Birthday wishes

If you ask a fellow what he wants for his birthday dinner and he instantly says "homemade gnocchi," you can't refuse to make it, even if it is the hottest day of the year.

When we got married back in 1993, John's sister in Ohio sent a hand-cranking gnocchi maker like their mother had. Nowadays you can buy things like that on the Internet, but 19 years ago you couldn't walk into a west coast kitchen store and expect them to know what you were talking about. So it was a special gift from Janice that we still have and use. Automatic pasta makers were faddish in the 90's, but the mechanical cavetelli machine (meaning "shell") is a specialized pasta maker that imitates the look of hand-made gnocchi, which is usually scored with the tines of a fork.

As with most labor-saving devices, the "labor-saved" part is debatable once you factor in the prep work and clean up. It also takes a long time to get good at a gadget if you only use it a couple times a year. But I've finally mastered old BeeBo. It's never been washed of course, and it's stored above the stove in the original tatty cardboard box.
The ropes of pasta dough (semolina flour, egg and riced potato) are fed into the wooden rollers while turning the crank, and if the gnocchi gods are in a good mood the pastas plop out individually without sticking to the machine (or each other) as they land in a heap on the board. Like I say, practice makes perfect.
The box says our Beebo was made by a company called Villaware in Cleveland, and I wondered if they were still in business. An easy search brought up their fancy website saying the company was established in 1906 by Angelo Vitantonio.
When Angelo immigrated to America, he missed old country food. He created the hand-crank pasta machine, probably to make life "easier" for his wife ;-) and then marketed the new gadget to his Little Italy friends. Villaware has been a family business for four generations, although our mechanical Beebo Cavatelli maker is no longer in production. I'm sure Angelo would be surprised to see the sleek electronic kitchen appliances being sold by his descendants.

Happy birthday, John!