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Retracing our Roots

By Anna Marie Smith and Tom Cook, Fatto a Mano Project

Into the depths of Italian culinary history, there remains a search for the most exotic pasta shape; a culinary journey into transitory perfection and ephemeral uniqueness. Then, lies the humble gnocchi. A lump. A dumpling shaped and formed by ​old hands crooked and weathered or tiny fingers touching raw dough for the first time. The singular gnocco stands alone as Italy’s poor mass of unhinged flour.

Image Credit: ©AZZAMARIE Studio ‘Ball of Dough’

Like the sculptor before us, gnocchi lies as a mass unbothered and unetched by shape and form. A gnocchi di patate, gnudi, or ricotta gnocchi sits below the base level of chef and restaurateur alike. Simple and manufactured as a starchy potato bomb, gnocchi have become a gastronomic black eye. To make them is above the Michelin guide, to buy them is embarrassing, to serve them​ pre-packaged…well, to some Italians, is sacrilege.

Gnocchi has its roots in cucina povera or poor cuisine and remains synonymous with terms like Malfatti and Gnudi (poorly made and naked, respectively). To touch on a memory of making gnocchi, one doesn’t need much. It is, after all, a ball of starch. But to serve the potato bombs that are boxed and shelf-stable for two years, one must forsake any and all concern for gastronomic indulgence.

Image Credit: ©Tutti’s Italian Market & Deli ‘Gnocchi Pull Detail’

Twenty-five years after high school graduation, Anna and Tom reconnected and found similarities within the work they had been doing in their respective fields (education, design and entrepreneurship). Over shared stories of their Italian-American upbringings, Fatto a Mano was born. Over communal memories, time was shared about our grandparents and great-grandparents’ kitchen table; Italian immigrants who worked tirelessly all day, made every meal from scratch, and set the table for all to gather every evening. This practice is not new or unfamiliar for immigrant families. Often, the matriarch planned, prepared, and served multiple course meals every single day. Hand-made pastas, sugos, meat ragu’s, and cold fruit for dessert.  But, as a child when you stopped getting the ugly scraps of dough and had to begin helping in the kitchen…conversely, your culinary journey shifted. 

The love language of food is one of service, not servitude; sacrifice, not submission. 

As children, the multisensory activation that occurred while helping our grandmothers and great-grandmothers was deeply imprinted into our beings, informing how we navigate throughout our lives. Contemporary research across psychology, design, neuroscience, and related fields increasingly investigates the interplay between sensory activation and mind-body integration through the lens of embodied cognition. Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps describe this phenomenon through our gustatory memories: “Taste, like touch, is intimate. It requires physical contact. Saliva is key—food must dissolve in order to be tasted, much like molecules must evaporate in order to be smelled”(99).  When we return to, and create, similar experiences in our respective professions multiple senses are simultaneously activated.

Anna and Tom recollect shared experiences of archiving recipes/memories on their own time, for special occasions, and with their own kids, nieces, and nephews. Realizing that they wanted to ‘officially’ offer these same experiences to others, they are embarking on a collaborative project that recalls a record of the time they spent in their grandmother’s kitchens roughly forty years ago. The FaM project is an open call to share both story and sensorial experiences with a broader culinary community.

Image Credit: ©AZZAMARIE Studio ‘Gnocchi Making with FAM Gnocchi Board’

Like craftsmen of any creative field, with repetition and time, your craft solidifies through the mesh created from tactile memory, sound memory, olfactory memory, taste memory, and muscle memory. A harmonizing of the craftsmen honing their skills.  This deeply applies to our gastronomic practices; a developed skill that Matthew Crawford claims“…if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life. This understanding may be hard to articulate; bringing it more fully into view is the task of moral inquiry. Such inquiry may be helped along by practical activities in company with others, a sort of conversation in deed. In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives”(22).

Cooking is a sensorial immersion. It requires little initial skill and keen eyes; watching and listening transcends recipe de-construction. So, it is with food that we travel onto a path paved by memory and meaning-making. As the most important experiential quest we embark upon, we would argue that fatto a mano– handmade–is both sign and signifier of our greatest human memories. Why we make the argument for a retreat back to the roots of cooking, by hand, in our kitchens relies upon utilizing multisensory engagement that solidifies stories (old and new), satisfaction (basic needs), self sufficiency (growth). The orality of tradition is only provided by time spent together with the gatekeepers of that history. 

If art imitates life, then our tables emulate our values. This is not a call to “make” a recipe, but rather a cry to make a meal. Together. This isn’t just an investment, it’s a return to what matters  — making, failing, learning — together.

Image Credit: ©AZZAMARIE Studio ‘Rucco Ricotta Gnocchi Recipe’

Anna Marie Smith is a designer and Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at James Madison University. Anna has been learning through making since she was a little girl, playing with dough scraps in her family’s pizzeria. As a designer, she is a cross-pollinator who has worked in performing arts, education, and design direction. As an educator, she is passing on the hand-making modality of her Italian-American heritage, in the space where craftsmanship, design, food, and making co-exist.

Tom Cook is an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Department at The University of North Carolina-Charlotte and the owner/operator of Tutti’s Italian Market and Deli in Concord, NC. As a proud Italian-American, Tom uses both his classroom and the deli to teach others about the power of food and what it communicates about our stories and identities.

Cook and Smith are co-directors of the Fatto a Mano Project. In its inaugural year, the FAM Project has started to compile research, collect data, recreate recipes from memory, make tools, make food, present workshops and record the process along the way. They are currently securing workshops for the later half of 2025, and aim to have published content in the coming months. 


References

Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table : Food, Family, and Community in New York City, University of Illinois Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central

 Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Penguin Press, 2009. 

Lupton, Ellen, and Andrea Lipps. The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, New York, 2018.

Pastorelli, Elisa. “Orality and Multi-Sensoriality: the Secret Ingredients of Food’s Longevity and the Power of Memory.” The Recipes Project. February 11, 2024.