Tiralo Fuori Sull’impasto

Tiralo Fuori Sull’impasto 13 MINUTE READ

“I just thought it might be nice, you know, rather than surviving on Jeannie’s robust but diminishing array of leftover vittles, to charge once more onto the culinary battlefield,” Francis said as he unpacked the paper bags from the grocer’s. “Although I do always forget on larger shops it would behoove me to go in frock. Certainly someday we shall live in a time when a gentleman might stock his own larder well without the judgment of little old ladies, who, for some bloody reason, don’t believe I should know the difference between rosemary and thyme.”

“I never noticed judgment on my trips,” Richard commented from the kitchen doorway. His instinct was to help, but he contented himself to watch his spouse place cans and jars of various things on the counter with no apparent relationship to each other: olives, lye, anchovies, two packets of tea cookies, tomatoes in oil, starch, white cherries, four bundles of herbs.

“That,” Frankie said, turning just enough to point at Richard over his shoulder, a tin of corned beef in his other hand, “is because you are too handsome to be judged. Someone’s dowager aunt catches sight of you, all she can likely think, is, ‘there goes a sculpted god of mercy, picking up supplies for an orphanage or something, wish he would pop in at the quilting circle,’ and, meanwhile, there I am looking like a bewildered—oh, hello.”

Richard, flushed to the ears, laid his chin on Frankie’ shoulder and gave the man a slight squeeze with the arms now wrapped around his waist. “Stop. If a grandmother judged you, it was based on conceiving what meal you could make with… Borax and olive oil?”

“It’s not all for dinner,” Frankie protested, shaking with suppressed laughter. He pressed a hand to Richard’s to keep them clasped against his waistcoat as he fished in the pocket. “Here, look, Jeannie already had part of a list. Picking up a few things for her was one of the conditions of my use of the facilities this evening while she and Miss St. Claire take in a show— as well as your presence, of course, my dear.”

Richard hmmed as he took the folded piece of scrap paper from his spouse and inspected it, then set it aside to sort the purchases one-handed. Two more logical piles emerged: one of household sundries, and one of pricier imported Italian products. “This does make more sense. You’re making…”

“You can’t guess?” Frankie teased. He pointed to each item in the ‘dinner’ pile in turn. “Oil, garlic, tomatoes, capers, I think those are, anchovies, pitted black olives, and of course the parsley, marjoram, oregano, and basil.” At Richard’s continued silence, he huffed. “It’s puttanesca, clearly! Georgie used to make it when we were all frantically revising at the end of term, claimed it was so simple even I couldn’t foul it up, but was never brave enough to test the theory. Tonight, however, we shall see once and for all! I have high hopes, now that you’ve shown me how to adjust the heat on the stove. And to use oil when putting things in hot pans. And not to start reading partway through when I grow bored.”

“Puttanesca,” Richard repeated. He stared at the array of ingredients and pressed his lips together tightly for a moment to keep from barking out a laugh, then cleared his throat. “I see. And… you have everything you need?”

Frankie rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ll of course be borrowing an apron, and I’ll need to get down one of those large pots from the hanging rack, there, a task which I hoped you might find it in your heart to assist me with, and I assume I’ll also require the services of some sort of… spoon…”

“That’s a good start,” Richard offered, helpfully. “Anything else?”

“Now you’re just teasing me, and I won’t stand for it!” Frankie chided. “If this is an allusion to some esoteric, ostensibly superior New York version of the dish, you cannot possibly expect me to have stumbled upon the secret ingredient through sheer happenstance, whether it be, in fact, Borax, or, or…” His eyes finally settled back on the gathered ingredients. “Pasta. I forgot the pasta.”

Richard squeezed his spouse close and hid a smile against his neck. “I love you.”

“How did I forget pasta?” Frankie groaned, turning in Richard’s arms to hide his own face in the taller man’s chest. “How, I ask you? It’s the only thing holding Italian national identity together besides football and fascism. Good Lord…”

“It’s fine,” Richard assured him. “We have what we need here.”

“Oh, good, Cyrus or Jeannie already laid some in?” Frankie asked, stepping back to glance around at the many, many cabinets in the finely-appointed kitchen. “If I recall correctly the dish uses longer, thicker noodles, though I would take a spaghetti noodle and say cheers, of course, given present circumstances.”

