Mother’s Day: See reader’s pasta cake recipe – 05/12/2023 – Reader’s Panel

Imagine the following situation: you have 42 mothers. Each of them is the best cook in the world – they always are – but you only have to choose one recipe from one of the 42 mothers.

Pulled, right? It is in this tangle that the Sheet stuck me.

To celebrate Mother’s Day, the Newsroom asked readers to send recipes that bring back maternal memories, with the respective stories. I’ve been chosen to select one, just one, and I’m already kneeling in the corn begging forgiveness from the other 41.

The chosen recipe was the macaroni cake, sent by Valéria Toloi, from Aclimação (central region of São Paulo). I’ll be right back for her. First, I want to talk a little about the fabulous stories that arrived.

Eduardo Batista de Souza, from Diadema, sent me a recipe called hot chicken. Steamy? Spicy? No, he explains that the dish got its name because his mother chose the live chicken, in a cage, and prepared it freshly slaughtered, before it cooled down.

Lucas Eugênio de Andrade, from Itaúna (MG), spent part of his childhood certain that his mother had invented a dish called salpicão – an illusion shattered when the dish was served at his school.

Claudia Lindgren, from Rio, brought the recipe for ground beef with vegetables that her mother called “child’s minced meat”.

Wait a minute, a speck fell in my eye.

Valéria’s story, of the chosen recipe, is also touching. Her mother, Wilma, needed to cook for her younger siblings when she was still a child. The grandmother, separated, left to teach and support the children.

A neighbor saw the girl’s effort on the wall that separated the houses and, to help her, taught her this recipe. “It was leftover food: take the cooked pasta, take the vegetables that are in the fridge, the meat from the day before”, says Valéria.

Dona Wilma’s cake appears in classic Italian recipes under the name “timballo di pasta”. The leftover pasta and other ingredients are mixed in a baking dish and everything is placed in the oven, whether or not wrapped in a pie crust.

Valeria says that, over time, her mother standardized the recipe. She no longer used leftovers, but freshly cooked pasta, mozzarella, ham and canned peas. “Today I prefer frozen peas”, says the reader.

To bind this cake, a mixture of milk, flour and egg. Valeria mixes the flour directly into warm milk. I preferred the safety of making a classic béchamel sauce, in which the flour is dissolved in the melted butter and the milk is added little by little.

By the way, I obtained permission from Valéria to adapt the recipe to my needs – I had leftovers and wanted to use them.

“That’s the spirit of the recipe,” she says. “You can change the ham for roasted chicken or turkey breast, for example.”

I used as a base a linguine with tomato sauce from lunch the day before. In place of the peas, I put some frozen green beans that I had bought to make the quiche for the coronation of King Charles 3rd, also at the request of the Sheet.

The recipe calls for parsley. I bought cilantro by mistake (I love it, but it doesn’t go with this recipe). I picked some herbs (basil, sage and chives) in my son’s backyard.

My biggest fear was: how to unmold this thing without falling apart? Valeria reassured me, saying that at her house, macaroni cake is served in a baking dish. And so it was done here too.

It was delicious. Dona Wilma and Valéria are to be congratulated.

The children of the other 41 mothers must be wondering: but why was this one chosen?

Well, it’s all very subjective. There were more sophisticated recipes (and less as well), but Valeria’s is nice and, very importantly, falls within the limits of my culinary competence.

The mother-child-cook story got me. There were other stories just as good as hers, but one detail in Valeria’s account struck strongly: her mother now has advanced Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t remember anything, what will she say about a pasta recipe. Just like my own mother.

With the forgiveness of all the other mothers in the world, it’s always ours that we think about when Mother’s Day arrives.

PASTA CAKE

Yield: 4 servings

Difficulty: easy