What do you call a hobby that you’ve had for more than sixty years? Something that intertwines with life until it becomes a part of it? Perhaps the word “passion” isn’t enough to describe it. Maybe we could call it “love”.
Every family has learned and taught some lessons. If I were to choose one lesson I’ve learned and want to pass on, I would say that food must never go to waste. My mother was an excellent example in this regard. It’s a warning that comes directly from the post-war period, a hard time in which everything was beautiful and precious. A lesson that smells like toasted cheese crust, typical of Lagosanto, a small town in the province of Ferrara.
There are some moments, unrepeatable intersections of space and time, when life poses a question and the answer can change the course of life forever. For us, that moment arrived when we turned forty: we had a choice: continue following our path in life - the known road - the road we had learned to call our own, or go off the beaten track, reignite our passion and perhaps envisage a new version of the future.
Hi there, let me introduce myself: my name is Maura. A while ago you met my mother Anna, and read about her erbazzoncini. What you don’t know is that nowadays when she makes them she uses the vegetables my husband grows in our vegetable garden. My story is a little different from hers though: I've always worked as an accountant and when I got married, I had really no idea how to do anything in the kitchen. One day I asked my mother to teach me the three or four recipes I liked the most, and I copied them down into the diary from 1980 that I still have to this day.
My name is Anna Lucia, but everyone calls me Anna. How old am I? I’m 90 years young.
I live in the place I was born: Reggio Emilia. I had a great childhood although the war is certainly ever present in my memories of it. My mother had to make bread every day, because after threshing the guards used to collect the wheat, leaving us with just a couple of ounces each. That’s why we had to be extremely careful not to waste anything. Those were years in which abundance was inconceivable, but we never starved...
The story I want to tell you here is a tale of memories and flavours. Flavours which conjure up images of the past. It is the story of a large household,Giaretoand takes us back to a time when streets were named after buildings.
It was 1977 when my grandmother bought a house in the Reggio hills...
