Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Buone Feste
Be it harvest, wedding, birth or religious holiday, traditional celebrations are intrinsically
woven into Tuscan culinary culture. They are not as raucous as festivals of the past, when
an animal was sacrificed, but most remain meaty affairs.
Tuscans have baked breads and cakes such as ring-shaped
berlingozzo
(Tuscan sweet
bread) and
schiacciata alla fiorentina
(a flattish, spongey bread-cum-cake best made with
old-fashioned lard) for centuries during Carnevale, the period of merrymaking leading up
to Ash Wednesday. Fritters are another sweet Carnevale treat:
cenci
are plain twists (liter-
ally 'rags') of fried, sweet dough sprinkled with icing sugar;
castagnole
look like puffed-up
cushions; and
fritelle di mele
are slices of apple battered, deep fried and eaten warm with
sugar.
On Easter Sunday, families take baskets of hard-boiled white eggs covered in a white-
cloth napkin to church to be blessed, and return home to a luncheon feast of roast lamb
gently spiced with garlic and rosemary, pre-empted by the blessed eggs.
September's grape harvest sees grapes stuck on top of
schiacciata
to make
schiacciata
con l'uva
(grape cake), and autumn's chestnut harvest brings a flurry of chestnut festivals
and
castagnaccio
(chestnut cake baked with chestnut flower, studded with raisins, topped
with a rosemary sprig and served with a slice of ricotta) to the Tuscan table.
Come Christmas
, bollito misto
(boiled meat) with all the trimmings is traditional for
many families: various animal parts, trotters et al, are thrown into the cooking pot and
simmered for hours with a vegetable and herb stock. The meat is later served with mustard,
green salsa and other sauces. A whole pig - notably the recently revived ancient white-and-
black
cinta senese
indigenous breed - roasted on a spit, is the other option.