Richard didn’t open upper cabinets. He bent and opened one where stranger kitchen gadgets were stored beneath a counter, retrieving something that looked like a miniature printing press and clamping it to the counter. “Cyrus makes and dries the pasta Jeannie uses. We won’t need the patterned cutter rollers he uses for that, however. Linguine can be done with a knife.”

Frankie blinked, rapidly, as Richard made his preparations. “You… you can’t simply make pasta, it’s… I mean, it’s grown, isn’t it? The Italians sort of… farm it?”

Richard stared back at his spouse. Then he pointed to the icebox. “Eggs, please.”

Frankie dutifully retrieved the egg basket, then flour as directed, finishing by pulling out a pair of aprons for them. He stared skeptically as Richard tied his on and set about dumping a small mound of flour on the countertop. “Are— Are you not going to use the measuring cups? Or a bowl? This hardly seems precise.”

“Pasta,” Richard said, scooping a crater into the mound of flour, “is something you make by feel. Crack an egg for me? Yes, right into the flour.”

Trying to recall just how Richard did it, Frankie tapped the egg on the edge of the counter to crack the shell, and tried letting the yolk and white drop in neatly as he separated it with thumb and first two fingers. Richard smiled as he fished out the bit of shell that got in, and Frankie did better with the second egg. Using a fork, Richard whisked the whites and yolks together.

“You try to pick up some flour with each pass,” he explained, his scarred hands working gently and precisely, the right whisking the egg, the left knocking a little bit of extra flour from the sides of the crater in to thicken the forming dough. “Then, once it’s too thick to whisk…”

Frankie leaned on the counter, transfixed, as Richard began scooping the flour from the outside of the mound in, working the dough from a shaggy texture to a smooth, golden ball over the course of ten minutes. Finally, he gestured for a cloth to wrap it with.

“That’s it?” Frankie asked. His voice had grown quiet, a side effect of the hush of the house, empty aside from them, and Richard’s clear concentration as he kneaded.

“It needs to rest,” his husband explained, “then we’ll roll it and cut it.”

“That was… I mean, I suppose it wasn’t ever going to be the food of one thousand steps, or what have you, considering how much of it exists and how many eat it, but that was almost simple, to my eyes,” Frankie remarked. Edging forward along the counter, he asked, “If it can be dried, and will surely be used if excess is made, do you think that I could…?”

Richard smiled and dumped more flour onto what was left of the first mound, then stepped back, gesturing Frankie into his place. The man went eagerly. He was still pressed and proper at the start, but once he rolled up his sleeves, dug the hollow into the flour, and almost immediately got a smudge of flour on his cheek from wiping it with the back of his hand, he looked more at home with the work. Richard cracked the eggs for him and watched as he whisked. He only intervened at the kneading.

“You’re being too gentle,” he said, stepping behind Frankie and sliding his arms forward under his spouse’s to add his hands to the two already working the dough. “It’s flour and egg, it won’t break.”

“You mistake my shoddy work for delicacy, when it’s more testament to my neglect of upper body exercise, my dear,” Frankie said with a laugh, leaning back into his husband as he rocked forward, urging more force into the kneading. “I was never, and shall never be, I fear, a champion rower.”

“I learned to make pasta from a cook in Rome, when I trained as an initiate of the Sanctum,” Richard murmured into Frankie’ ear, voice a steady rumble to the rhythm of their work. “She wasn’t very strong, either, but she was passionate. She told me she saw a lot she didn’t like, in the course of her work, so she would think of it and tiralo fuori sull’impasto. Take it out on the dough.”

Frankie shivered and tried to cover it with a chuckle. “I fear I don’t have the righteous fury of the average Italian woman, either. Suppose you’ll just have to stay here, mmm, and continue to lend your aid?”

Richard snorted but kept moving, rocking forward and back to work the dough, carrying Frankie with him, who by that point had given up all pretense of helping and was all but purring in his husband’s embrace. It took Richard longer than it should’ve to realize what was going on. He sputtered and turned red again. “Really? This?”

“Why not?” Frankie asked, turning again on a lean back to press close and run his hands up Richard’s back, feeling the muscles flex as he kneaded. On the push back in to roll the dough he didn’t give an inch, their bodies subsequently sliding against each other in a way that made Richard’s breath hitch. “You haven’t the slightest idea how attractive you are, just, being perfectly competent and very thorough, do you?”

