Flour, Water, Roast Garlic Béchamel

on taming wildfire

There is something about kneading dough, any kind of dough, that makes a person feel like a person again. I was thinking about this last night making pasta: 100g 00 flour, an egg, a splash of water, smack it down and fold it over and pull it together with the heel of the hand over and over and over again. It goes from slop to disparate crumbs to cool and smooth and firm surprisingly quickly, and it always amazes me how easy it is to make something from nothing.

If I ran the NHS I would make pasta making obligatory for the anxious; I would set the depressed up with a cardamom bun shop and ban the use of stand mixers. Hands in, hearts up. Of course the problem with all of this is that it’s unimaginably twee (the power of the kitchen to heal the soul etc) but also that it’s incredibly annoying, when the doom descends, to be told to get up and make stuff. When, obviously, if you could get up and make stuff you would have done that already. It is a hopeless little vicious cycle with no way to break it.

And yet, equally obviously, you do have to break it.