Random acts of kindness: gnocchi edition

Published 2:21 pm Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Right around Thanksgiving is a good time to think about people who have shown me acts of kindness for no reason other than, well, they’re nice people.

I got to experience one such event this summer.

My wife, Katy King, and I saved up enough that we could take a driving tour of Northern Italy, starting in Venice and meandering through the regions of Tuscany, Umbria and Liguria. It was relaxing and romantic; breathtakingly beautiful, with some of the best food and the best wine of our lives.

We wanted to visit hill villages, which is why we were traveling by car. One such is Montepulciano, in the province of Sienna, in Tuscany. It’s surrounded by vineyards and features a 14th century palazzo comunale, or community palace.

Katy is the world’s greatest vacation sleuth, and she can dig up the most amazing places to stay and to eat on the cheap when we’re in Europe. For this leg of our journey, we stayed in a massive stone-walled house currently owned by the 13th generation of a family. The ground floor of the place is a restaurant called Il Pozzo.

And to give you a sense of how old things are there, the manager, Gionata Gattevecchi, gave us a tour of the first underground level beneath the restaurant, where they store wine bottles; the second underground level, where they store casks and barrels of wine; and the third underground level, where they discovered Etruscan artifacts.

Yeah: Pretty old. More history than, say, the oldest building in the town I was born in, which, if my memory serves, was an A&W root beer joint.

Anyway, after the tour, Gionata seated us where we could see the kitchen and the chef de cuisine, his wife, Lilian. And he informed us that she offer cooking classes.

Now, a kitchen is my happy place. No matter how stressed out I am after a day of work, there’s nothing more therapeutic than doing prep work; chopping, peeling, dicing. There are knifes and fingers in close proximity, which calls for mindfulness and being present. I am never happier than when I’m wearing an apron and stirring a sauce.

I told Gionata that I was heartbroken; we would be leaving Montepulciano in the morning and I wouldn’t be able to take Lilian’s cooking class.

He apparently headed to the kitchen and told her.

You have to understand: the place was packed. We couldn’t see an empty table. That means the chef de cuisine is insanely busy.

About 15 minutes later, we were weeping with joy over the aperitivo and Sangiovese-based wines, like Brunello and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. When Gionata and Lilian stepped out of the kitchen. She began going table to table, greeting regulars and tourists.

And when she got to our table, she beckoned us to stand up and follow her.

I should point out that Lilian apparently speaks no English, and my Italian is dreadful. (I have no ear for languages; I took Russian for three years and can hardly string together two sentences.)

But she led us out to this balcony overlooking the valley; Gionata’s family owns something like 18 hectares of vineyard down there. She’d set up a huge wooden plank, upon which was a lump of dough, a couple of baking sheets, and a bench scraper; one of those go-to gadgets that most cooks own. I do.

She was making a classic: Gnocchi, a kind of Italian dumpling. And a dish that, honestly, I’ve struggled to perfect.

She asked me to move around to her side of the board. I pointed to the dough and, through some miracle, I remembered how to pronounce the word “potato” in Italian. (OK, OK, it’s “patata.” Not exactly a marvel of translation.)

“Si, si,” she said. She was using a potato mix.

She used the sharp edge of the scraper to hack off a bit of dough. She rolled it by hand, using her palms, until she had a long rope of golden dough roughly the diameter of a dime.

Using the sharp side of the scraper, she deftly hacked it into small, pillow-like shapes — the gnocchi. She used the flat part of the scraper to gently lift them onto a baking sheet dusted with flour.

“Double zero?” I asked in Italian. (Again, “doppio zero.” Save your applause.)

“No, no. Riso.”

She was using rice flour, not the finely milled double-zero flour I use for Italian cooking. Rice flour is even more finely milled.

She gently tossed the gnocchi hand to hand. The flour kept them from congealing into one giant lump of potato (as mine have in the past). She placed them delicately on a second baking sheet.

She did it all again.

Then handed me the bench scraper.

As Katy took photos, I bent low, chopped off a hunk of the dough, rolled it out, cut it into pillow shapes — not nearly as deftly as she had. Then she showed me, again, how to cradle the gnocchi and dust them with the flour.

There. I’d created gnocchi, on a windless night, overlooking the Tuscan tranquility, as taught by a master chef.

The lesson maybe took six minutes, tops. But it was six minutes in the life of a crazy-busy chef who has every table full and orders stacking up in the kitchen.

Lilian didn’t have to do that. We weren’t rich patrons or important people. She just wanted to show a stranger a kindness. For no other reason than she could.

Epilogue: I now own rice flour. And I’ve made gnocchi back home in Portland. And it’s pretty perfect.

Katy and I have had the opportunity to see some really wonderful things in Italy, including the art and architecture, the beauty of the farmland and the achingly gorgeous towns and cities.

But that simple act of kindness is the one I’ll be keeping in the back of my mind for the rest of my life.

A kitchen is my happy place. No matter how stressed out I am after a day of work, there’s nothing more therapeutic than doing prep work; chopping, peeling, dicing. There are knifes and fingers in close proximity, which calls for mindfulness and being present. I am never happier than when I’m wearing an apron and stirring a sauce.