Came across my first cookbook, given to me when I was five by Nanna Francesca (signed ‘Nonna’ while I called her ‘Nanna’ in our Italian/ Australian tussle). My favourite pancake recipe pages are still splotched and dusty with flour!
I read that in the 1960s/70s, Ursula Sedgwick’s cookbooks were supposedly often given to granddaughters by worried grandmothers as mothers left the home for the workforce! This wasn’t so for me (and in actuality Sedgwick herself was very much a career woman, advocated for women’s rights, raised three sons with her husband and was a journalist, copywriter and later a magistrate) but my grandmother did persist in giving me cookbooks over the years.
Perhaps in her determination to show me how to cook she hoped to impart something that was a tie to her birthplace and upbringing (her Nonna was a baker) or to her parents whom she’d lost early, both who cooked well (her father, a cane gang cook known for his puddings). I’m not sure, maybe she just wanted me to know how.
While at times I resisted cooking and argued with Nanna/Nonna about it, the irony was, I did come to love it and am thankful she persevered. Nanna Francesca didn’t get to see me achieve other things as I may have hoped yet seeing me come around to cooking made her very happy. I guess sometimes it’s the little things you don’t expect that bring such contentment, however humble they may seem, and near enough is good enough (a bit like how some of my pancakes turned out!!) xx
My Italian grandmother made these all the time so I thought it fitting to serve them on one of her Florentine, painted wooden serving trays on the terrazzo table that sat on my grandparents’ patio for decades.
These little doughnut balls are also known as zippoli, zeppole or sfingi in Italy depending on the region where they are cooked. (I’ve also tasted the German version quarkbällchen – known too as ‘Bavarian snowballs’ – from a roadside stall not far from 
On a Sunday afternoon walk, we discovered mulberry trees growing wild along the creek and were not the only ones who picked the berries – the largest, plumpest and sweetest we’d come across in ages. Almost half an hour later the trees were still heavy with fruit, plenty left to share with others, the birds and flying foxes. That night Roger made mulberry pie with crumbly, buttery shortcrust pastry for supper. A little bit of ‘Sunday afternoon’ to last throughout the week…
Saw these sweet, baby capsicums at the market and couldn’t resist buying them, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to cook them. Decided to stuff the capsicums with a mixture of seasoned goat’s cheese, pine nuts, parsley and basil, then bake in the oven. Served with some crusty bread on the side…
It is claimed that arancini originated in Sicily as far back as the 10th century. The balls of rice with various fillings are shaped, crumbed and fried, resembling an orange – the Italian for orange being arancia. (Rice cooked the day before and cooled in the fridge works best.) In Messina, they can be more cone shaped, while in Naples they are pall’e riso (rice balls) apparently. I think ours (made 11 centuries later in Australia!) ended up being influenced a little by both cities.
So far about half a dozen at last count in the vegie patch. Every day I see them getting a little larger. I cannot wait to cook them and am trying to think of different recipes – eggplant parmigiana, crumbed slices fritte, melanzane involtini, stuffed eggplant, melanzane in passata…
Pane Casereccio – delicious served warm – R made this Pugliese bread studded with salami and cheese, inspired after watching an old television series with Antonio Carluccio making it. I love how so many Italian recipes have been created to use leftovers.
“…whenever the loaf is put on the table, few foods will produce such joy and delight in others as when freshly baked bread appears, the aroma of fresh memories rising with every slice, and all things – poetry and miracles, friends and family, food and love – for a short time are as they ought be: one.”
At home when I was growing up, we sometimes ate eggs baked in leftover pasta sauce which we called, ‘eggs in tomato’, not quite as evocative as ‘eggs in purgatory’ that I later discovered this dish is also called.
il bouquet perfetto for Valentine’s Day
Caggionetti/calcionetti are traditional Italian Christmas treats particularly popular in Abruzzo (where my Granny Maddalena made them). They have a filling of almonds, walnuts, chocolate, chickpeas, lemon zest, cinnamon and honey enclosed in paper-thin ravioli casings fried in white wine and olive oil then cooled and dusted with icing sugar.
Autumn means chestnuts, castagne and I always think of my Italian grandfather, Nonno Anni whenever we roast them. In the Abruzzo in the 1930s, Nonno Anni harvested chestnuts beneath Gran Sasso, later taking them to turn to flour at the stone mill with the wooden water wheel on the canal below his village of Fossa.
For many centuries, baking in most Italian villages took place mostly once a week or even a fortnight. Both my grandparents told me how they recalled the women of the village taking their dough to the forno (often the only oven in the entire village), and that each piece of dough had an identifying mark on it for when the women came back to collect their baked bread.
Zoë Boccabella 