We were five people signed up to attend a cooking class with Maria Pastore on how to make pasta from scratch – in other words, made fresh from dough in the Italian way. We attended as a family, three adults and two children. We are all enamoured of pasta, yet we usually only cook it using store-bought brands.
Learning to cook totally homemade pasta was the indispensable next step to savour pasta as it truly should be.
Pastore met us on the doorstep to her kitchen, which was not just a room but the apartment itself on the ground floor of a building in a verdant street in the Cairo neighbourhood of Maadi. A vast window filled the space with natural daylight.
Pastore, who is Swiss, was born and raised in Egypt, and the class we were attending was one of many that she gives covering a repertoire that spans Egyptian food as well as European cuisine.
She was brisk and to the point in her pasta class, handing each of us an apron as we went through the doorway and asking us to wash our hands, which we did, in a washbasin that was spotlessly clean with no frills.
At the centre of the large rectangular space that made up the apartment were two large working tables filling it in perfect proportions while leaving enough room for a sideboard upon which were placed a jug of lemon water and glasses. We sat there later together to eat the meal we had cooked.
The tables were solid and their surfaces large enough to allow some ten people to work at them at once together. There was no pretence here of the “minimalistic understatement” sometimes displayed in synthetically gleaming and rather lifeless modern state-of-the-art kitchens.
Affixed to the working tables were food-measuring scales, large enough and simple enough for a novice to use with ease. Their generous surfaces gave off an inviting energy, encouraging one to indulge in cooking with effortless ease.
Pastore started by cutting up large sprigs of fresh coriander and some leeks, “the two go-tos of Italian cooking,” she said, which “many people do not know.”
The fragrant smell of fresh herbs wafted up with each swish of the blade. She then asked the children present to cut up some of the smaller sprigs, instructing them to “cut, but not too fast, in small circles.”
The herbs, along with the tomatoes that were stewing on the lowest of fires without any water added, are ingredients in the basic Italian pasta sauce that Pastore versatilely adds to different dishes.
Next, the pasta dough was prepared, made of a blend of different kinds of flour, salt, and eggs. Pastore told the children to “feel the different textures with your hands,” knowing that this was a part they would greatly enjoy.
Then came the kneading. The dough was then put into the small pasta machines also affixed to the table. The sheets of dough were made to pass through by turning the machine’s little trundles, and what came out was broadly shaped raw lasagna.
She showed us a little trick that needs no machine, much to the delight of the children: simply pick a tiny piece of dough and pinch it with the fingers, transforming it into ribbon-shaped gnocchi.
The meal was a full repast of pasta with the delicious red sauce, arugula salad with apples and walnuts (which we also prepared), and later – and this was done by the children – delicious little biscuits of vanilla and chocolate.
Tea was then served, prepared the Egyptian way by putting black tea and a sprig of mint into a small ceramic pot and then leaving it to percolate for a few moments before pouring it into cups. The pot had beautiful Arabic inscriptions on it and had been crafted in Tunis Village in the Fayoum, where Pastore and her brother Angelo had lived and been raised by their parents.
They attended the local government school there, living in the local community at a time when it still had no electricity.
Pastore’s parents, Michel Pastore and Evelyn Porret, who were Swiss, had made the choice in the early 1960s to live in Egypt. They were both children of the “flower generation” of that era: altruistic, progressive, and community oriented.
Pastore’s father Michel, an artist and designer interested in textile design, loved to travel the world. He was, in Pastore’s words, low-profile, introverted, and highly creative. He founded the Nagada organisation that supports Egyptian artisans and worked alongside his wife, Evelyn, who over the years taught and worked with the community in Fayoum in creating and crafting pottery and ceramics bringing out their strong potential for entrepreneurship.
Fayoum became world-renowned for its pottery as a result, and Porret, who passed away in 2021, was considered an unforgettable mentor. Together, Michel Pastore and Evelyn Porret founded the now internationally renowned Fayoum Pottery School.
Maria Pastore spoke to us throughout in Arabic, equally at ease in the language and all of its idioms as she was in her native French or Italian. She is rooted and grounded, and she spoke, in her typically unornamented fashion, of the fascinating people she had met as a child in her parents’ home, among them the writers and artists who had shaped much of Egypt’s cultural and artistic life during the period in which she grew up.
We all sat there, into the twilight, enjoying our tea with mint and savouring it along with delicious small vanilla and chocolate biscuits that the children had baked while the tea was being prepared. As we sat, stories unfolded of food, childhood, and life at large.
Pastore told us that next time there would be a class on how to make sourdough bread, using a recipe that goes back to the time of the Ancient Egyptians.
“Sourdough needs patience,” she said. “We prepare it on one day and leave it overnight to leaven, and then we bake it the next day. It’s slow, and it takes time, like meditation.”
I felt that I wanted to go back again and learn how to make sourdough bread, because of the joy of baking, for one thing, and also because of the wholesome old-world goodness of sourdough bread.
I also wanted to sit and talk again in Pastore’s spacious and unpretentious kitchen, preparing and kneading the bread at its tables and letting the stories unfold while we cooked, talked, and ate together, food for the soul.
Italian tomato sauce
Recipe courtesy of Maria Pastore
One onion
One kg tomatoes
One leek
One stalk of celery
Put the tomatoes in a pan on a low fire without water and let them stew for about 45 minutes.
Remove the skin. Sauté the vegetables and add them to the stewed tomatoes. Let the mixture simmer and stir once or twice. Mix in a blender or strain. The consistency of the sauce can be varied according to taste. Pack the sauce in glass jars or freezer bags in portions and use it as desired as a basis for pasta sauce, cream sauces, or for poultry or meat.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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