Recently, my cousin, Carlo (on Granny Maddalena’s side), who lives in Italy, revisited the area of our ancestors in Abruzzo and sent me these photos of pallotte cacio e ova that he’d cooked for the first time. His mother used to make this dish and our shared nonni in Abruzzo would make it too in times past.
I admit I’ve never cooked cheese polpette instead of the usual meatballs. In Australia, Nanna Francesca always cooked the meat ones. (As a little girl, I hated plunging my hands into a bowl of cold mince mixed with egg, breadcrumbs and parsley that together we’d mould into egg shapes – I’m so happy now though that she made me do this with her!)
Abruzzo’s pallotte cacio e ova no doubt came about to use up leftover bits of cheese and stale bread in the cucina povera tradition. Fried, then simmered in tomato sauce, the pallotte swell and absorb the sauce flavour to taste surprisingly like ‘real’ meatballs. I might have to try it, I think! Thank you to Carlo, for sending me these wonderful photos and allowing me to share them. It’s so great to see the carrying on of heritage in handed-down recipes.
I’ve much admiration for how all of our ancestors created inventive and delicious dishes from humble ingredients and didn’t waste anything. Yes, this mostly came from living in poverty but it’s taught me that no matter how much we have, never to throw away food, to try to find some way to use leftovers. Scraps could feed animals and if there was food past its day, the nonni buried it to ‘go back into the earth’ as fertiliser.
In turn, this dish also reflects the land and what was available. Bread from milled grain or corn grown in the fields, eggs from household chickens or bartered, pecorino cheese due to Abruzzo’s many sheep flocks. Carlo said he decided to use parmigiano as well as pecorino, as the latter can be quite salty. This is fitting, I think, since he also has ancestry from Emilia Romagna. It seems it’s always there with us, this history of our ancestors, especially in food and I’m so pleased it continues. ❤️ Zoë xx
When we cook the same dishes that our ancestors cooked it connects us to them, to our history and it also brings us back to something within ourselves that we mightn’t have thought of for some time or something we hadn’t yet discovered. Just the aroma of a dish cooking can release a trigger of deep memories that lets things rise up and take shape in us.
The maccheroni Calabrese (pasta rolled on a knitting needle for its shape) has a richer red sauce with melanzane and chillies that Francesca’s town of Palmi is known for. And the chitarra pasta has bitter, wild greens added to the passata, inspired by Maddalena walking hillsides near Fossa picking wild greens into her upturned apron and taking them back to cook with. It also has pecorino cheese on top because that part of Abruzzo is known for its sheep.
Zoë Boccabella 