What We Talk About When We Talk About Gnocchi

This is not a guide to making gnocchi. This is not a review of gnocchi that I’ve eaten, that I’ve made, that I’ve experienced. This is about one time, the first time, that I made gnocchi.

But first, let’s go back.

The year is 2016. I’m twenty, two years into a relationship that’s about to fail catastrophically, Obama is still in office. Trump jokes are still funny because we are all unprepared for the political realities that are just starting to crest over the horizon. In my eyes all I can see is the misguided ignorance of somebody who thinks that the world makes sense. Maybe it did then, but life, as we knew it, was going alright by any means, and I was hungry. At this point in my life I had been living on my own for less than a year. My diet consisted most of McDonald’s, overcooked cheap cuts of beef, and the occasional bag of raw carrots. But none of that was on the menu this night, I was trying to impress.

Cooking for somebody for the first time is scary, to say the least. You shoulder the enormous responsibility of feeding somebody for the night, it is just as much their meal as your own. What’s on the line isn’t some self important notion of cooking good food for good food sake, but somebody’s tastebuds. The only thing standing between a good time and an uncomfortable time is your food (and probably some other factors but the food is an important start).

Now for the gnocchi.

This is the face of somebody who thinks that he has just been defeated by a pound of potatoes and a few cups of flour. At this point in the process gnocchi as I imagined it was out of the picture. The dough was shaggy, unkneadable, dry, and I was heart broken. Thoughts of “Isn’t gnocchi supposed to be easy to make?” and “let’s just order in.” were dangerously floating around my mind like mirages in the desert. I was lost, going through the motions of kneading just to show my trust to the process. All that I could hope for was that maybe my girlfriend might be understanding of my failure.  Then like mana from heaven, a breakthrough in the form of water.

Turns out properly hydrated dough is pretty important to making gnocchi, a fact which seems obvious now and maybe should have been obvious then but which nevertheless eluded me until I watched a video on Youtube to explain what was going wrong.

Finally I could get my dough rolled out into strips and form the individual dumplings. My hands were unaccustomed to the proper technique needed to create perfectly shaped gnocchi on the back of a fork. I am no Nonna and any self respecting Nonna would have kicked me out of the kitchen after seeing me fumble around trying to create anything vaguely shaped like gnocchi.

There’s a strange feeling that comes over you when you when you cook for somebody for the first time. If all goes well you eat and talk and realize that none of the struggles that went into making the food really mattered. The joy of cooking for somebody else comes from watching them enjoy the fruits of your labor. There is no deeper happiness than sitting down to share a meal with people that you care about. Even if it’s not perfect.

 

-Tim Caston