The loopy pasta with a long, little-known history

When he first described maccheroni alla molinara to me, I thought for sure something had gotten lost in translation because of my rusty Italian. The name translates to “the miller’s wife’s pasta” and dates back to the mid-14th century, when flour mills were introduced to the valley. The elaborate pasta was presented to King Robert of Naples, the region’s ruler, although I imagine that the millers’ wives also made it for their hard-working husbands.

Still, I just couldn’t picture such a noodle.

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So Marcello took me to see Rosa Narcisi. She and her husband, Domenico Degnitti, run Domus, a small, family-style restaurant high in the hills beyond Bisenti. It has a spectacular view across the valley to the dramatic Gran Sasso mountain range, and almost everything that Rosa cooks comes from their farm.

That afternoon, Rosa gave my daughter, Adriana, and me an impromptu lesson. Maccheroni alla molinara requires only flour, eggs and tepid water. When kneaded together, they yield a soft and supple dough that stretches beautifully.

The noodles are made by hand. You take a bagel-size piece of dough and punch a hole in the middle, then stretch it into a fat ring. You keep working your way around the dough with your hands until the ring is a loop. When the loop is too long to pull with your hands, you place it on a work surface and work your way around it, rolling it into an ever-larger loop. Your aim is to end up with a loop of pinkie-finger thickness, about five feet long (twice that length if it were stretched end to end).

The loop is then wrapped into a loose coil and dusted with flour to keep it from sticking. Once all the dough has been shaped into coils, the noodles are immersed in salted boiling water. As they cook, they often break on their own into fat strands of manageable lengths. The cooked noodles are dressed with an Abruzzese ragu.

After our lesson, we got to enjoy the fruits of our labor, along with more of Rosa’s wonderful food. We all marveled at how tender the noodles were, despite their girth. That, Rosa told us, was due to the amount of water kneaded into the dough, and also to an extra resting period that the dough is given before it is shaped.

I knew I had to shine a light on this pasta in my book. I think of myself as a curator of such recipes: noble ones, from a time when 30-minute meals were not the norm. And I know there are more than a few of us out there who can’t resist a good DIY kitchen project.

In spite of my enthusiasm, I was, once again, skeptical that I’d be able to reproduce maccheroni alla molinara back at home. But my daughter and I managed to roll out those loopy loops successfully on our first try. The process has gotten easier with each subsequent batch. There’s something immensely satisfying about making these perfectly imperfect noodles.

I should have known; if I have learned anything from working on an entire book devoted to pasta, it is this: The key is to relax. Nothing chases away kitchen fears like rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. Making pasta is an intuitive process; it is also imprecise and, most of all, fun.

If you can let go of your skepticism, the secrets are there, waiting to be revealed.

Recipe:

Maccheroni Alla Molinara Domus