In the Kitchen With Italy’s Great Santinis : Cucina: After 42 years atop the restaurant business in Italy, Bruna Santini comes to America and finds that pasta is difficult to translate.

Bruna Santini is famous for her pasta. Not just among the residents of Runate--her small hometown just north of Parma and roughly midway between Venice and Milan--but all over Italy.

Dal Pescatore, the 30-seat family restaurant started by her father, is considered by many to be the best restaurant in the entire country. This year’s “Guida Gambero Rosso,” one of the two top restaurant guidebooks in Italy, raves: “The excellence of this restaurant can’t be measured just by the high level of every single category.”

The book’s main competitor, “Le Guide de l’Espresso,” isn’t arguing. It awarded the restaurant 19 out of 20 possible points, noting: “This happy island of hospitality and eating is among the most welcoming that exists today. The Santinis are safeguarding the secrets of a cuisine that is genuine and exalted.”

But right now Bruna, who is on a visit to the United States, is genuinely puzzled. This is the first time she has made pasta with American ingredients, and things are not going according to plan.

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She started in the usual way: shaping a volcano of flour, beating eggs (four whole eggs and two extra yolks) in a well in the center, gradually pulling the walls of the volcano down into the beaten eggs. But at the point where a shiny, smooth ball of dough should have formed, she has a dry, cracking lump. It’s the difference in the flour. She grabs another egg and beats it into the dough. That’s somewhat better, but still not what she wants.

“It should be bella e lucida , beautiful and shining,” she says. But to her mind it is neither. “The flour in Italy is much softer and the pasta is much lighter. The egg yolks are a different color too. When we make pasta, we use our own eggs and it’s almost the same color as this.” She points to a deep-orange winter squash puree that will go into the filling. To understand how profoundly disturbing this might be, you have to remember that fresh pasta is one of the cornerstones of Bruna Santini’s existence. She figures she has rolled out an average of 10 pounds of it almost every day for the last 42 years--her tortelli di zucca are legendary.

Still, you don’t get the feeling that Bruna is one to go crying over spoiled pasta. She has the mien of a dogged terrier. Once a job is finished, she moves on to the next, rarely talking.

The talking she leaves to her son Antonio, with whom she shares kitchen duties in his friends Marvin and Judy Zeidler’s sunny Santa Monica kitchen. The Zeidlers, owners of several prominent Los Angeles restaurants, met the Santinis during a trip to Italy 15 years ago and struck up a friendship that continues to this day.

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Back in Italy, Bruna runs the restaurant with Antonio and his wife, Nadia. Antonio takes care of the front; the women cook: Nadia makes appetizers, main courses and desserts; Bruna does the pasta. Antonio’s father, Giovanni, is semi-retired, but he still makes the bread, takes care of the fish and tends the vegetable and herb gardens. Much more than a greeter at Dal Pescatore, Antonio acts almost as the curator--a combination of maitre d’, sommelier, manager and culinary conscience. “L’Espresso” describes him as “the charismatic leader” of the restaurant.

One thing’s for sure: Antonio’s a good shopper. At the Santa Monica Growers Market earlier in the day he wades through the crowds, inspecting every stall, picking up what looks best and bringing it close to his nose for a good, deep sniff. He does all this despite the fact that there are probably more people waiting in line for grapefruit than live in his hometown.

He makes one quick charge through the market, determining exactly what is there and which produce he likes best, then he goes back to mop up, buying what he wants. Everything gets the smell test--even spinach. And when he buys a bag of mixed lettuces, he picks through the bin, selecting them leaf by leaf. He’s most impressed by the fruit--the strawberries and dates in particular.

In the kitchen, he acts almost as a master of ceremonies: determining the type and order of dishes, explaining details of preparation and waxing eloquent in Italian on the finer points of culinary history or theory, while his mother demonstrates.

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Antonio decides we should start with a simple early-spring frittata. Bruna quickly chops green onions fine and sets them to melt in a saute pan with butter. She adds chopped asparagus and spinach, then a touch of bouillon powder. To serve six, she beats seven eggs together with salt and pepper and 1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. Over medium heat, she works the mixture as if for scrambled eggs, pushing in the sides and letting the liquid egg run onto the pan. When the whole thing is just about set, she turns the frittata out onto a pan lid and then slides it back into the pan on the other side. While it cooks a little longer, she keeps flipping the frittata back out to check for doneness. It’s finished in not much more time than it took to read this.