Richard fumbled for another cloth to wrap the dough as Frankie snaked a hand back around to pull at his collar, kissing the skin he exposed there. “We should start the sauce.”

“The dough needs to rest, doesn’t it?” Frankie teased.

“Fine,” Richard allowed, setting the second covered ball of dough to the side and lifting Frankie up onto the counter with minimal effort. “But I want to note this is a bad idea because of the potential for mess.”

“You’re the one who just dropped my arse in flour!” Frankie said through a laugh, even as he reeled his husband in for a kiss by the apron ties. “Mmm. We didn’t still have need of that, did we?”

“Bench flour,” Richard mumbled, leaning in to deepen the next kiss, almost to the point of climbing onto the counter himself. “Just… put down more, later.”

Frankie nodded as if that were the most sensible thing in the world and yanked the knot out of the apron to work at the buttons on Richard’s shirt. “Jolly good, because I intend to be wearing most of it.”

The dough got a good long rest before their pleasant fumblings grew intense enough Richard’s had more hesitation than heat, and Frankie eased them both back down. Completely breathless and, true to his word, covered in flour, he steadied himself with a tight grip on Richard’s shoulder and gasped, “Mmm, ah, right then, the, er, the… that thing, with the clamp? What’s that for?”

“The…?” Richard shook his head, pulling himself back together. “Right, the roller. It’s… Sorry, you’re just…” He covered his face with a hand to suppress a laugh as he took in Frankie’ state. “The apron didn’t, uh…”

“Oh, help overmuch?” Frankie said, in exaggerated faux-surprise. “You don’t say!” He wiped some of the flour off the side of his face and put a big powdery smudge right across Richard’s nose. “Awful man. I’m dampening a dish towel, tell me about this ‘roller.’”

Richard ducked his head, hiding a smile as his husband walked away much more heavily-floured on the back, and busied himself wiping down the work surface and putting down fresh flour. “You can make pasta with a rolling pin, but it’s a lot of work. Just getting it rectangular to start and feeding it through the roller saves effort getting it to the right thickness.”

“Wonders of modern technology,” Frankie observed, wiping his face down and beating clouds of flour off his trousers with the ends of the dish towel before stepping over to mop Richard up a bit, sealing the gesture with a final peck on the lips. “Except now you’re going to tell me it was actually invented in the Middle Ages, and I’m simply an uninitiated pasta Luddite.”

“Nineteenth century, actually,” Richard said, because of course he knew. He gave the Vitantonio a cursory wipe-down in case of any dust from storage. “I’ll crank if you’ll feed?”

Frankie raised his eyebrows. “How forward.”

“That’s… no.” Richard unwrapped the balls of dough and retrieved a rolling pin to get them into rough rectangles, flouring them generously. Then he took position at the crank with the shaped dough aloft and nodded to Frankie. “You’ll want to support the sheet as I turn the crank. It’ll be very thin, but not perfect yet. Coat it thoroughly with flour for a second feed.”

Calming down and working together, they slowly put their pasta dough through the roller on its widest setting, resulting in a sheet so long Frankie started laughing helplessly halfway through, and Richard had to stop everything to cut it down to more manageable sections. They repeated the process in a gentler echo of the earlier rhythm of kneading until, folded into loose layers, Richard nodded his satisfaction at their work.

“And the last step…” he said, taking up the knife again and studying the layers of thin dough closely to choose the best starting point. He began to cut. He was neither rushed nor hesitant, just precise. With each cut he created a narrow cross-section of the many layers of their dough until at last all were standing but separate. Glancing at Frankie’ impressed expression, he finished with a bit of a flourish, tipping the last section of pasta dough over into the one next to it so that it created a little cascade. The collapsing dough sections unfurled into a heap of linguine noodles.

Frankie burst into applause.

“Don’t look embarrassed, it really is amazing,” he insisted, grinning at Richard as he put undue focus into sprinkling a last bit of flour on the pile and tossing it to coat the finished noodles. “There are so many things you know how to do that leave me baffled, you know, and not just the sort of things I don’t know because I’m a bit of a posh bastard who had maids to make the toast correctly. I mean the sort of things most people don’t know. It’s your own kind of magic, my dear—the things you learnt just because you could.”

“We really should start the sauce now,” Richard deflected, but a smile had managed to make its way onto his face, and Frankie beamed back.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 5/17/2020 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024