My grandmother, like all grandmothers, is an exceptional cook but she knows little about making sweets and cakes, she prefers to eat them, a bit like me.
Fortunately, however, my grandfather built our house exactly halfway between two bakeries, Egle and Buglia. And so in the early morning or late at night, as a child and even today, wherever I look, I smell the bread.
In the Easter period, in particular, the ovens work a lot and how can we forget the races to the bakery to buy the sbattuta pizza (leavened savoury cake)... or cresciuta pizza (a bit like panettone). An existential doubt that marked my childhood began to assail me in front of that counter:
-Dimme Fiamé
(Tell me Fiamé)
-Una pizza... di pasqua
(an Easter...pizza)
-Cresciuta o sbattuta?
-Eh.. Quella che compra nonna
(Eh .. The one that grandma buys)
-Io nonnota la conoscio ma che ne saccio io quale se magna.
(I don't know her but I know what the great lady wants.)
-E nonna si mangia quella più buona
(And grandma eats the best one)
-Tòcca sarà quella sbattuta, se non va bé reportamela subito
(So it will be the sbattuta, if it does not go well come back to me immediately)
Suspance…
It was the sbattuta. Anger.
The thing we love most about Easter is definitely breakfast, somewhat atypical, a sacred moment for all families, especially mine.
I vaguely remember that one Easter morning I was not present, I don't know why, I don't remember. They still reproach me. I tell you this to make you understand the importance of sharing certain moments.
Christmas with your family and Easter ... Always with you family.
And it is precisely during breakfast that my grandmother, after having prepared everything included in the breakfast, including the fateful Coratella, asks me:
'can you take the pizza with you for your mother-in-law?'
I did not understand why, then I discovered that in the past there was this inviolable tradition that if for some reason it was transgressed it jeopardized the future marriage of the betrothed. And so I understood Granny's reasonable concern.
All this is to tell you that:
1) Sometimes a flavour or a scent can bring back to us splendid memories otherwise locked in a drawer.
2) Tradition and its conservation must be continued because it makes us unique in our kind.
3) The sbattuta pizza is better than the cresciuta one.
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