Qualcosa bolle in pentola!!!
That’s Italian for “something boils in a saucepan”– a delightful idiom meaning “Something’s up!”
So, qualcosa bolle in pentola here in Huntington Beach.
Huntington Beach’s two wild and crazy cooking divas (and a small sweet dog named Juliet) are back in the kitchen and we’re making handmade raviolis and a piquant tomato sauce. (My friend Sarah is the pretty lady in the foreground.)
Before we launched into our pasta-making marathon, I did a bit a Internet research about the origins of ravioli. The first site I pulled up said that the first reference to ravioli in written history was in “14th century Venus.” ( Venus. Venice. Close. Reminded me of some of the bloopers I read in student papers when I taught history for more years than I care to admit. One of my favorites was a kid who wrote a paper about that improbable duo: “Marx and Lennon.” That one still makes me laugh. )
More reliable history (or, at least, more reliable word processing skills) confirms that ravioli was served in European kitchens in the 14th Century, both in Italy and in Northern Europe. Some food historians connect the dish to one served earlier in Arab kitchens.
My pasta search also unearthed this wonderful old photo of JFK enjoying (?) pasta in an Italian restaurant. I think the photo is a good example of pasta photography gone terribly wrong. You’ve got to wonder if JFK had to change his suit after that shot. Here is the photo. 
Back here in Huntington Beach, Sarah and I made an eggy pasta dough for our ravioli, using my antique Kitchen Aid mixer, the Kitchen Aid pasta attachment and our prodigious hand kneading skills. We also used a ravioli cooking mold, a Ravioliera, that I bought at Sur La Table. (If you don’t have a ravioli mold there are ways to work around that. See the link posted below.)
While Sarah and I worked the dough for our ravioli, our conversation ranged from national politics and world affairs to neighborhood news. Whenever the conversation veered into politics, I noticed that our dough kneeding skills improved significantly. If you are in need some serious post-election therapy, a ball of pasta dough just might get you through the hard times.
The pasta and sauce recipes we used are adapted from recipes taught at Costa Mesa’s wonderful Sur La Table Cooking School.
Also, for those of you who are visual learners (like me), here is a link from the Serious Eats blog with clear directions on how to make homemade ravioli:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/02/how-to-make-homemade-ravioli-recipe.html
And…here is our final product. Something was indeed boiling in the saucepan and it was delicious down to the very last drop of sauce. Buon appetito!
[mpprecipe-recipe:42]
This looks fantastic. I have a question about cooking the ravioli. You say to add the prepared ravioli to boiling salted water and cook for 4 minutes. When it’s almost done it will float to the top. Every time I cook fresh ravioli they are already floating on the top. What am I doing wrong?
Hi, Maria. Here is Alton Brown’s explanation of why ravioli float: “As the air inside expands, they become buoyant.”
I’m not sure why your ravioli immediately float to the top. Sometimes mine float pretty quickly,too–but not immediately. I think the foolproof way to know if they are done is the age-old taste test. The good side of that is that the cook gets an extra portion!
The length of time it takes to cook the ravioli also relates to their size. As you can see in my photographs, the ravioli Sarah and I made were pretty small.
Hope you are well. It is nice hearing from you.