Carol’s Column

A machine which can change your life

You may not be aware of it, but there is a machine which can change your life. Before last Friday, I was unaware of its existence and it would not be an exaggeration to say I came upon it unexpectedly.

Each year, Cape Town, holds a Good Food & Wine Festival. The entire Peninsula displays to the rest of the country – and the world – what it has to offer gourmands and those interested in food, the making and the eating of it.

Top chefs, local and those from other lands, demonstrate their culinary wizardry. Participating restaurants and wine farms offer special menus, wine tastings – you name it – everything to do with the pursuit of fine food.

As part of the festival, during this past weekend, the annual Good Food & Wine Show was held at the Good Hope Centre. For four days, exhibitors displayed everything from global gastronomy to the latest in gadgets, kitchenware, food ingredients, and more.

Due to the fact that there was much free food and wine tasting, the public attended with vigour.

As you probably know, a newly-born convert is always enthusiastic. So it was when I attended this show with my husband, the newly-born chef.

He has recently completed evening classes at a well-known cookery school (attended mainly by males who enjoy cooking while savouring bottles of good wine).

You might imagine he would have started with the basics – boiling eggs. Not so. After his second class, he was creating exotic tartlets, veal in cream sauce and lemon meringue so light it melted as you breathed upon it.

So, you understand, at the show, I was accompanied by an expert.

We tasted, sipped, nibbled and the newly Master Chef (as he is fondly known among family, pets and friends) was glowing.

But it was a small, square machine that caught his fancy. Like a snail attracted to a succulent petunia seedling, he slid across the floor and latched onto the Marcato.

A Marcato, I should explain, is a hand-operated pasta machine. According to those in the know, it is the Rolls Royce of handmade pasta machines, the Steinway of dough extrusion. Beside the machine stood Pietro Marcato who'd just arrived from Italy.

It was his father Otello, he told us, a pasta maker and inventor of great repute, who designed the original pasta-making machine in 1941.

So clever was it, we learnt, that all you had to do, was make your basic dough, push it through the machine, turn a handle, and out would come spaghetti, ravioli, lasagna, fettucine and other pastas.

My spouse's eyes lit up, his not unlarge nose quivered and voila – a Marcato was ours.

Cool, you might think. However, there is none so keen, so convinced, so passionate as a newly-born chef.

Our house has been invaded. Wherever I look, there are lengthy strings of pasta draped across doors, tables, chairs. Fat, thin, flat, round, square pasta hanging from lines stretched across rooms and open windows.

Tagliolini, tortellini, linguine, capelli d'angelo, trenette, lasagne, ravioli, cannelloni . . . Italy has more kinds of pasta than it has people. And they are all hanging in our house (the pasta, not the Italians).

"There is nothing to beat fresh, hand-made pasta," exclaims my husband joyously.

"But who will eat this?" I wail.

This morning I offered him an ultimatum. "This house is not large enough for me, the Marcato and all this pasta," I said. "You have to make a choice."

Which is why you will presently find me in the purple and blue tent (fourth on the left), at Joubert Park.

■