Le pizzelle di nonna Bianca

May 27, 2020

Bianca Pennella, my mother, arrived in Cagliari (Sardinia) in 1938 after marrying my father, Salvatore Clemente. They had met in Portici, near Naples, where she lived, and where my father was studying for his degree in Agrarian Science. Culturally, she maintained a deep connection to Naples and its traditions throughout her life. She kept speaking with a Campanian accent and followed a number of traditional recipes, both sweet and savoury, which my brothers and I loved.

“Pizzelle” was one: a sort of fried bread dough, with tomato sauce and cheese on top. Driven by feminist ideals and my two daughters, I started cooking when I was already an adult and living in Tuscany, where I had moved to teach cultural anthropology at the University of Siena. In that moment, I realized I had not learned anything from my mother, so I decided to begin with those recipes I could find in her cookbook. My mother was raised with different ideas about the role of men and women in the household, and had some trouble accepting the fact that my wife wasn’t the only one cooking for the family, but she eventually made peace with it.

It must have been the year 1990 when I asked her, over the phone, for the recipe to make “pizzelle”. I started cooking them for my daughters and it was an immediate success. In the 2000s, I made “pizzelle” for my grandchildren and they loved them too. Each of them gets to choose the menu for their birthday and the choice often falls on “pizzelle”. So this family tradition of great-grandma Bianca’s “pizzelle” started and continues along four generations.

A few years ago, I wrote a post on Facebook in memory of my mother and her “pizzelle”, but her recipe was criticized by some people who made them a different way. I tried a number of variations in the following years, but I still think that my mother’s recipe is the best one. There are some mashed potatoes that make the dough softer, and the cheese is added twice, under and over the tomato sauce, a bit like the buttered bread that the Blue Fairy made for Pinocchio’s Party.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 situation, relationships and contacts between grandparents, daughters, and nephews have become more rarefied, forced to just see each other on Whatsapp. After a while, my nephews started to ask us for some takeaway dishes, which we can't eat together, of course, but that are still a symbol of a social world that existed at the kitchen table. So us grandparents started to cook some dishes that they missed and felt nostalgia for. Among these recipes, the pizzelle. We couldn't meet, so we lowered a small basket with pizzelle tied with a rope from the third floor, as people used to in the postwar period, when they had to buy streetfood that way. Then the approval was documented on Whatsapp with pictures and expressions of enjoyment. We created this way of fighting the sadness of distance with pizzelle and other dishes that "fall" from above and then reappear in a picture in your smartphone on a virtual kitchen table.

Ingredients:
500 gr flour
A spoon of olive oil (I usually put some more)
Salt
Two small mashed potatoes
Two or three teaspoons of fresh yeast (now we’d use a little packet of baking powder or a square of brewer’s yeast)
Lukewarm water, enough to make the dough
Tomato sauce
Oregano
Parmesan cheese

Mix flour, olive oil, salt, potatoes, yeast and water together to make the dough. Use your finger to inscribe an X mark on the dough and let it sit for an hour so it can rise.

To make the sauce: use tomato sauce, olive oil, salt, oregano.

After one hour divide the dough in 20 “pizzelle” (see the picture, little “circles” of dough), little balls and little sticks of dough.

Fry the pizzelle, the little balls and the sticks with abundant oil, until they are golden. Then take it out and grate some parmesan cheese on top (in Sardinia we usually use pecorino cheese, but it is not easy to find abroad), put some tomato sauce on (you can add a pinch of oregano if you like) and then more grated cheese on top.

Put some salt on the little balls and the sticks.

Enjoy!

Born in Nuoro (Sardinia, Italy), Pietro Clemente lives in Siena (Tuscany), is a retired professor of Cultural Anthropology who conducted research on European ethnology, heritage, memory and museums.