“Well, when I make this at the restaurant, I do it with 50 eggs,” she says.

Now, Antonio thinks, perhaps a risotto. Runate lies on the Oglio River (the nearest town of any size is Canneto sul’Oglio, population 4,561) and when his grandparents started the restaurant, the sign out front simply said “Fish and Wine.”

“My grandfather fished; my grandmother fried,” he says. Today, one of Dal Pescatore’s specialties is a risotto made with wild onions and catfish.

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No sooner does he mention it than Bruna sets to work. She cooks onion and butter together, then adds the rice (Vialone Nano, not Carnaroli or arborio) and stirs it until it makes a dry singing sound. This tostare is the key to developing the flavor of the dish. She adds boiling broth a bit at a time, keeping the mixture fairly loose. The rice never becomes completely dry. When the rice is cooked, some flaked cooked fish is added along with a big helping of chopped chives. The risotto is moderately soupy, with a distinguishable, slightly chalky bite to each grain of rice.

This, Antonio explains, is the way it is preferred in Mantua, the province in which Runate is located. “In Venice, they like their risotto soupy and their rice well cooked,” he says. “In Milan, they like it thick and the rice al dente. We’re right in the middle, so we get people from Venice saying it’s underdone and people from Milan saying its overdone.”

Despite his obvious love of food, Antonio was never supposed to go into the restaurant business. His father sent him to the university in Milan, where he studied political science and in 1974 married Nadia, a fellow student. And, as he told an Italian newspaper, that’s when his father told him: “To have a son graduate from college is a dream, and now I can sell the restaurant.”

“Sell the restaurant?” Antonio asked him. “My life, my world are here.” He talked to Nadia. “What do you think about taking over the restaurant?,” he asked her. “I will need your help. It will be hard but it will be fun.”

“She never said ‘no’ to me,” Antonio adds.

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So the couple took their honeymoon in France, visiting restaurants and learning what they could. Then they returned to Runate and began to redefine the restaurant, not as the rustic osteria it had been, nor as a Gualtiero Marchesi-style palace of nuova cucina. Rather their focus was on refining and revitalizing the traditional cuisine of the area.

During lunch, Antonio talks on and on about regional specialties and fine points of gastronomy (“ E una cosa interessante (This is something interesting),” he says time and again). At almost every other sentence, Bruna jumps up to demonstrate one thing or another. He extols agrodolce , a sweet-and-sour pepper mixture that is served as a kind of salad along some frittatas. She slices a bunch of red and yellow peppers and puts them in a glass bowl, brings most of a bottle of vinegar to a boil with a little sugar and some salt, pours it over the peppers and tightly seals the bowl with plastic wrap. A while later we taste it with some olive oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano. “You can also do this with scallions,” she says.

When her son talks about gras pista , a lard-and-parsley spread that is served as a kind of cold cut, she asks whether there is any lard in the house. The Zeidlers, who keep a kosher kitchen, look horrified. Bruna merely looks disappointed that she can’t demonstrate.

Then it’s time to finish the tortelli. The filling is a roughly textured mixture of mostarda di cremona (a spicy mixture of fruits candied in a mustard syrup), crushed amaretti , bread crumbs, cheese and winter squash.

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Which squash? Antonio says they use zucca Americana , but it doesn’t sound familiar--kind of like a yellow pumpkin. In an effort to clarify, Antonio points it out in the design of one of the restaurant’s plates. But that squash, it’s pointed out, is green. “ Artisti ,” he shrugs.

At the market, we’ve picked up butternut and kabocha squash, but Bruna rejects both out of hand as being too soft--though she is enthusiastic about the possibilities of frying thin slices of butternut as a part of a fritto misto.

After similar problems with bread crumbs (Bruna sniffs, then refuses packaged, grates some from sourdough, then throws up her hands), it’s decided we’ll use some filling they happen to have brought with them from Italy.

