Severino Pasta: A family tradition goes national

DUE TO THE TIME and place of my upbringing — white-bread suburb, 1970s and 1980s, WASPish family — I spent the first 19 years of my life believing that pasta must come from blue boxes and be boiled into a mushy mound, topped with “spaghetti” sauce that came from a jar, and “Parmesan” cheese sprinkled from a green can. It was while living as an exchange student in a village near Cremona, Italy, that I realized I was living a pasta lie. Anna, the mother of the family, would spend the afternoon making stuffed pastas by hand. And her tortellini di zucca agnolotti and marubini were nothing like the spaghetti back home in West Deptford. Rather than red sauce, they’d be served with a little brown butter and sage or a broth, and top with fresh grated Grana Padano. It was an honest-to-goodness revelation from which I have never looked back.