I am a lucky person. For sure. And I was a lucky kid: I grew up among people who loved me and away from big cities. I was blessed by picking eggs still warm from a chicken coop, jumping on hay stacks, eating fresh green almonds directly from the trees. Flavours you never forget. Flavours that build your palate, your personality. And then you grow up, and you happen to become a professional cook and you attempt every time to reproduce those flavours even though you are perfectly aware that you will never succeed. That lemon peel you licked after your father finished preparing a pot of pastry cream is a Proustian madeleine that only a time machine could help you to relive. My favorite dish remains my grandma’s pasta with freshly shelled peas. The smell of the onion and pancetta, cut in small pieces and then the flavourful broth … the pasta, lumachine of course, which allow the peas to hide down under. Well, I tried over time to reproduce that smell, that flavour but, unfortunately, my grandma is not here anymore.

Cristina Bowerman, Glass Hostaria (Rome, Italy)

The recipe (in Italian): http://www.cristinabowerman.com/gnocchetti-assoluti/