My mother and I were on our way to my aunt’s house to watch her make pasta for All Souls’ Day. We pulled into McDonald’s to get lunch. 

“You don’t know what kind of mood she will be in today,” my mother had said. We were due at Crair’s at noon, but my mother thought we would be better off eating first. It was November 2, the Day of the Dead, and I had driven two hours to watch my 86-year-old aunt make a traditional Calabrese dish for the day, ceci e lagane -– pasta with chick peas.

Well, just the lagane. My mom didn’t want to stick around long enough for the ceci part; we’d each do that in the comfort of our own kitchens. 

“Pick a spot in the sun.” We left the drive-thru with two cheeseburgers and pulled into a parking space. It was a warm Monday. The presidential election was the following day. We went to the same McDonald’s in Lynbrook we took my grandmother to every week when I was little, to have coffee and a Quarter Pounder. She loved McDonald’s coffee.

“Crair has her own ideas about lunch,” my mother said. Once we had Bulgarian-made Caciocavallo cheese and Wonder bread. The last time we visited, my mother yelled at Crair to turn off green beans that had been bubbling on the stove for hours. “You are turning them to mush!” my mother yelled. “They’re fine!” Crair shot back.

In Crair’s kitchen, nothing ever comes out the same way twice. She pulls ingredients from her basement, which is lit by a lone bulb and heaped with essentials for twelve doomsdays. She has a photographic memory for the location of every item: apples and mangoes by the dozen mellowing in cardboard box lids on an oil-cloth covered table; two refrigerators filled with greens wrapped in plastic bags, cartons of eggs, and every kind of meat; painters’ buckets of rice and flour, and bags of plastic bags on a discarded dresser beneath an old calendar of saints. 

“Why does she want to watch me make pasta?” my aunt asked my mother as she pushed her kitchen door open for us. She pointed at me. “She doesn’t know it’s just eggs and flour?”

I did know that, but it wasn’t the actual food I was after. Crair prides herself on being the keeper of old family recipes, and there is something in her way that reminds me of Mongrassano, the tiny village in Calabria where she and my mother were born. There is nothing measured, nothing precious, nothing written down. My grandmother had made lagane too, and I remember the long noodles laid out to rest on a sheet covering the bed in her darkened room.

To be honest, though I remember the dish, I don’t remember ever associating it with this day.  I rarely think about All Souls’ Day at all. I was trying to reverse-engineer a tradition, to deepen my connection with Mongrassano, and imagine myself there, like my grandmother once, on a dark night lit only by fire, and people gathering around warm bowls, wisps of steam rising like ghosts. 

So why this dish on this day? I asked Crair as we began. I was helping her pile flour into a huge metal bowl from the basement bucket. “I don’t know,” she told me. “Get a bigger bowl. No wait, I’ll do it.” And that was that. There was no story of enveloping dark, and women gathered around a brewing pot, and lighting tallow candles in circles to call back the dead. 

But the internet always knows. Later, I started hunting. I couldn’t find any connection of pasta and chick peas to All Souls’ Day anywhere. The dish itself has its own English Wikipedia page, where it is called lagane e cicciari. It lists the basics: it’s from Calabria, it contains chickpeas, lagane, garlic, and oil. A click on lagane brings you to a page for pappardelle, which are Northern; a dead end. 

There is no counterpart entry on Italian Wikipedia. A search for lagane, though, kicks over to the entry for lasagna, which was interesting. Both words come from the same source: from the Latin laganum, and before that, the ancient Greek laganon, λάγανον, which means limp or soft. Lagane is the Southern Italian word for the most ancient type of pasta in Italy. Now I was getting somewhere.

I was fumbling with my iPhone camera when Crair began cracking a bunch of eggs into the flour, and my mother dropped in some water from a teacup. I don’t know how many eggs; I don’t know how much water. “Can she mix dough?” She asked my mother. 

“Of course I can,” I answered. I put down my phone  and stuck my hands into the bowl, trying to mix from the center out as the dough began to form strands that stuck to my fingers. Crair stood over me, critiquing my technique. “Start from the middle,” she told me. 

“I am.” I tried to work deliberately as possible, but the whole thing was a mess for several minutes. 

“She’s going to make it stick together,” Crair said to my mother. “She’s going to squash it.” ‘Mbaracchia was the word she used. Spelling mine.

“But I’m trying to make it ‘mbaracchia, aren’t I?” I said. 

“That’s too much,” she said. I could hear Fox News on the television in the next room but I didn’t ask her to shut it off. It was never off. 

“You really like him?” she asked. “You really like that stupid voice? She tried to imitate Joe Biden, pulling a grimace, mashing up her face, talking in jibberish. When I looked up at her, I almost found it frightening, like a Halloween mask. I looked back down at the dough and said nothing.

I picked a little shard of eggshell from the forming dough and held it out to her on my fingertip. “You missed one,” I said. 

“Stop talking,” she said. “Mix.”

Continuing to scour the internet, I found out more about lagane on a website dedicated to the Cilento, an area of the region of Campania, which points out that ceci e lagane was mentioned in the poetry of Horace (d. 8 BCE):

…Inde domum me ad porris et cicero refero laganique catinum.
“I’m going home, to my plate of leeks, chick peas, and lagane.” (Satires, 1, 6, 114)

That’s all I needed to squint and envision my grandmother in a tunic, and a chariot full of ceci.

The dough came together, and we put it on a large rimmed wooded board that my grandfather had made onto kitchen table; it stayed in place while we kneaded the pasta dough. Then she had me divide the dough in two, and we let it rest. 

“Not that long,” my mother said. “It’s fine. I have to go.”

Then Crair sent me down to a corner of the basement and directed me to a large wooden dowel, about a yard long, and the width of a rolling pin. This was a druca. The spelling is mine; in my aunt’s pronunciation of this dialect word, the “c” sounds almost like a “g” – it walks the line between both. 

“This is the most important thing,” she said. The druca is the traditional tool needed to roll out pasta into large, flat sheets. I began to roll, pushing outward as she showed me, to keep the thickness of the dough even from center to ends. There was some grappling over the druca.

“What’s the matter with you?” she took the druca from me. She took over the rolling, and when the dough was large enough and thin enough, she let me work with her to roll up the dough, forming a long, coiled tube. “Don’t squeeze it!” she admonished me, because then the dough would then ‘mbracchia.

The ancient Greek word laganon signified some kind of pastry dough – probably not pasta, but a sheet of rolled dough, cut into strips. And that’s what Crair did: quickly cut the dough into thin strips. They were thinner than I expected, based on what I remembered.

It turns out the only thing that is ancient about lagane is the shape – not the ingredients, and not the cooking methods. The dough was likely made from pasta madre – sourdough starter. In Greece, apparently, the lagane were cooked on hot stones. In other times, and other areas, they were boiled in hot oil. Campania, Basilicata, Calabria all claim the dish. Long strips in any number of forms, any number of origins, all correct. 

It makes sense to me: ribbons of pasta eaten with dried beans which could be brought back to life on any day of the year, harvest independent. 

I asked Crair if on All Souls’ Day in Mongrassano, you would visit the cemetery. There must be some mystical candle-lighting in this whole thing somewhere, I was hoping. “Did you say prayers for the dead?”

As I spoke, my mother translated what I was saying into Calabrese dialect for my aunt. This was not something she usually did, but today, neither my English nor Italian were falling on Crair’s ears reliably. In Mongrassano, the cimitero is just above and out of town at the end of a row of cypresses. All the tombs were in jumbled rows, like a little village, and tossed off their centers with the passing of time, the wind, the rain, and earthquakes. 

“You don’t pray for the dead,” my mother said. “What’s the point of that? They’re already dead, what are you going to do for them? You remember the dead.” Every year, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, she brings a Quarter Pounder and a coffee to my grandmother’s tomb, high on the wall of a mausoleum, perfectly smooth, and out of reach.

Those who are remembered still live, in their way. In our minds we play tapes of their voices; they walk through our memories as though they were in the next room, just over the threshold. 

As Crair cut coils of dough I picked them up and loosened them with my fingers, and tossed them with flour to keep them from getting stuck together. 

“Don’t do that!” she said. “It’s too much flour. What’s the matter with you?” she said, angrily, as she cut. My feelings were beginning to be hurt. We worked in silence as we prepared cardboard boxes lined with wax paper, and dropped the lagane in. Later, when I got back home, I boiled them in water for a minute, tossed them with a little bit of tomato sauce (I prefer it without the sauce, but this is how my mother likes them, so in her honor, I did it her way), and covered everything with chickpeas fried in garlic and oil. 

In the morning, I awaited the phone call. 

Everyone loved the lagane, I told Crair. If you had a cell phone, I would text you a picture. 

“I’m sorry I was hard on you yesterday.” She was probably thinking about it all night. There was no need. When I take out my phone to record her – how she speaks, how she cooks, though I feel that it is necessary in some way, it feels like stealing. And for that, I am the one who is sorry. Because I don’t trust my own memory to keep these old ways alive. Because I need to codify what used to be innate, and a necessity, otherwise it will pass out of this purgatory and to the other side, from where it can no longer return.

“I don’t know how to be,” Crair said.  “I get nervous. I try to make jokes, to be mean. To be funny. I want to do it right.” 

There is no need to relearn what you already know to please me, I wanted to say. “I just enjoyed being with you,” I said. We didn’t mention the election. We just gossiped for a while and hung up to watch the results pass slowly before our eyes.