In Troubled Times, Make Your Memories as Best You Can
I couldn’t get my hands on 00 flour, but I still made marubini
Of course there is no 00 flour, you asshole.
That’s not what the guy who answered the phone at Whole Foods said to me. Actually, he was exceedingly polite. Too polite. Yes, he understood that 00 flour was a specific flour for making homemade pasta. Yes, during normal times — when, say, there was not a deadly pandemic — the store certainly always stocked 00 flour.
“It’s just that there’s a shortage of all flour right now, sir,” he said. “We don’t even have, you know, like, basic white all-purpose flour. The shelves are completely empty.” He apologized and I thanked him and hung up the phone. It was a ridiculous request. People were dying and I already had a bag of semolina flour in my pantry, for fuck’s sake.
Like everyone else, I’ve had a difficult time processing the complex cocktail of emotions during the isolation: the anxiety, the fear, the hopelessness, the powerlessness, the loneliness. But also the sudden manic need to do something, anything, to make the bad feelings go away. Which is why on the third Sunday of the lockdown, I impulsively decided to make an elaborate, traditional stuffed pasta from Lombardia called marubini — one I’d first eaten three decades ago as…
