The Washington Post - USA (2022-03-27)

SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE F3

— of sharing her secret.

“If we became too selfish, the

tradition will die. I am doing this

to pass it on,” Selis said.

Sardinia sits in the Mediterra-

nean Sea, between Italy and

Algeria. Its geographic condi-

tions and position have made the

island an important wheat pro-

ducer since ancient Roman

times. But although the regions

of Sicily and Campania were

historically known as leading

dry-pasta producers, Sardinia

made the list only recently.

Laura Galoppini, a professor

of medieval history at Pisa Uni-

versity who was studying the

island, stumbled upon 19 cus-

toms records of the city of Cagli-

ari dated between 1351 and 139 7.

The documents, kept in the ar-

chives of the Crown of Aragon in

Barcelona, included detailed

quantities of pasta exported: fi-

deus (similar to penne), macaro-

ns (maccheroni) and obra de

pasta (other kinds of pasta).

Galoppini calculated that

Sardinian producers exported

about 8^1 / 2 tons of pasta in that

period.

“Pasta was a food product

requested by merchants, elites

and sovereigns,” Galoppini said.

The large amount of flour needed

and conservation problems

made dry pasta a luxury product.

If You Go

Su filindeu class

011-39-333-271-6440

facebook.com/sufilindeu.it

This class with Raffaella Marongiu

Selis includes a certificate of

attendance, the recipe for su

filindeu, 0.5 pounds of pasta and a

traditional wooden disk for drying

it. About $330 per person.

Reservations r equired.

To day, “a pack of pasta doesn’t

cost much. But at the beginning

of 1400, a kilo of pasta was worth

twice a kilo of meat.”

According to Paolo Solinas, an

expert in Sardinian food culture,

su filindeu was mentioned in

several documents during medi-

eval times. However, he believes

that the roots of the hair-thin

pasta can be found at least 1,00 0

years ago in Arab culture.

Solinas explained that the

meaning of the name is not clear.

One school of thought cites the

translation of su filindeu by Ital-

ian writer Grazia Deledda, win-

ner of the Nobel Prize in litera-

ture in 1926, into the “threads of

God.” However, Solinas thinks

the term probably evolved from

the Arabic word fidaws, meaning

“hair” or “thin as hair.”

“When we talk about food

history, often we don’t take into

account migrations and ethnic

mixing from exchanges and inva-

sions,” Solinas said in Italian.

“Every food culture, everywhere,

has an ethnic and mestizo na-

ture.”

Su filindeu seems to have last-

ed so long because of a specific

event: Every year, on April 30,

people from Nuoro and nearby

towns make a pilgrimage of

about 20 miles on foot to the

sanctuary of Saint Francis of

Lula. After the celebrations, vol-

unteers serve everybody su filin-

deu in mutton broth — a sort of

reward for the act of faith.

The Selis women and their

descendants have been in charge

of making the dish for the past

century. It took them months to

prepare the pasta to feed those

who made it to Lula. Until a

couple of years ago, participating

in the pilgrimage was one of the

only ways to eat such pasta.

“It was not valued much,” Selis

said. Ye t, once people began

understanding the effort that

went into making su filindeu,

they started requesting it. So the

Selis family began selling the

pasta at about $33 per kilogram

(a little over two pounds),

enough to feed about 20 people.

To day, some restaurants in

Nuoro include su filindeu on

their menus.

In 2019, Selis participated in a

private event organized by La

Cucina delle Matriarche, a non-

profit cultural organization. She

taught her carefully kept secret

to six chefs. Satta, one of the

Raffaella Marongiu Selis, top, shows her class how to make su filindeu, a recipe passed down in

her family for generations. After a stretching technique that might make your arms sore, the thin

strings of dough are dried, broken into smaller pieces and traditionally c ooked with mutton broth.

take design cues from the Rock-

ies.

Expansive vistas refresh us,

which explains why we request

hotel rooms with a view, pull the

car over at scenic lookouts and

loll on the sand, g azing a t the line

where blue sky meets bluer wa-

ter.

“The health of the e ye seems to

demand a horizon,” wrote Ralph

Waldo Emerson. “We are never

tired, so long as we can see far

enough.”

During a 2021 cross-country

car trip, I gasped at craggy

mountains, sheer drop-offs, river

gorges and Yosemite’s granite.

But the plains, prairies and

grasslands are what have stayed

with me. Long views stir a long-

ing.

