First attempt at making Pasta !

Occupation and Activity and Technical Aspects
Today I started on my occupation, I went to Emily's a friend of mine and she taught me to make pasta dough by hand, and then use the pasta machine to stretch and cut the pasta.

To make pasta dough you need

-Water
- Flour
- 1 Egg

Add egg to flour and mix until it turns into dough, then add water as needed. Very simple to do. When the dough mixture is kneaded enough it is ready to put through the pasta machine to stretch it and then after the pasta is stretched you can cut the pasta. The process takes time but once its done it looks great

Next once the pasta is cut, you can cook with it !!!

The purpose of making pasta by hand is to understand that before the pasta machine was invented we had to do all our cooking by hand, it also gives me an appreciation of the food and the time and effort I put into it to turn it into the finished product.

Hand making pasta is both purposeful and necessery. Purposeful as it is hands on and you can use this as therapy, and necessary as not everyone will have a pasta machine and cooking/preparing food is necessary for us humans to survive.

Environment

I learnt pasta making in a home, however you can learn it in a variety of different environments, such as social enviroments with your friends or alone. You can also do the pasta making at a school or educational area. As I was new to making pasta, i had to ask someone to teach me, this was a unfamiliar feeling, as i had to learn and make mistakes. However I can now understand that you would need patience to teach someone this occupation and activity !

Participation barriers and affordances

Due to the fact I had never made pasta i relied on having other people to help me and teach me. I felt that I would have struggled to teach myself and also have felt more frustarted if i had tried to learn on my own as i would have had no support or help if i had made a mistake. There didnt seem to be any barriers, as all the ingrediants are simple and most people tend to have them in their cuboard, however if you didnt have the ingrediants then you could not make the pasta.

Personal Reflection

I learnt so much from making pasta, I didnt realise how long it would take and I realise that it is a awesome stress reliever. I had to learn how to use the pasta machine which was great, and I was proud of my pasta ! Would totally recommend learning to make pasta by hand !

History of Italian cooking

The history of Italian cooking is very interesting to find out about.

"Tracing down the culinary history of Italy we find that it started to make its mark during the Roman Empire movement more than 2000 years ago. The Italians even have a cookbook dating back to the first century B.C which shows how important a place food had in society. The structure of Italy as a country underwent a huge change after the fall of the Roman Empire" (Country facts and information, 2004).

"Italy may be home to the world’s oldest known cookbook. This suggests the potential for unifying characteristics within such diversity. Sometimes attributed to the famous epicure Marcus Gavius Apicius of the first century A.D., the cookbook De re coquinaria (On Cookery) is a collection of hundreds of ancient Roman procedures for preparing dishes. The collection was not so much recipes in the modern sense as they were basic directions for the preparation of ingredients intended for the experienced chef. Apicius, a name generally associated with the love for food, likely accounts for the majority of the cookbook, though the damaged manuscripts preserved from a later century are actually a collection of recipes from numerous sources assembled sometime in the fourth or fifth century A.D. (Internet Source). Other ancient Roman writers--including Cato, Pliny, and Horace--identified early place names and their famous goods, from the wild boar of Tuscany and the onions of Pompeii to the cultivated asparagus of Ravenna and the semolina wheat of Campania (Capatti and Montanari 2003). The lists are extensive and are a clear antecedent of famous regional products that define regions within Italy and are available at specialty import markets internationally today.
The cuisine that developed in Italy during the Middle Ages had a number of cultural origins. These influences were deeply rooted in the peninsula such that by the time the recipes and ideas were circulated in humanist texts and other cookbooks in multiple languages across the continent, Italy was beginning to truly distinguish itself from the other political entities that were also emerging at the time. The manuscripts of Roman writers found their way back into Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, during the Renaissance’s humanist revival of antiquity. But the field of gastronomy may have borrowed less from antiquity than did other intellectual and artistic pursuits of the Renaissance. Renaissance works in gastronomy such as Bartolomeo Sacchi’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Honest Pleasure and Good Health, about 1470) built as much upon the immediate foundations of the Middle Ages as it did classical sources (Capatti and Montanari 2003)".


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbCr73lfsh0


References:

Capatti, Alberto and Massimo Montanari. 2003. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. Aine O’Healy, transl. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Grout, James. 2007. "Apicius" in Encyclopaedia Romana. Accessed: March 14, 2008.

Country facts and information (2004). History of Italian cooking. Retrieved from Country facts : the world at your fingertips: http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/articles/italy/history-of-italian-food/1299
May, Tony. 2005. Italian Cuisine. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press. Redon, Odile, Francoise

Sabban and Silvano Serventi. 1998. The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy. Edward Schneider, transl. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Introduction to PIO 2 !

Welcome to my blog on Italian cooking. This is my first post so will be an introduction. In the following weeks I will be keeping my blog updated on my progress of cooking and will add recipes, photos and information !

I am going to look at a variety of different areas while participating in my new occupation of Italian cooking such as occupation and identity, technical aspects, environment, how i learnt the occupation, participation barriers and affordances and will reflect on what was done.