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Ingredients Bread dough, cut into rounds
Directions If you want to make cauzuncielli with "scammaro" you use the same dough as with cauzuncielli imbottunati ("pasta de llo ppane).
Notes The recipe in this entry was taken from the book, "Cucina Teorico-Pratica" by Ippolito Cavalcanti (Naples: Di G. Palma, 1839). For the complete copyright-free Italian cookbook visit www.archive.org. P.S. The directions are a little bit difficult to understand, but having done similar style of dishes, I kind of filled in the blanks. In any case, having grown up in a Southern Italian family (born in Molise) many of the words used in Cavalcanti's Neapolitan recipes sound very similar to the dialect used in Molise. Certainly, the word, "scarole," which the Google Italian-English dictionary translates as "escorole," was in my family used to mean Swiss chard. When I was a child my mother used Swiss chard in omelets and other dishes, she rarely used spinach and she certainly never used escorole. According to my mother the reason those from Molise use "scarole" rather than other greenery in their dishes is because farmers in Molise found that "scarole" did well, but other types of greenery did not take well to the soil. When I was growing up in Montreal back in the 1960s I assumed "scarole" was an Italian vegetable known only to Italians and sold only in Italian shops. It was only when I was an adult that I discovered to my amazement that "scarole" is not in fact an Italian vegetable, but one available throughout western Europe and some parts of North America. A source of merriment. Ignorance shouldn't cheer one up, but when it comes to food, everything has to be taken with a grain of salt. Comments and photos: Mary Melfi. |