As Robert Frost’s “Stopping by

Woods on a Snowy Evening”

suggests, a pause from one’s

route is a tonic. Last August, on

Iowa’s far western edge, we

steered our family sedan out of

westbound t raffic and onto a side

road, where we stopped and

stood in the sun. Insects

hummed. Crops rustled in the

wind. The gravel two-lane reced-

ed north until it vanished, and I

wanted to disappear into that

distant point. But we had miles

BY REBECCA POWERS

America’s Great Plains lie in
wait, challenging road-trippers
to cross the expanse in record
time.
Given the reality of vacation
math (distance divided by days),
motorists on a schedule put the
pedal to the metal. An 80 mph
speed limit in South Dakota?
Great!
We can be forgiven for at-
tempting a horizontal pole vault
over our nation’s midsection. It’s
a vast country, and there’s so
much to see. In setting our
itineraries, we too often dismiss
the plains as drive-through terri-
tory en route to the more asser-
tive draw of forests, peaks and
surf.
In the ocean of land between
our two shores, there’s a per-
ceived nothingness. Long freight
trains snake along the ground
floor of America. Herds of hay
bales huddle. Highway bill-
boards implore motorists to stay
awhile — and we should.
In an era when public dis-
course proceeds at a fever pitch,
a clear horizon and relative si-
lence are as mentally cleansing
as any beach.
The plains are, by definition,
mostly flat — and that’s the
beauty. As the Prairie School of
architecture illustrates, horizon-
tal lines, free of excess ornamen-
tation, offer visual relief, unlike
so many new houses that seem to

to go until we slept.

In d ismissing the appeal of flat

land, we somehow forget having

previously lingered on the pages

of the literary plains: riding

horseback with the hard-bitten

characters of “Lonesome Dove,”

homesteading with the family of

Laura Ingalls Wilder, surviving

the “shaggy coat of the prairie”

with Willa Cather’s “O Pio-

neers!,” and witnessing heart-

break in Dee Brown’s “Bury My

Heart at Wounded Knee.”

The drama and history of

wide-open land hold a place in

our imagination — and in our

shame — even as we speed along

ribbons of asphalt, where states’

license-plate nicknames read

Sunflower and Cornhusker and

the s kyline i s scattered with silos.

The Great Plains offers lessons

in ecology, history, botany and

topography. Although defini-

tions of the region’s boundaries

vary, all or p arts of these 10 states

lie within the region: Colorado,

Kansas, Montana, Nebraska,

New Mexico, North Dakota,

Oklahoma, South Dakota, Te xas

and Wyoming. Plains are open

areas that are mostly t reeless a nd

studded with scrubland and

shrub.

Some contain grasslands

where, as the name suggests,

grasses are the primary vegeta-

tion. The grasses may be tall,

short or mixed.

The word prairie, which we

incorrectly tend to use inter-

changeably with plain, is derived

from the French word for mead-

ow. Prairies are alive with native

plants.

Are they wide open? Yes. De-

void? No.

Like a historical farm home

whose floor has evolved from

dirt to wood to vinyl to carpet,

there are rich layers beneath our

wheels: Indigenous culture, hoof

prints, ruts carved by covered

wagons and once-flourishing na-

tive plants plowed under for

agriculture.

The Native American Scenic

Byway, a 350-mile route through

North and South Dakota, travels

through reservation land of four

tribes and takes in memorial

markers, monuments, and cul-

tural and sacred sites.

California Hill National His-

toric Trail in Nebraska illustrates

a different story. T here, deep ruts

of pioneers’ covered wagons re-

main carved into the earth.

The plains whisper the stories

of the country. Those tales in-

clude the land itself, where con-

servationists will tell you that

there is plenty going on.

Carbon-consuming prairie

grasses are a metaphor for the

plains’ interwoven past. As the

National Park Service notes, tall

grasses, including those at the

Ta llgrass Prairie National Pre-

serve near Strong City, Kan., once

covered 170 million acres of

North America. “Today,” the Park

SEE PRAIRIE ON F5

With wide-open spaces, the American prairie beckons

BETH J. HARPAZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A one-room schoolhouse dating from 1882 is part of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near

Strong City, Kan. Tall grasses once covered 170 million acres in North America.

