Grandma’s cooking was very homely and substantial.
While seasoning chestnut flour tagliatelle with mushrooms, she said the wood’s flavors call to each other. It’s so simple. But her repertoire changed during holidays, events, and Sunday lunches.

At that time, even religious precepts affected the family menu.

Reading and studying old cookbooks, I see that the women of my grandmother’s generation, born between the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, had considerable repertoires that embraced local, Italian, and international cuisine.
Contemporary home recipe books are also full of recipes of all kinds. Today’s women have impressive tools like the web (blogs and social networks).
At the beginning of the 20th century, women did not have the internet and social networks.
Likewise, their recipe books are a door open to the world. And from these collections, you can understand a lot about a woman.
Women of high social standing inherited family culinary books, which they enriched with new recipes over time. This was thanks to the network of other women working for them as cooks or maidservants, who brought their recipes from the countryside where they came from and exchanged them with other servant women from other homes.
Of course, ladies of high society discovered new dishes, traveling and exchanging recipes by letter. They were women who had no qualms about asking, even when they were not famous for sharing.

I think of Claudia, a superb cook with a bad temper, as well as my husband’s grandmother.

She wanted and got the recipe for cassata from the Caflisch bakery, which was at its peak during the Belle Époque years while she lived in Sicily.

Claudia was the daughter of a prefect of the Kingdom of Italy who was sent by the regime to fight mafias. During her Sicilian years, she learned to cook extraordinary dishes.

She made cassata Siciliana for Christmas lunch every year until her death. Then he died, taking that and many other recipes with him.

One day, I will tell you her story. But today, I return to the tale of Sara, my maternal grandmother.

Sara’s cookbook

I think of her social background when I leaf through her recipe books.

Sara was born into a family of farmworkers, which, once, was the worst condition for a farmer.

You work when and if someone calls you. At that time, and unfortunately today, there was a system of illegal hiring out (called caporalato).

When she was a child, she started working in the fields. But even though she was a poor and illiterate woman, Sara resolutely escaped that life. She learned to read and write, and above all, thanks to her work, she sent her daughter to college to study.

Rethinking about the variety of recipes in her repertoire, for the reasons I have told you, it tells an incredible story.

Among those peasant dishes, what is surprising are the French and German recipes and the recipes for the table of the lords, from the local and Italian traditions. Her cookbooks tell about her determination to change her destiny. Among those recipes, I find names of forgotten dishes and desserts. I also ignore most of those recipes’ origins.

My mother has never desired to cook, although she has recently discovered the world of pots and pans. But she is the person who preserved notebooks, loose sheets, and grandmother’s books.

We often still rummage through boxes and cupboards in search of culinary memories, and we still find one of her notes at the bottom of a drawer.

Sometimes, we recover a memory. The wood’s fruits call each other, like chestnuts with mushrooms.

Chestnut flour tagliatelle

When I met Mrs. Paola at the farmers’ market in Piazza Carducci in November, she was cooking fragrant mistocchine on a stove. On that occasion, she said that if I liked it, I could buy the chestnut flour that she produces on her family-run farm in Bologna.

In December, an SMS informed me that the chestnut flour I was waiting for was ready.

Of course, it depends on the area and the climate of the season. For some years now, chestnut flour has been ready earlier than it used to be, but still, there is no point in looking for new flour in September. It’s too early.

We organize the delivery crazily. But in mid-December, I am taking in other preparations and storing the chestnut flour in the pantry, forgetting about it until a Sunday morning in mid-January.

I’m in my rooftop kitchen, which, news has it, will soon no longer be my kitchen, preparing a sauce of mixed mushrooms leftover from a braised mushroom stew.

Suddenly, I think back to my grandmother, who used to say that wood ingredients call for other wood flavors, to the chestnut flour patiently waiting for its moment, and to the mushrooms in the pan. I took out my cutting board and rolling pin to make the pasta dough.

Pasta dough with chestnut flour for tagliatelle

It is a traditional egg and flour fresh pasta with a mix of 00 and chestnut flour. Some people also make it without eggs, just flour and water.

If I use 4 eggs, I mix 100 g of chestnut flour with 300 g of 00; if I make two-eggs sfoglia, I use 130 g of 00 and 70 g of the other.

Chestnut flour has a lingering sweet flavor and gluten free. For this reason, the pasta sheet with chestnut flour is more challenging to roll out. I recommend that you roll out the pasta sheet very thin; it tends to puff up in baking. If the lack of gluten makes it difficult, use a pasta machine to roll it out. For the same reason, cut tagliatelle about 0.5 cm thin.

Grandma loved to dress them with a simple sauce of mixed mushrooms. When in season, she enriched it with porcini. In the Romagna Apennines, chestnut flour tagliatelle is usually served with a shallot sauce. I also like them very much with a white sausage ragù

Buona cucina, Monica

Cook with me

Among my family’s recipes with chestnut flour, HERE is one for making castagnaccio. It is a gluten-free, low-sugar sweet of the peasant tradition.

Keep in Touch

To receive unpublished recipes, tips, and food stories, sign up for the Tortellini&CO newsletter.
Follow me on Instagram.

Print Pin it!

Non ancora votata