By: Caesar Maximianus

Caesar Maximianus — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 12:37:56 +0000

Buona Pasqua to you and your family!!! We love both this recipe and your presentation of it. Our late Grandmother used the Pizza Gaina pronunciation and it’s a pleasure to see it treated with respect. I acknowledge the altitalia, but like cucina povera, I embrace her dialect. We had a choice as children: pizza gaina or the Pizza di Ricotta Dolce that we called “pizza grana” — probably a further corruption of the blended languages. We assisted our Grandmother and one of my jobs was dicing the salumi and cheese until they noticed that Good Friday lost the battle with good tasting, then I was reassigned :-)) It was the time of the year when my Grandmother baked the most and though she’s been gone some four decades, it’s the time of the year when her spirit guides our hands just a little more. My sister is particularly skilled at our Grandmother’s recipes.

I would welcome, given how adept you are with our language, any insight into how the fatback paste (saltpork, garlic and parsley pesto) that she used in bracciale and referred to as “la de la chaad?” Lardellato is the closest word that I can find, but I am uncertain whether it was dialectic, her “protecting” us from the language, protecting the language from us, or some other explanation. I tried for years to understand “rigobhaad” which was her word for the triage of vegetables where small spoiled sections would be excised from the whole; it turns out to have been recuperato, “recovery,” waste was limited and the remainder cooked.

Again, thank you for all the effort you put into this site — it is a cultural treasure.

Comments on: Pizza Chena

By: Caesar Maximianus