The questions I ask Silvana are meant to be more open-ended rather than simple “yes/no” questions, so as to encourage deeper discussion. The questions go as follows—
1) Name, age, where you live, occupation?
2) What role does the noodle play in your family? (How often do you eat noodles? In what setting? Family traditions? Do you make your own noodles or do you buy them?)
3) Do you have any stories or myths you recall associated with noodles?
4) What does the noodle mean to you?
5) What is your favorite local noodle? What makes it unique? How do you cook them?
6) Do you have a favorite noodle restaurant? Tell me about that restaurant.
7) Are there any cultural rituals and symbolism associated with noodles?
8) How do noodles and eating noodles affect your health and wellness? Your thoughts on instant noodles?
9) Has your habit of eating noodles changed over time?
10) Do you associate noodles with any kind of emotion?
11) Do you associate different kinds of noodles with different levels of education and class structures?
12) How important do you think the noodle is in defining Italian or Chinese culture? Is it possible to separate your culture from the noodle?
13) Could you share a favorite recipe and the stories around that recipe?
Recently, I have been given the opportunity to interview Signora Silvana Sulejmani, a fifty-four year old Italian immigrant. Between an ethnographic study of a restaurant and an interview, I ultimately chose to do an interview because I wanted a more personalized and in-depth look at the influence of noodles in one person’s life, this one person being Silvana Sulejmani.
Video interview can be seen here– https://youtu.be/9w0ryAZ3RIE
Similar to the transportation of crops and foods from different countries, as is quite common with globalization, Silvana was raised in Italy and found her way over to North America. Her Italian authenticity is captured when she instinctively starts speaking in Italian at the start of the interview and accidentally mixing italian with english throughout. She was born and raised in Emilia-Romagna, home of her favorite noodle restaurant Alla Doro and what she calls “the country of field pasta,” painting a picture of farm-to-table dining with the phrase. She explained to me that Alla Doro means the Golden Wing, perhaps named this because it takes customers onto its golden wing and flies their taste buds up to heaven. Emilia-Romagna lies in the northern region of Italy and is known to be “one of the most fertile and productive regions of Italy” due to its close proximity to the Adriatic Sea (Discover-Italy). Silvana’s eyes light up as she recalls the fame of Emilia-Romagna being “the country of field pasta,” as if it is a source of pride for her to say that this, the country of field pasta, is her home. As well as this should be a source of pride for her—her homeland has been producing the same agriculture it does now since antiquity, feeding generations and generations of people and keeping people happy on full stomachs. Pasta has been an affordable food that comes in mass quantities for a long time and this affordability and quantity was part of the reason Emilia-Romagna was such a wealthy and productive hub of Italy throughout history.
Though my interview only allows an estimated eight minutes with the company of Silvana, her warm nature is still captured in this short period of time. Silvana is a talkative and very warm-natured person, making me wonder if her personality could at all be explained with Thomas Talhem’s Rice Theory, within which he finds that agriculture affects regional cultures and thus the personalities of those living in the regions. Rice farming is primarily done in northern Italy where Emilia-Romana is and, according to Talhelm, fosters a cooperative personality and Silvana was more than cooperative in our interview, answering questions I did not even ask yet, such as her belief in where noodles come from. She said that noodles come from the Middle East, but that Italians give pasta their name, being why she believes pasta cannot be separate from Italian culture as it is an essential part of the Italian culture.
The questions may be varied, but two themes appear that remain constant throughout the interview—happiness and home. As evident from the interview, only one word can capture the emotion Silvana feels when she thinks of pasta—happiness. The answer to this question of which emotion she associated with pasta required little to no thought and she even looks at peace when sounding out her answer to this, in a temporary state of bliss as if caused by memory of pasta alone. Though preceding the interview, Silvana only mentions four things that she claims to be Italians’ favorite things, being “pasta, motorcycles, pizza, and soccer,” something else captured her and her husband’s eyes when making the monumental decision to move to America—hope and happiness. Silvana was thirty-two when she and her husband moved to America to start a family, her husband all the while carrying the idea of the American Dream in his mind. They wanted the children they brought into this world to have a good education and many opportunities available to them and felt like America possessed a very strong multicultural presence that would serve to make their children more open-minded and comfortable with people belonging to different cultures than their own, and thus more ready for the world. Though, one can only hope that this embracement of other cultures does not lead to them losing their own culture along the way. As a safeguard against losing their own culture, Silvana utilizes noodles, bringing a piece of home with her to America, similar to Ponzio Bastone declaring a chest full of maccheroni when he arrived in Genova in 1297. Perhaps if her children eat their culture in the form of pasta, as pasta is an edible cultural artifact, it will become part of them and will never leave them.
The interview reflects a gradual shift away from tradition in Italian culture. Though Silvana does not take the easy way out by buying her pasta precooked and rolls out the dough herself, she also does not let tradition keep her from making a hard job easy when it comes to making various shapes of pasta. She claims that she does not use machines for shaping tortellini, probably due to this being her favorite pasta and wanting it to taste it’s absolute best, but says she does use machines for pasta that are not similar in shape to tortellini or lasagna. The use of machines turns away from the tradition of shaping pasta by hand, without machines, as illustrated with the anger of the two nonne, Elide and Graziella, towards Franca for proposing the use of machines to help make the pasta because it is faster in “How to Make Handmade Pasta Like a Badass Italian Nonna.” As travel becomes easier, this may parallel the shift away from tradition as Silvana did confide that she felt her eating of pasta has been affected by moving to America from Italy.
Comfort foods typically bring the image of fattening food to mind, many associating any carbs with the dietary devil. Comfort foods do not have to be unhealthy, though, and many people automatically associate pasta as a tried and true comfort food being deleterious towards one’s health. Despite popular beliefs to the contrary, Silvana believes that pasta is a healthy food–as long as it is cooked al dente, she says. This belief in pasta as a healthy and core part of one’s diet is reflected in her own diet where pasta is a staple at her kitchen table as it is at many an Italian’s kitchen table. She has pasta for every meal along with something else.
Works Cited
Emilia Romagna. 2017. Italian Tourism Official Website. http://www.italia.it/en/discover-italy/emilia-romagna.html, accessed August 4, 2019.
Heath, Elizabeth. 2018. How to Make Handmade Pasta Like a Badass Italian Nonna. HuffPost. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/make-pasta-like-italian-nonnas_n_5b9bf0f8e4b013b0977a7d01, accessed August 4, 2019.