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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 an exchange student.
Over the years, I’ve stayed in touch with my host family, the Bernabes, who live in a village near Cremona called Pieve San Giacomo. I’d intended, in fact, to see them this spring, at least before the travel bans snuffed out those plans. Yet for a couple of weeks during the coronavirus outbreak, I’d been unsuccessful in reaching them via WhatsApp. I grew more and more fearful. So many people were dying, particularly older people in Lombardia — the region hit the hardest, with almost two-thirds of Italy’s COVID-19 deaths. I worried about Anna, the family matriarch, who is now in her 80s.
Finally, I received a message from Daniela, Anna’s daughter — images of the Torrazzo of Cremona, the city’s famous 14th-century brick tower, lit in the red, white, and green of the Italian flag. This was followed by a sober video of Cremona’s overwhelmed hospital ward. Then, “Hugs to everyone. Who knows when it is over…we are still…