BY AGOSTINO PETRONI

Bright fluorescent l ights shone
on Raffaella Marongiu Selis’s
pale hands as she poured water
into a wide earthenware bowl.
Before her, in a cold farmhouse
on the Italian island of Sardinia,
12 women h eld their breath while
Selis added flour to the mix. They
had waited years, if not decades,
to learn how to make su filindeu,
one of the world’s rarest pastas.
Selis was one of the few women
who inherited the recipe and was
about to share it publicly for the
first time.
“I am the black sheep who’s
divulging the secret,” said Selis, a
60-year-old native of Nuoro, Sar-
dinia, in Italian.
The recipe calls for only three
ingredients: durum wheat flour,
water and salt. However, the long
and complex labor that makes
the dough elastic thwarts most of
those who try. When the dough
reaches the right consistency, it’s
rolled thin, then folded in half
and pulled, then folded again
and stretched for a total of eight
times, until, between spread-out
arms, there are 256 pasta threads
as thin as strings of cotton. Then
they’re laid out on a wooden disk
and cut to the right size; there, in
three overlapping layers, the
strings will rest until dry. The
result is a pasta web that is
traditionally broken into jagged
pieces and added to a mutton
broth sprinkled with fresh
pecorino cheese.
Giovanna Satta, a 71-year-old
retired schoolteacher, was one of
the women in t he f armhouse. She
had been trying to learn how to
make su filindeu for years, but
couldn’t find anyone willing to
teach her.
“The videos you find on the
Internet and YouTube always
show the premade dough. You
never know what’s the right con-
sistency for pulling,” she lament-
ed.
When Satta heard that Selis
would hold her first public l esson
last December, she made sure to
reserve her spot and wired the
money to attend the three-hour
class.
Selis learned how to make su
filindeu from her mother, Gavi-
na, who had learned from her
mother, Rosaria. This culinary
know-how has been passed down
only within the family in Nuoro.
As a result, the pasta is so rare
that it was included in the Ark of
Ta ste, a catalogue of endangered
foods funded by the European
Union and maintained by the
Slow Food Foundation for Biodi-
versity.
As Selis worked the dough, the
sound of her kneading filled the
room. Attendees filmed each step
of the process attentively. A reli-
gious atmosphere, a mix between
an Easter Mass and a funeral,
filled the space. Nobody dared to
speak, as if one whisper could
break the spell and conceal the
secret forever.
“I never taught the recipe as a
sign of respect for my aunt,” Selis
said. “My mother advised me
against it to avoid bad blood in
the family.”
With her aunt growing older
and only two daughters to teach,
Selis felt the pressure — and
maybe the economic possibilities

participants at the December

class, tried to get a seat, but says

she was rejected because she

wasn’t a restaurateur.

Last year, after years of court-

ing, Gisella Dessì, a Sardinian

journalist, persuaded Selis to put

together a course where ordinary

people could learn how to make

the dish. Selis chose to keep the

class small, so each participant

could learn how to work the

dough well.

“We have to pull, right?” asked

one of the attendees. Then she

promptly added: “A s if we were

pulling our husbands’ necks?”

Laughter erupted a s other partic-

ipants struggled to get to their

third round of pulling without

breaking the dough.

“You always end up saying

that, eh!” said the scorned hus-

band who stood behind her.

For hours, the women tried,

some reaching the coveted

eighth pull, while others strug-

gled to get to the fourth. Selis

went from table to table, touch-

ing the dough, adding water,

sprinkling flour, showing them

how to hold it, pull it and get the

hair-thin strings.

“It’s not easy, but it’s not

impossible,” she said. She be-

lieves it’s not enough to know the

recipe to make su filindeu; daily

practice, for years, is key. She has

been making su filindeu for 45

years and thinks that, after some

time, the pasta’s texture and

width reflects the maker’s per-

sonality. “When my sister and I

make it together, her dough is

softer, while mine is dryer. It’s in

my temperament to make it that

way.”

That weekend, Selis intro-

duced 42 women to making su

filindeu. With Dessì, she’s plan-

ning new courses for the coming

months, the next in April. Selis

already has 80 people on the

waiting list, while Dessì receives

requests from Brazil, England

and the United States.

“To me, Raffaella Marongiu

Selis, with her cousins who pass

on the art of su filindeu, are

living, human treasures,” Dessì

said. She’s pushing the Sardinia

administration to create a regis-

try of immaterial inheritances, a

sort of catalogue listing and de-

scribing fading t raditions such as

su filindeu.

“Filindeu is something that

you have to find in your being

and your hands,” Selis said.

“There is no secret. All you need

is passion, c onsistency and lots o f

patience.”

Petroni is a writer based in Rome.

His website is

apetroni.contently.com. Find him on

Twitter: @PetroniAgostino.

In Italy, telling a pasta secret that stretches back centuries

PHOTOS BY AGOSTINO PETRONI FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

“If we became

too selfish, the

tradition will die.

I am doing this

to pass it on.”

Raffaella Marongiu Selis,

a 60-year-old native of

Nuoro, Sardinia