As a child growing up in northern New Jersey, pasta was my comfort food. My dad made spaghetti with meat sauce once a week religiously. He prepared the same sauce recipe and cooked two full pounds of dried spaghetti for our family of four, and, by gosh, we always polished it off. To this day, my sister and I still pull out his hand-written recipe when we need a dose of nostalgia and a remembrance of our dear deceased dad.
Though pasta runs deep in my childhood memories, there’s no Italian blood in my veins. My dad, a Florida native, could trace his ancestry no further than North Carolina in the 1600s. And my mother was born in Manhattan to Estonian immigrant parents shortly after their Ellis Island arrival. Neither barbecue nor borscht (nor any other North Carolina or Estonian staple) captured my heart. But I did feel a deep calling to build a career in food. And, specifically, a life built around pasta. In 2013, I followed my passion for Italian cuisine to culinary school at the ALMA Scuola Internazionale di Cucina Italiana in Parma, Italy, and a job in the kitchen of a Michelin–starred restaurant in Puglia.
While living in Italy, I gained a reputation as la ragazza americana pazza (the crazy American girl) who loves to make pasta. It started when I was learning to make orecchiette (the famous “little ear” pasta from Puglia) from Chef Maria Cicorella at her restaurant, Pashà, in Conversano. The home-cook-turned-Michelin–starred chef taught me how to scrape the semolina-water dough flat and carefully form it over my thumb just the way she – and every woman in her family – had been doing her whole life. It felt so intimate and generous, this window into a long history of tradition and daily practice. I asked her if I could make pasta with her family outside of the restaurant. Maria welcomed me into her home, then her sister Enza welcomed me into her home, and then I just kept showing up with my lousy Italian and eager smile ready to knead and scrape and shape noodles as long as these southern Italian nonne (grandmothers) would have me.
On a rare day off from restaurant work, Maria suggested I take a drive down to the southern point of the Puglia peninsula. She had a friend who owned a restaurant in Alezio that she thought I might like. I drove deep down into the Salento region, to a tiny town off the tourist path, and parked my Fiat rental outside of Le Macàre restaurant. Before I could even get out of the car, I saw a couple of women about my age running down the street to greet me. When I asked them how they knew it was me, they explained that they knew all the other people and cars in town so a new face and vehicle must mean la ragazza americana pazza had arrived.
They quickly embraced me and started rattling off greetings in Italian while they ushered me to the restaurant porch. There, gathered around a large table, were about a dozen people. In the center of the group were two grandmothers from town dressed in their finest Sunday clothes and jewelry. Each woman had a pile of flour in front of her. They looked up at me, still with my overnight bag slung over my shoulder, and said, “Pronti per fare la pasta?” (“Ready to make pasta?”)
They showed me their quirky ways, educated me in pasta dogma, and bickered over differences in pasta-making minutiae. We laughed and worked and swapped stories and ate and drank and just smiled at each other as we experienced these unlikely moments. And that’s where I found my calling – a devotion to the practice, the craft, the history, the moments connecting and making something together, and the culture created when you prepare and share it all. Many years later, my friend Colin Ruel helped me put all of this into one word: pastaculture.
I bummed around southern Italy for a while longer, meeting families and sharing in any part of their culinary traditions they’d have me for – I harvested olives off hundred-year-old trees; processed tomatoes into passata; stretched fresh, hot mozzarella curds; and kept making pasta with anyone who invited me into their house.
I got the call that it was time to move back when my dad got his cancer diagnosis in 2014. Once stateside, I landed my dream job at America’s Test Kitchen in Boston. I got to develop and test recipes for Cook’s Country magazine, cookbooks, and two television shows during the week, and be with my parents – who had moved to the Island full-time in 2004 – on the weekends. After five years at this amazing food-media paradise, my father had passed away and my mother’s health was quickly deteriorating. It was time to settle down full-time on the Island. Through all the changes, losses, births, grief, and joy of life unfolding, I just kept making pasta. I taught my kids how to make pasta. I taught friends. I taught classes at The FARM Institute in Edgartown, libraries, and schools. And I kept spreading pastaculture.
Eventually, that passion grew into Martha’s Vineyard Pasta. I first set up shop under the name KL Pasta and sold handmade pasta shapes, such as orecchiette and cavatelli, at the Edgartown Village Market in its first year of operation, the summer of 2023. The following year, I got a temporary spot at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market, changed my company name to Martha’s Vineyard Pasta, and invested in an extruder (a heavy-duty machine imported from Italy that kneads dough and forcefully pushes it through a bronze die to make noodles – I still hand cut each noodle off the machine, but the extruder vastly increases production capacity) so I could make my favorite noodle – bucatini, a shape that can only be extruded. The Island was so supportive, and people generously bought just about every strand of pasta I could produce.
My parents had taken me to the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market almost every week throughout my childhood as an Island “summer kid,” so being a vendor there was truly a dream come true. I knew that my spot from 2024 wouldn’t exist in future summers unless the market, which strictly upholds the farmer-to-non-farmer ratio dictated by their bylaws, gained more farm vendors. So, I made a truly unlikely pivot at the end of last season. I decided to become a pasta farmer. I couldn’t grow semolina wheat, but I sure as heck could raise chickens for eggs to use in my dough. I read as much as I could about entry-level chicken farming, talked to Island farmers, attended workshops, and invested in a giant coop.
I have volumes to learn about this new farming life. I find myself with two little kids, a bunch of chickens, multiple extruders from Italy, a commercial kitchen in Edgartown, pasta-making classes around the Island, and freelance recipe writing for cookbooks and magazines, including the recipes on the following pages. It’s busy and it’s messy and it’s complicated and it’s beautiful. It’s all pastaculture.
The following recipes were originally published along with this article:
Bucatini and Seafood al Cartoccio
