Another trip to Florida means, as is the case with a trip to anywhere further than the local corner store, another round of exhaustive investigation and cataloguing of everything stupid thing I stuffed into my bottomless maw. That said, let’s cut to the chase, in the first of a pair of posts dedicated to this voyage to America’s southernmost corners, this one dedicated to the pleasures of traditional old-Florida eating.
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An Easter special - although to be honest I bought and consumed this bit of pastry months ago - cassatelle marks one of those special occasions where cannoli cream is inserted into something other than a cannoli. It shouldn’t be confused with Cassata, another traditional paschal dessert that appears to have a much more illustrious status in the world of Italian dolces, meriting an entire Wikipedia entry of its own. Cassatelle, which along with the other two items has a Sicilian origin, doesn’t seem to merit as much attention, although I imagine that, due to their shared ingredients and similar name (likely both derived from the Arabic qashatah, or bowl) they have a parallel history. What is Snack Semiotics, however, but a place for the underloved, the misbegotten, and the regionally specific to have their moment in the spotlight. Not to mention that this pastry, often referred to as cassateddi in Sicilian, is delicious, providing a pillowy alternative to the cannoli's shatter-crunch carapace. This humble dough horn boasts specific versions local to both Trapani and Agira, and I’m sure that if were to start splitting hairs (or kicking around the Sicilian countryside) a dozen more varieties would turn up.
Traditionally, these are stuffed with ricotta, some kind of cocoa, or a combination of the two. They also resemble, at least to my mind, some forms of empanada. As I prepare to make Sardinian Panada for Easter, I wonder if it’s time to contemplate the many appearances of ostensibly Spanish cuisine items in Italian cooking, and to attempt to figure out exactly what this says about Spanish influence upon the illustrious peninsula. Alas, the baking project that lies before me (itself a topic for a future post, should no disasters occur) assures that it isn’t. Moon Over Miami is not a great musical. It's not a great food movie either, but it contains enough moments of general culinary weirdness to make it notable, a quality heightened by its lush use of Technicolor shading. Such coloring is, in my opinion, the explanation for the bizarre detail above, in which a jar of pre-made guacamole sauce (pronounced, hilariously, as "gwaca malla") appears in a deep red hue, likely thanks to the fact that the person in charge of the inking had no idea what it was. The odd pronunciation was explained in a recent episode of the linguistics podcast Lexicon Valley, which originally put me on to this cinematic curio; other questions, such as why guacamole is being jarred in the first place, or why the person preparing it describes it as an essential part of her famous hamburger recipe, are a bit harder to answer.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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