Tortellini: The aroma of things past

Ever had a Proustian memory? Clinically speaking, it’s the “involuntary memory” triggered by the senses: something you taste or smell or see for the briefest moment. Marcel Proust famously described it in a passage from his book, À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time), when he is reminded of his childhood by the taste of a madeleine dunked in tea.

I recently watched an Instagram video in which a man was brought to tears by his daughter’s replication of his late mother’s raman noodle soup.

A few years ago, I smelled burning leaves, and it instantly reminded me of some sunny Saturday in the sweater-weather fall in a small New England town, back when we raked leaves into piles on the street and burned them.

I recently saw an old photograph of a pond in the same town and it ignited a melancholy memory of fishing with my brother and father there in summers long gone.

And then there were the tortellini that I cooked in chicken broth.

They were dried and imported. As always with commercially-made tortellini, I had no expectations that they could be as good as those my Italian-American mother served many years ago.

But when I dropped them in hot broth, cooking them at a slow boil for just minutes, they immediately took me back to our kitchen, and from the kitchen to the house of Louise Chiappini, the woman who made thousands of tortellini on her kitchen table. Her tortellini were remarkably all the same size, filled with cheese or meat or a combination of the two. My mother, Rose Rodricks (nee Popolo) called them “belly buttons.” Twice a year, she ordered them from “the tortellini lady” in the next town, and it was a cherished tradition, served in a simple soup of chicken broth and endive. 

I strived over the years to replicate that soup — to have that moment of Proustian memory — but could never find tortellinis like those that came by the bag from Mrs. Chiappini in Bridgewater, Mass. But then I purchased an imported brand, Pagani, discovered on sale at my neighborhood Giant. I dropped the small, dried tortellini in my hot brodo. They were not the exact shape of Mrs. Chiappini’s tortellinis, but just about the same size. And they expanded as they cooked and floated in the broth. After a minute or so, the aroma of the tortellini impressed me. I suddenly felt hope, sensed something good about to happen. Then, the taste . . . the taste hit the spot — that place in the brain where memories of treasured moments wait to be stirred awake.