Relaxing at the table is a wonderful thing," sighs Margherita, and we tuck in to the lasagne. It is rich and immediately satisfying, with at least as many layers of flavor as there are layers of pasta, sauce, and cheese.
"The Simili sisters," says Marcella Hazan, "do lasagne as it is supposed to be done." As usual, she is absolutely right.
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