homecoming rituals

on being your own Nonna

Since June 14th I have barely been at home; just 12 days in ten weeks, according to my calendar. The whole last year has been something of a whirlwind, from launching a debut novel and a short story collection to traversing up and down the country for funerals, births and birthdays—all family and most friends live outside of Scotland—to traveling for work, snatching small writing retreats here and there and actually going on holiday. Even just in this country, I’ve been everywhere from Hastings to Orkney. Coming home after a month away, after about ten months of hectic travel, I was in desperate need of some grounding.

One thing about being away from home is that it really clarifies what brings you pleasure when you’re back. Weekends without plans remain rare (the curse of working in an industry where so many things happen outside of the work week), so a lazy coffee in bed on a Saturday or Sunday morning has started to feel like a gorgeous indulgence. Better if its raining and I can convince a cat to lay at my feet; add a croissant from the bakery round the corner (never fetched by me, for I am lazy) and a book and I’m golden.

For a dinner at home, especially if it’s the first in a while, I invariably want to make fresh egg pasta, taking a couple of hours to meander about with a podcast or some music on, filling the flat with the smells that make me feel like I’m settled—roasting garlic, a tomato sauce, the scent of recently cut olives.

(I feel like a should clarify something here, for people who have known me a long time and are thinking: what the fuck are you doing with eggs? Having been vegan for over a decade, the last two years I’ve been completely wrecked by a stress related digestive issue (not unrelated to all of the above) and have slowly made my way back to being a pescatarian to try and regain some control over what’s going on inside my body. It’s been an adjustment, but I feel fine about it; in fact, it’s been lovely. I was never a massive foodie when I was young, and I went vegetarian at 21 and vegan a couple of years later, so the last year or so has involved me pottering about, eating something very standard and expressing irritating delight to everyone around me. Oh my god, have you tried pecorino cheese? Does everyone else know how amazing a Caesar salad is?)

It’s never quite made sense to me that making your own pasta in this country marks you out as some sort of bougie obsessive. At its heart, pasta is just flour and eggs; even accounting for the tipo 00 Italian flour I get and the nice eggs from our local grocery place, fresh pasta for two people costs a pound to make. Yes, it costs time, but I’ve got time—and really, it’s not actually that much. Five minutes to make the dough, half an hour to rest, and when it’s in the pan it takes two minutes to cook. You could grate in parmesan, butter and black pepper and have an incredible cacio e pepe for probably £2.50 and less than an hour. While you’re waiting for the dough to relax (letting the flour hydrate and the gluten to become more flexible), if you feel so inclined, you can whip up all manner of delicious sauces; tomatoes roasted on the vine and then simply mashed with roasted garlic and balsamic, some capers and olives thrown in; a fresh pesto, almost illegally fragrant; even a proper carbonara if you can get your hands on some Guanciale. What takes time is the rolling out and the cutting. Enter: the pasta machine.

I got my pasta machine as a gift the year before last, but you can get your own for as little as 25 quid, which Google tells me is about half what a microwave costs (we don’t have one). People still act as if having a pasta machine is equivalent to owning a five bedroom house or a yacht—you’ve got a pasta machine?—rather than a relatively affordable and very basic piece of kit that you can use for all manner of things (fresh noodles, cookies, etc). All it really does is roll things flat and thin and cut them into strips.

But you do not need one. If you, like me, love the Pasta Grannies Instagram account, you’ll have seen the many ways in which octo- or nonagenarian Italian women roll out their pasta, seemingly effortlessly, with enormous and inviable rolling pins and grand wooden kitchen tables. This is the ideal, obviously, but your kitchen worktop and and a two quid rolling pin will work fine; I’ve achieved it with a wine bottle before. You don’t even have to be aiming for a particular shape of pasta; I think we stress about getting it ‘right’, as if Italy will invade because Rebecca in Milton Keynes didn’t properly fold a tortellino. But here’s the thing about cooking: you can do what you like. No one can stop you. You can leave your pasta dough thick and cut it into hefty belts; you can roll it out like a snake, snip it into sections and drag the tines of a fork across it. No one will ever know!

For me, the ideal homecoming dinner is this: linguine with roasted tomatoes and garlic, capers, kalamata olives and anchovies, a glass of sangiovese nearby. Or fat strips of pasta tossed with broccoli and a home made pesto. Or, as this last weekend, fettuccine with vegan sausage, fennel, crème fraîche and grana padano, with chilli flakes and fennel fronds on top. All this takes two hours tops, and costs less than a tenner, and the smug factor is off the charts. This is a new ritual; I don’t have an Italian Nonna who taught me to make pasta, who might have welcomed me home after a long trip with a steaming bowl of fresh spaghetti alle vongole or spinach-stuffed ravioli. My grandma was from Rotherham, and she was called Eileen, and she made a hell of a coffee and walnut cake. But the truth of the matter is this: you can make your own rituals, you can find your own pleasure. Your kitchen is your own, and how you welcome yourself back to it—well, that’s up to you.