One recipe, a bunch of Ferraris and 1,500 tortellini

FARMINGTON – As the season of feasting gets underway, many families begin sketching out dinner menus to match the holidays: thawing Thanksgiving turkeys, ordering Christmas hams and proofing the Challah, some recipes, handwritten, pulled from the pages of brittle cookbooks, others simply Googled. But for the Ferrari family holiday cooking looks a little different.

“It’s more like the tortellini has become a side line thing. It’s about getting together and enjoying each other,” Norman Ferrari said.

Norman and his brother David have been making tortellini together since they were little boys and have now taught the tradition to numerous relatives: sons, daughters-in-law, nieces, nephews… the list goes on as Norman’s son’s house fills with people on a Saturday morning.

Every fall the extended family gathers on Porter Hill to take part in a tradition that has been going on for well over 100 years. Using a machine that dates back to the 1920s they mix, slice and shape the small, hat-shaped pastas in preparation for Christmas dinner. This year the group made 1,600 tortellini to distribute among the three participating families.

“It’s a lot of tortellini. We line them up in rows of 15 because everybody wants to know how many we make,” Norman said.

The Ferrari tortellini recipe is an original passed down from Norman’s grandmother who grew up in the Bologna region of Italy. The “ping,” or filling, still contains secret ingredients that only several people in the family know of. The rest of the project is a well-oiled machine, complete with “runners” to carry the finished products to the back bedroom to be placed neatly in rows of 15 for drying. The tortellini is frozen until Christmas dinner, at which point it’s cooked in chicken stock and eaten like a soup. Maybe with a little bit of added salt or Romano cheese, according to Norman.

Norman remembers his mother making tortellini during the week before Christmas- requiring a clear table for several days on which she would mound and knead flour and eggs, squeezing and rolling it into a grapefruit size ball that would then be rolled and sliced by hand before being cut into two inch strips. The ping consists of ground pork, more eggs and even more Romano.

“Usually the women would shape the dough, you know, because their fingers are more nimble than men’s,” Norman said. “My mother was a great cook. We didn’t suffer for food. It was just always there.”

David recently sat down to test the tortellini from Saturday’s gathering. The machine had been acting up, and he wanted to make sure they came out all right, he said.

“I just had to make sure they were good,” he said. “They were.”