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Or, you know, whoever ends up coming to the feast. I actually did this last weekend, I just haven’t had a chance to sit down and post it yet.
So, what do you do if you are mad enough to want to hand make pasta for 90 people. First you need some dough:
The dough doesn’t start out like this of course. First you need to get a large bowl and fill it up with flour and eggs. Then you stick your hands in. This is exactly as sticky as it sounds with a side order of really quite cold too (if your eggs have been in the fridge). I would have taken a picture of this, but I didn’t think of it until I was already wrist deep. The above is the result of about 30 mins solid kneading plus an hour in the fridge. I have already begun to cut it into pieces as you can’t sensibly put a 3+kg lump of dough through a pasta machine in one lump.
By the way, this was only really feasible because it is for a feast. If I was making a meal’s worth of pasta for 90 people I would need about four times as much and I don’t think I could knead that by hand.
Next you need a pasta machine, and a willing helper
Actually, you don’t entirely need a helper. In fact, once the helper got bored and wandered off, the process became mysteriously about 50% faster.
The pasta machine performs its magic (which is a magic that involves a certain amount of elbow grease).
This is one of those small lumps of dough fully rolled out.
At this point you could cut it into squares for lasagne or make ravioli (both period), but for this feast I am making <i>maccheroni</i> or <i>makerouns</i> to give them their Middle English name. This seems to be a fairly generic name for several kinds of pasta in period, but it mostly appears to refer to something like fettucine.
This is so much easier with a pasta machine.
About three hours later….
The pasta is hung up to dry. It sometimes curls up a bit as it does so.
And finally, the pasta is packed away into tubs for storage:
And now for something completely different:
These roses were flowering a little bit when we moved in. We pruned them, and then we had all that rain and they have gone mad!
