Pia, Costanza, Barbara, Clementina, Elda, Maria, Ester.
These names taste like beautiful, ancient sweets. They are the names of some of my direct ancestors, geat-aunts, great-great-grandmothers and so on.
Traveling back in time through the branches of my genealogy is quite the journey.
I met women who lived in societies so far away from the present one and so different from the world we live in now.
They could have been from the Moon.
They lived in a time when women had only one choice: mothers, workers, and wives.
I look around me at my generation, the direct descendant of those women, and what I see is a beautiful generation of women making very personal, independent and free choices instead: someone went abroad and explored a new world, someone went around and discovered a new self, and someone else decided to become a mother and be always there for their children.
We all chose according to our inclinations, which none of the above-mentioned ancestors could do.
Of some of these grandmothers I have but one memory; of others, I have a recipe; and of others, nothing but a name.
Being a woman, I carry all their best lucky genes packed in my double X chromosomes, so I think I am a bit their revenge: they could not choose, but I could, and I can avenge them and make them live a life they could not even dream of.
Great-grandmother Ester was one of them.
Mother of the father of my father. She lived in a small house and never wanted to upgrade her kitchen to a modern one, even in her ancient age in the Fifties.
She was faithful to her wood-fired oven, stove, and darkened, smoky kitchen with no electricity, water, or fridge. Stubborn, uninterested in fancy comforts and true to herself: just like me.
Mother to many children, she had cows, chickens, and goats, and it is said she was a good cook within her means of poverty in the Italian wartime eras.
I don’t have pictures of her, but people in the village say I am taking after her even in my looks.
She comes to life for me through my dad’a tales of how much he loved to eat her cornbread as a child.
I found his stories fascinating and the taste of this cornbread almost mythical, as in the meantime the recipe got lost and none of her 16 children, that were grandparents at the time, could remember it.
Thus, I only have a second-hand recipe for Ester’s cornbread, although it is a recipe, I guess, based on what my father remembered and on, and I tried and tested it year after year.
I think I made the breakthrough in this recipe after his passing, so I cannot be sure.
It is so sad that of Ester’s (many) children or grandchildren remember. Here there’s a lesson for those who become parents for the vanity of having descendants.
It’s tough that your grandchildren will even remember your name, let aside your main accomplishments or even your dishes. A cautionary tale!
For many years, I was so angry at them for not carrying this memory; I was relentlessly seeking it. I spent months tampering with food to find the exact alchemy of the recipe, seemingly nowhere to be found elsewhere.
She had many brothers, sisters, neighbours and even children who went to the Americas, both the US and Canada, and I think this recipe came back with some of them.
It is, in fact, a classic American recipe, and in my quest to know more about it, I imagine this woman using this “new” flour as a delicacy.
Only during the 1800s did Granturco, the Italian name for mais/corn, also called sorghum, zaldo, or formentaz, spread everywhere, especially in Northern Italy. It was cultivated even in mountain areas, becoming the usual food for the less wealthy. Just like great grandmother Ester was.
She had 16 children to feed after all, so I can see how cornbread with some milk (she had cows, goats, and rabbits, whose descendants I met as a kid) was a feast and an authentic way to feed a crowd.
According to my dad, she made it a staple at home, and even in her elderly days, she baked it weekly: my dad used to receive it as a snack in the afternoon with some milk or cheese and sausages when he was a preschooler.
If you want to pay homage to all grandmothers and all the forgotten ancestors we all have by baking something, you can do it with this relatively simple recipe I arrived at after many trials and errors.
You can adjust your quantities; these amounts make for a rather fluffy cornbread.
Do not skip the buttermilk. This is the crucial piece of the puzzle.
The missing piece: it was my Eureka! moment, when I realized she had access to it (now a quite rare ingredient at least in her village) because of her cows!
Esters’s Cornbread (Torta de Formentaz)
120g cornmeal or polenta di Storo flour
125g white flour mixed with baking powder
a pinch of coarse salt
100g unsalted butter, melted
60g sugar and one tablespoon of honey
One large egg
220ml buttermilk (latticello)
Whisk the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. In another bowl, mix the melted butter with sugar and honey before adding the egg and buttermilk. Whisk thoroughly before adding each ingredient. Finally, mix the wet ingredients with the flour.
Once combined, pour the mixture into a baking tray or pan and bake (200 degrees for 20 minutes should do).
If you do not have buttermilk, which is the critical element of this recipe, together with cornmeal, you can make it yourself by adding two teaspoons of fresh lemon juice or white vinegar to a cup. Then, fill the remaining space with enough whole milk. Stir and let sit for five minutes before using.
Polenta di Storo is, simply put, the best polenta in Italy. It’s a small Slow Food production between Trentino and Lombardia, where Trento and Brescia kiss just a few mountains away from the Garda lake.
It’s absolutely delicious. Worth the trip just to get a bag of it.