The tortelli , Antonio explains, is a widely celebrated dish. “It is food that is very happy and very social,” he says. “In my family we serve it--and only it--on Christmas Eve, but we use a tomato sauce, which is the old way. In the old days, it was only served with tomato sauce, which showed off the pasta better. Now the point of view of fine gastronomy is that it’s better served with Parmigiano and butter, which accent the filling.”

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Beyond that, there are regional differences as well. “In Cremona, it’s made with only amaretti and Parmigiano,” Antonio says. “In Ferrara, it’s made with only squash and Parmigiano. In Mantua, it’s made with squash, amaretti , mostarda , a little nutmeg and Parmigiano.”

But all that is theory. Bruna is ready for a practical demonstration. She kneads and rolls out the pasta with an electric-powered machine, then cuts the thin sheet into squares. She puts a knob of stuffing slightly smaller than a walnut in the center of each square, using both hands to fill two squares at the same time.

Then she goes back down the line, sealing the pasta in the distinctive shape of the area. One corner is pressed against its diagonal opposite, making a triangle, then the base of the triangle is folded over and pressed again, making a shape like a paper hat.

Bruna gently places the tortelli in boiling water, then lines an oven-proof plate with Parmigiano. After the drained, cooked tortelli are slipped out onto the plate, a bit more cheese goes over the top, melted butter is poured over all and the whole thing is popped into a warm oven for five minutes or so.

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When it’s done, the flavors are explosive and almost medieval, combining sweet squash with mustard-y hot mostarda and rich cheese and butter.

Bruna rests for a moment, eating her portion and sipping a glass of wine. She smiles briefly and again apologizes because the pasta is not the way it is back home.

Then Antonio mentions pipasener , a homey type of ricotta cake specific to their region, and she jumps up to start putting together the batter.

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Antonio Santini is adamant about using Vialone Nano rice for this dish, but arborio will work almost as well. If you can find those little onions that look like scallions but have very rounded bulbs (cipollotti), use those for a more assertive onion flavor and cut the final amount of chives in half.

RISOTTO WITH CATFISH AND CHIVES (Risotto Con Pesce Gatto e Erba Cipollina) Juice 1/2 lemon 1 celery stalk, chopped 1/2 carrot, chopped 1/2 head fennel, chopped 1 3/4 pounds catfish fillets Fish or vegetable stock 5 tablespoons unsalted butter 1/2 onion, finely chopped Salt, pepper 1 cipollotto (wild onion or green onion), finely chopped 9 ounces Vialone Nano rice 2 tablespoons white wine 2 tablespoons chopped chives

In pot bring 4 cups water to boil with lemon, celery, carrot and fennel. Reduce to simmer and add catfish. Cook at bare simmer until just flaking, about 6 to 10 minutes. Remove fish from poaching liquid. Reserve poaching liquid, adding enough fish stock or water to make 5 cups. Keep at boil for cooking risotto.

While fish is poaching, melt 2 tablespoons butter over medium heat in skillet. Add onion and cook slowly, stirring, until onion is very tender. When onion is tender, add fish and cook several minutes more. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Let cool. When fish is cool, chop coarsely.

In separate saute pan, cook wild onion in 1 tablespoon butter over medium heat with dash salt and 2 tablespoons water. When water evaporates, add rice and cook several minutes, until rice makes dry “singing” sound when stirred. Add 1 cup boiling stock and cook, stirring until almost all stock is absorbed by rice. Repeat, 1 cup at time, until rice is creamy and still bit chalky to bite, about 15 minutes. Add fish, wine and chives and cook another 2 to 3 minutes. When rice is cooked al dente, add remaining butter and stir vigorously so mixture becomes creamier. Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about: 648 calories; 260 mg sodium; 131 mg cholesterol; 22 grams fat; 75 grams carbohydrates; 38 grams protein; 2.6 grams fiber.

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This filling takes some adjusting to resemble the stuff the Santinis brought from home. Their Mostarda, which they make themselves every year, had a mustard-y bite that nearly brought tears to our eyes. The stuff we bought here, in an Italian specialty store, was much sweeter, so we added a bit of dried mustard to crank up the heat. Also, since we could find neither yellow pumpkin nor Hubbard squash on the day we shopped for testing materials, we used acorn squash. It worked fairly well but required some additional bread crumbs to become firm enough to hold together properly.

