Serving Function

Those persons who fervently read food magazines know about pasta-making and may have taken the journey to a foreign country to see how pasta is made by machine and by hand. For those persons who have not taken the journey (usually as part of a luxurious vacation package), this experience is paralleled back home by taking a field trip to a local processing plant featuring the region's claim-to-fame food product(s).

There are people who attempt to handily craft food that is more efficiently produced by machine. To be such a person, one has to be a hobbyist--or for lack of a better word, a dilettante. To craft successfully, the hobbyist/dilettante must function as the laborer while transforming the service connotations associated with the work from a pedestrian mentality to that of an artisan/artist.

While I have taken field trips over the course of my life, I have yet to journey overseas to a ready-making plant--in particular for pasta production. I have, however, attempted to produce home-made pasta: practicing the alchemy/chemistry of combining flour with water, cranking the concoction into strands that have resulted in spaghetti cords and sometimes in linguini threads. I have rolled and cut pasta that sometimes resulted in leather-shoe durum dumplings, and sometimes in silky semolina ravioli. I have created gnocchi that has disintegrated in boiling water, and I have created gnocchi that has melted in my mouth.

So, when making pasta, functionally I am somewhere in between hobbyist and dilettante, service-wise between pedestrian and artisan/artist.

Oh, the frustrations of being middle class!!!