Learning to Make Pici with Adriana

Pici is the pasta of this valley and it is almost aggressively simple: flour, water, a little salt, and no egg. What makes it difficult is that there is nowhere to hide. There is no machine, no cutter and no shortcut. Each strand is rolled out by hand under the palms until it is roughly the thickness of a pencil and around thirty centimetres long, and if your hands are uneven the strand is uneven, and it cooks unevenly, and everybody at the table can tell.

Adriana has been making it for fifty-one years in a farmhouse kitchen about ten minutes from us. She teaches four people at a time, in Italian, with a running translation from her son when she remembers he is there. The lesson runs about three hours and costs less than most restaurant dinners.

Two ingredients, no machine, and about four hundred years of practice.

The first twenty minutes are humbling. Everybody rolls too fast, the strands snap, and Adriana walks the length of the table putting hands back where they belong without much comment. Then somewhere in the second half hour the rhythm arrives, the strand stops breaking, and the room goes quiet in the way rooms do when adults are concentrating on something with their hands.

You eat what you made, with cacio e pepe or with the garlic and breadcrumb sauce called aglione, and you take the rest home in a tea towel. Guests routinely tell us it was the best afternoon of the week. We can book it with about three days' notice, and it works for anyone from roughly eight years old upwards.