Zeppole …. a saint …… and an empty plate

So, yesterday Rosa made zeppole.

It is a favourite and consists of butter, eggs, and flour which when mixed are put through a piping bag to make the desired shape and then deep fried and finished off with a dusting of sugar.

Sometimes she will add home made custard, but last night they were presented just as twisty sugared donuts and they vanished as quickly as snow in the winter sun.

The art is to mix the eggs into the butter dough while it is still warm, otherwise it is a very hard job to get the mix to come together easily.

And that was the basic mistake Rosa made when she first came to Cambridge from Naples in 1960.  

She and her husband Simone were economic migrants welcomed as valued additions to the workforce, and stayed for a decade, working in the local hospital and briefly as domestic servants.

That first Cambridge attempt led Rosa to write home asking her mother what went wrong.

Today it would be a phone call or a virtual conversation, but not so 63 years ago. 

And so instead of a 5-minute chat, the follow up corrections took weeks to arrive.

In the same way our dad well into the 1990s always wrote to his brothers, including the weekly airmail one to uncle Charles in South Africa.

By contrast like most people, I rarely write to family or friends, committing the business to the phone, or social media.

Likewise I doubt I would have eaten zeppole when I was growing up, which like so much of the food I now take for granted had to wait decades to be widely consumed in Britain.

They are pretty much typical of Italian cuisine but are most popular in Rome and Naples where Rosa will have eaten them from childhood.

Now, Rosa makes zeppole all the year round, but she told me that they are really a specialty made on St Joseph’s Day which is March 19th.

So, we were a tad early, but none of the family complained.

And having posted a picture on social media, my Canadian cousins recognized them as cruellers and friends offered up variations from Spain and elsewhere.

But then the idea of frying dough and adding sugar or something sweet is as old as the hills, and reminds me of that Neapolitan fried pizza, which is a story for another time.

Location; everywhere

Pictures; zeppole, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson