The art of pasta: Columbus chefs share their secrets

The secret was out with the bedsheet.

I can remember, as a child, walking into the kitchen, seeing the clean sheet spread across the dinner table, covered in teeny dough balls, glowing in the pale morning light. That's how my dad, like his mother before him, made pasta grattata. Grated balls of egg and flour were left to dry until dinner, then tossed into boiling water and served under slow-cooked red sauce.

My dad didn't make pasta with any regularity; when he did, it was a surprise or a special occasion. He didn't have a hard recipe. It was all from memory-those of his mother and father, of smell, taste and touch. These childhood scenes came flooding back to me while talking with some of Columbus' pre-eminent pasta chefs. They reminded me pasta isn't something that's dried, poured into a box and thrown onto a supermarket shelf. It's a honed craft. And it almost always comes with a story.