PUMPKIN TORTELLI (Tortelli di Zucca) 1 3/4 pounds yellow pumpkin or Hubbard squash 1/4 pound Mostarda di Cremona (fruit pickled in mustard), finely chopped 2 ounces amaretti cookies, finely ground Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese Nutmeg Salt, pepper 1/2 to 1 teaspoon dried mustard, optional 2 tablespoons bread crumbs, optional 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour 3 eggs, beaten well 1/4 cup unsalted butter

Prepare filling up to 2 days in advance, but definitely before pasta is rolled out. Cut pumpkin or squash in sections, remove seeds. In pan bake at 350 degrees until tender. Pass through food mill into large bowl. Add Mostarda, amaretti, 2 tablespoons cheese and dash ground nutmeg. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Mix well and taste. Filling should have definite mustard-heat. If not, add up to 1 teaspoon dried mustard. Filling should also be fairly firm and loosely hold together when formed in ball. If not, add up to 2 tablespoons bread crumbs.

In bowl mix flour and eggs. Knead into smooth ball and wrap in plastic wrap. Set aside at least 1/2 hour. Divide in quarters and work with 1 portion at time, keeping rest tightly wrapped in plastic wrap. Knead and roll out on pasta machine to next-to-thinnest setting. Cut into long strip and cut strip at 2-inch intervals into squares.

Place ball of stuffing slightly smaller than walnut in center of each rectangle. Diagonally fold over 1 corner of rectangle to meet opposite corner. Press to seal. Fold base of triangle over to form “paper hat” shape and press sides to seal. Set aside on floured kitchen towel and repeat until all dough is used up.

Sprinkle heated serving dish with 1 1/2 tablespoons cheese. Melt butter in saucepan. Cook tortelli in abundant boiling, salted water 4 to 5 minutes, until pasta is cooked. Remove with slotted spoon, working carefully to avoid breaking pasta. Place tortelli over cheese in serving dish. Sprinkle with another 1 1/2 tablespoons cheese. Pour melted butter over. Toss gently. Makes 8 servings.

Each serving contains about: 274 calories; 115 mg sodium; 105 mg cholesterol; 11 grams fat; 37 grams carbohydrates; 8 grams protein; 1.44 grams fiber.

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This simple, homey cake is a breeze to put together. It’s even easier if you can find lievito--a special packaged leavening mix--at a good Italian market. We couldn’t, so we substituted baking powder, baking soda and vanilla extract--and it worked just fine. The zabaione is very rich and wine-y and some people preferred the cake simply dusted with powdered sugar.

RICOTTA CAKE WITH ZABAIONE (Pipasener e Zabaione) 1 pound ricotta cheese, pressed through strainer 2 1/4 cups sugar 5 eggs 3 3/4 cups flour 3/4 cup dried currants 2 tablespoons rum 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/4 cup milk Zabaione

In large bowl, beat ricotta and sugar until creamy. Add eggs, beating after each addition, then flour.

If raisins are too dry, in bowl plump in warm water until soft, then drain. Blend into flour mixture with rum and oil. Add vanilla, baking powder, baking soda and milk to soften batter and blend.

Spoon batter into buttered, floured bundt pan. Bake at 350 degrees 1 hour, until wood pick inserted in center comes out clean and sides begin to pull away from pan. Remove and cool. When ready to serve, slice and serve with Zabaione on side. Makes 12 servings.

Each serving, with Zabaione, contains about: 511 calories; 102 mg sodium; 222 mg cholesterol; 12 grams fat; 85 grams carbohydrates; 13 grams protein; 0.39 gram fiber.

Zabaione 5 egg yolks 5 tablespoons sugar 5 tablespoons Marsala

Beat yolks and sugar until thick, creamy and light in color. Add Marsala and whisk well to combine. Cook over simmering water 10 minutes, whisking constantly. Makes 1 cup.

Tile used in ricotta cake photo from Mission Tile West, South Pasadena.