I have a thing for malfotti. And what, you may well ask, are malfotti? Well, the best definition I can give you is that they are little bits of ricotta cheese, herbs and other ingredients rolled in flour and boiled like pasta until they float to the top of the water. Shaped like little logs, they appear gray when they emerge from the water. But then they are drenched in an Italian meat sauce and eaten. I don't know what the average capacity for malfotti might be, but I like at least a dozen at a sitting, maybe more if I can get them. No matter how they came into being, they are delicious. And I love them.
Translated literally, the name means inferior ingredients, and although I don't know this for a fact, I've been told malfotti was what Italian cooks made when they didn't have enough money to buy flour for pasta. It's sort of like the insides of ravioli without the pasta protection.
It's somewhat surprising, however, that not all Italian-Americans know what it is. I have, in fact, run into Italian-Americans who never heard of it. That means that a lot of non-Italian-Americans haven't heard of it either. The public's lack of awareness probably is because it isn't widely available commercially. It is possible to make it if you have a recipe. I have a couple of recipes. But it also takes a certain amount of skill to get the consistency just right so they don't fall apart in the boiling water.
I'd rather buy it ready-made.
I know of only two places in the Bay Area where you can buy it and they're both in Napa. One is at the Depot Hotel in downtown Napa, which once stood next door to the electric railway depot one block from the Napa River just off Third Street. The depot is gone and so is the electric railway, but the Depot Hotel remains.
The other is a liquor store on Jefferson Street in the same town not far from Napa High School where it is made to order and boxed for you to carry out.
When I was a child it also was possible to take out malfotti from the Depot Hotel, which actually is not a hotel, but an Italian restaurant and bar. One brought a large pot, went around to the back door of the restaurant where a genial but mostly silent Italian lady took your order, tossed four or five dozen malfotti into her ever-boiling pot of water, dipped out the cooked malfotti with a large slotted spoon into your pot and then poured in the sauce from another kettle standing on the back of the stove. Then you carried them home, reheated them and ate them.
Perhaps it was the charm of going to the back door of the restaurant to get them that made the malfotti so wonderful. Or perhaps it was just that I was young and hungry. Whatever it was, it has never tasted exactly that way since. Close, but not quite.
It's also possible to go to the front of the restaurant and order it as part of a typical Italian-American dinner. But somehow it isn't quite the same. Other traditional Italian dishes also are available at the restaurant, even today. Alas, the restaurant when last I visited it was not open for lunch, which makes it a little difficult for a visitor from out of town either to carry a pot of malfotti away or stay for dinner.
The last time I had those delicious little tubes, however, wasn't at the restaurant but at a visit to an old Napa friend's house. She was aware of my addiction to their charm and so she made a special trip to the Depot to get enough to feed four of us.
It was, I must say, all I remembered. We sat in her house on top of a hill looking out over the town, lost somewhere in the haze below us. We talked about the old days when we were kids and ate malfottis, and drank red wine and concluded that we were very lucky to have lived in Napa when we did--before the wine buffs and tourists found us highways or redevelopment spoiled what had been a perfectly charming downtown.
We also concluded a couple of other things: that nothing stays the same forever, that nostalgia is still what it's always been and that there's nothing like a malfotti dinner to warm one's heart and memory on a cold January evening.
By Carl Heintze