Lucca - Tuscany Recipes & Anecdotes or cooking therapy
In Lucca-Tuscany
following age-old tradition, family recipes are forwarded exclusively to the own daughter, preferably just “last minute”. This tradition can be linked back to the legendary figure of Santa Zita, buried at San Frediano inside Lucca long ago – but that is another story…..
In our case things are different. Manuela, a very courageous lady from Lucca, tells us stories of her own and her ancestors’ life and, as eating is an important part of Tuscan culture, she is now unveiling some secrets of old and well hidden recipes for us. Liliana, Manuela’s mother, on the contrary would only let you have her friendly smile when asked for recipes and ingredients for her splendid dishes – and that would bring the discussion to an end.
Manuela has spent part of her younger years in Chicago, got married over there – to a young man from Lucca of course – has given life to her first son there and later-on returned to Lucca with her family. Back in Lucca she started taking serious interest in the old traditions, habits and history of her family and thus with Lucca and the area around. Over the time she got more and more confronted with questions about family, traditions and cooking recipes by people who love Tuscany-Lucca, which made her realise the high degree of interest people from other countries and cultures were taking when listening to her stories. This in the end has lead to her decision to put pen to paper.
You may look forward to the truly lively and telling style of her presentations.
I want to start a new recipe collection for all my friends who want to try something different, wholesome and old Tuscany ideas. I cannot take the entire credit for the outcome, good or bad, for this venture because most of the things that I will put down come mostly from living as a child in a family where nonna Zita, (the main character of this venture ) did all the cooking for the entire family. She did not have any of the fancy utensils and ranges that we can use today, and surely she did not have a supermarket full of all the ingredients you may need. But she did come up with the best tasting things that you can think of. 
She cooked by the seasons, she looked into her garden very early in the morning and decided what she would make for the day. We did always have chickens, rabbits, ducks and sometimes turkeys. But some of them had to be sold at the market in Lucca. But the family could use the meat from the pig all year. Nonno Stefano salted the hams and made prosciutto. He also made the sausages, the salami, and other different types of sausages that you cannot ever find in a super market. The rest of the meat was either kept under salt or under lard (the pigs fat ) Nonna Zita went to the butcher to buy meat only if someone in the family was ill and she needed to make some beef broth The chicken broth was easy, she just went outside killed a chicken and the broth was ready in a few hours. The little Alimentari ( grocery store ) was used to buy things like salt, sugar, coffee, ground pepper and some special kind of soap called soda to be used for almost everything that needed washing, from dishes to the family laundry .
