In this workshop we will work with a naturally colored egg-based pasta dough using wild and cultivated spring greens to learn handmade pasta techniques. We will explore the poetic and sculptural potential of the material as a means to better understand the relationships between form, material, body, and landscape inherent to cuisine. The workshop will begin with a talk to orient materially and theoretically, then collectively make and shape the dough, and end the workshop by cooking and tasting our creations with dinner prepared by Adriana.
The goal is not to become an expert pasta maker, but to develop through practice a critical understanding of a kind of traditional labor and its embedded histories. Pasta, or any traditional food-craft, can serve to cultivate an awareness of labor that conditionally includes the landscapes and ecologies that produce the raw ingredients as well as the people who perpetuate the tradition and the surrounding culture. In making pasta, we can ask how engaging with traditional food-ways produces and re-produces relations between individuals or between humans and nature.
Learning Outcomes
– Learn foundational handmade pasta techniques with an emphasis on colored and flavored doughs.
– Situate cuisine within broader ecologies of labor and conceptions of territory.
Program
– Introductory talk
– Introduction to the pasta dough and coloring techniques
– Kneading, rolling, filling, and shaping techniques
– Collective shaping
– Dinner
Resources
– A digital home for the contents of the workshop and additional resources.
– A primer on the theoretical underpinnings of the workshop.