A Sicilian Nonna's notes on Monogamy + Pasta Bake

Kalimera from a drizzly Athens.

One for the weekend - especially if it’s a cosy one where you are - this traditional veggie Sicilian pasta bake is hearty, wholesome and feels like a squeeze from the bosom of a Nonna. Scroll down if you’re in it only for the recipe but first, some notes from Nonna Ciccina and how views on monogamy have changed in a lifetime.

South of Sicily in the countryside of Licata, I spend a day learning to roll fresh pasta with Nonna Ciccina in her outdoor garden. Cooking up a Taiano is a real process, usually reserved for feasting days like New Year’s Eve.

First Ciccina prepares the pasta dough, returning to knead and roll hundreds of intricate individual pieces of strozzapretti (for the purposes of the recipe below, you can use a good quality store / deli-bought pasta), before moving onto the many individual components that make up the layers of a traditional Sicilian, pasta al forno (oven baked pasta).

We hang out in her garden kitchen between the wood fired oven and the outdoor dining area for what feels like hours. Inevitably, I begin to ask her questions about her life. Nonna Ciccina’s upbringing was very similar to my own Yiayia’s. As we speak, I begin to draw a number of parallels and it comes as no surprise that they were born just one year apart from each other (1936-37). Like Yiayia, Ciccina also never went to school. Her life as a young girl was solely focused on daily tasks that would contribute to the everyday running of the family. She spent her days between working the fields, sowing and harvesting and then the home, where she would help prepare meals for the family, along with the other female members of the household.

During the same post-war period, both Ciccina and my own grandmother’s husbands left their respective homes, south of the Mediterranean for Germany, to work in factories and send money home to their families. This is what Ciccina said about the experience of having the man she had recently met and married, leave for fourteen years:

I was 26 years old when I married, which was quite late for those days. He was my first and only love and a golden man. He left for fourteen years to work in Germany and I never went to visit him once. He’d come twice a year and they were really the only times we would go out. I didn’t dare go out without him.

I would ask him what he was up to over there and he’d always respond, ‘I am faithful to you’ but you never really know. He was a man. I don’t know what exactly he was doing for those years but what I do know was that he was coming back to me.

I don’t like the life young people lead these days. For us, it was one man forever. Don’t imagine that when you’re married to someone, there won’t be fights and that everything will be perfect. After ten years of engagement now, people in modern relationships can divorce and exchange people. Do you think that’s a better life than the one I led? The most important thing is respect and understanding between a couple. You have to love them and respect them, in spite of it all.

For obvious reasons, I find Ciccina’s views problematic, partly because the conversation with her reminds me of something my own Yiayia had told me about her experiences with my Pappou when he was off ‘doing what he was doing’ in Germany. I’m unsure how Yiayia came to find this out but she’d heard reports of my Pappou pinching some poor German girl’s bum. (Bear in mind they’re in their thirties in the 1940s and we’re not talking about my Pappou in his ripe old age sexually assaulting a young’un - but still). I asked her what she did in retaliation and she just laughed, shrugged and said “What could I do? He’s a man.”

In the first instance, I balked at Yiayia’s reaction and was outraged that strong women like Ciccina and Yiayia - women who were keeping the household together and taking care of multiple young children without a partner at home to lean on for years - could accept and tolerate that kind of behaviour. Now I wonder if perhaps ‘monogamy’ in the sense that they experienced it was looser than it is now. These women held their men up to a more relaxed moral code. The reasoning being, the odd dalliance or slip-up might happen but as long as their men kept by their promise to provide for them, take care of them, come home to them - all was accepted.

I can’t say I agree with the set up and I couldn’t contemplate this exact arrangement, were it not to be reciprocated with the same expectations of myself by my man but I do think Yiayia might have made it so long with my Pappou because she had a level of tolerance and patience that I lack.

Perhaps ‘modern relationships’ - as Ciccina refers to them - are built entirely on unattainable expectations? I suppose these grandmothers had a more realistic outlook when it came to their partners and maybe, just maybe, our own relationships might benefit from demanding a little less. One person can’t have it all and as Ciccina suggests, understanding the person you are with is one of the most important things you can do in a relationship. If they’re letting you down, maybe it’s because you’re projecting an unrealistic dream of the partner that you want, rather than seeing the person that you have?

I’ve cooked with over two hundred women over the past few years and the overarching theme in all of their advice on love is: tolerance. If that isn’t enough food for thought, below I’m sharing Ciccina’s hug in a pasta bake - her Sicilian Veggie Taiano - for my paid subscribers.

Filakia xx Anastasia xx

Nonna Ciccina’s Sicilian Pasta al Taiano (veggie pasta in the oven)

Feeds 4-6