torta. torta is a northern italian kitchen creation of a thinly rolled out dough filled with a variety of fillings. this afternoon i, with margaret at my side, made a torta. i don't have a recipe for this, i just have a few key words scribbled on scrap paper, dictated to me by my grandmother, which i keep tacked up on the side of my refrigerator for reference. i've been eatting tortas for as long as i can remember - but only started cooking them myself in the past year or two... growing up my grandmother and her sister would work as a team in creating these. one would make and roll out the dough and the other would make the filling - which they varied from a spinach based filling, a rice based filling and a potato based filing. they learned to make theirs from their mother, and perhaps were influenced by others along the way like my grandmother's mother-in-law (she didn't like onions so she would make half with onions and half without), and the lady who lived upstairs from them while growing up in new york city (she always got hers so nice and thin) who whipped up tortas too. each little part of the process has so many people connected with it. my favorite part is the dough process. i do not measure, i try to estimate and play around with it. sometimes heavy handed with the flour, sometimes a little more water, etc... and these subtleties make a difference each time. the filling we chose today was the spinach. originally my grandmother told me she makes it with spinach. then later on she mentioned that sometimes her mother would mix in greens like chard, or whatever they had or was seasonal. so that has been my inspiration lately - the extra greens. today we mixed in a little chard. each time is different. and i like critiquing it too - tonight's was good, but not as good as last week's. maybe too much olive oil in the dough? maybe i didn't chop the onion enough? anyway. the end product is not actually what is important. it is totally about the process. a process that i know has been passed down from generation to generation. and after all these torta sessions margaret is well on her way to being a master dough maker herself.
