Angela L. Das

Every year on the days leading up to Christmas my Italian mother has a flurry of Cooking Frenzy, and she makes what she has made every year of her life: Christmas Ravioli. Over time, I’ve come to realize that what we grew up calling “ravioli” are more accurately called cappelletti, which are named after the little hats that nuns wear (think Sally Field in ‘The Flying Nun‘). The family tradition has these cute little parcels of meat and garlic in a clear soup with a generous helping of Parmesan on top. Remarkably, the recipe echoes the economic environment she grew up in.

A baby boomer, born in rural, northern Italy right after the Second World War, families my mutter grew up with knew how to utilize food and how to maximize to feed as many mouths as possible. Every usable part of everything is incorporated into the final meal. My grandparents still try to instill this philosophy in me and my brothers, which is something that in some countries remains the same, and in others has sort of been forgotten. In a country like the US, where food is plentiful and constant, there’s a lot of wastage, plain and simple. In a third world country, and even some European countries by comparison, food is purchased and composed more carefully, with greater economic consideration  factoring into the recipes. (That is, until the recent economic crisis has encouraged everyone purchasing in the US dollar to be slightly more thrifty, overall.) For example, the cut of meat used to make the soup is later taken out, cooled, sliced and becomes the base for the first course of Vitello Tonnato. It should be noted though, because I’m no lush when it comes down to it, that since veal was not always readily available in the countries we’ve lived in, I’ve come to actually prefer beef in its place. The ravioli filling is made up partially of this meat, and a mix of others, plus a healthy handful of flat leaf parsley, and can be made in advance, allowing time for the different flavors to fuse.

I’m hoping that this economy will inspire more “economy” (stay with me, I’m about to explain) in the sense of being clever with what you’ve got to begin with. That out of this period, which we will call a “World Depression” no doubt, this necessity will breed delicious family traditions that people will pass on to their own families (like I did this year, teaching my mother in law, her sister and my husband’s cousin how to make ravioli from scratch), and talk about, and blog about, ad infinitum.

Homemade Christmas ravioli I made the other week.

Pandoro, which literally means “bread of gold” is a traditional Italian cake from Verona with a flavor that instantly puts me back in my grandmother’s kitchen. Soft and fluffy, the egg, butter and flour contains the same ingredients as the brioche, only the cake rises higher and the dough isn’t brushed to make that crispy croissant-y crust.

Pandoro is a wonderful dessert and comes in an large and impressively stylish looking box that contains the star-shaped cake wrapped in an airtight bag and comes with powdered confectioner’s sugar on the side. My grandmother’s technique was to slit the bag open at the top, pour in the sugar, and shake the bag until the sugar coated the entire cake. Once the cake was cut, we would take turns dipping our slices into the “sugar bag”.

The inside is a delightfully sound yellow cake. The usual size feeds up to 12 people, easily. The pandoro I found at my local Italian market, pictured here, is a mini version but easily feeds three.

Where To Find It:

It used to be that you could only find this in department and specialty stores around the holiday season, but for a while now they’ve been popping up in the US around the food sections of Ross and Marshalls stores. Don’t gag – as the announcements in those stores periodically remind you, they get their stock from canceled orders from department stores, which doesn’t necessarily mean that the food products have reached their expiry dates (although I always check anyway, ahem).

What To Look For:

I should mention here that my family are all involved in food distribution. So aside from being Italian, and therefore obsessed with food, illness and …no, actually, discussions are pretty much always centered around those two in some way. The point is, food is a really big deal. So bringing around a box of sub-standard pandoro to an Italian family would be a surefire way of being thrown out. Or maybe just frowned at with plenty of finger groupings being bobbed up and down. (You know what I mean, right? That funny hand gesture they do? I’m Italian, I do it, I still think its funny. I digress.) There are a variety of brands out there, but the best ones are:

Tre Marie: Pretty hard to find this one, so if you do you’ve hit the jackpot. Their website states that some of their products are made exclusively for distribution to pasticcerie and Italian bars (which are really more like French cafes than the places we might call “bars”). You can find it on Amazon for a small fortune of $31.99. The seller “pastacheese” has a pretty good seller rating on Amazon Marketplace, and sells Torrone, another Italian Christmas tradition, but that’s a whole other article…

Bauli is probably the most prolific brand of Italian baked goods, as they’ve diversified into producing croissants, brioches and even confectionery to cater to the year-round market. Clever clogs that they are, I’ve tasted their other products and they’re pretty gosh-darn-it-good.