Today's recipe is from Cooking Without a Grain of Salt (Elma W. Bagg, orig. 1964, but mine is the 1972 Bantam edition), but I didn't choose it for its notably-low sodium content, or even for its suitability to help you finish off a bounteous harvest of zucchini. It's just got a really weird headnote.
Headnotes often provide extra information-- perhaps advice on where to find an ingredient that wasn't common at the time the book was written or what to sub in if you just couldn't find it. Maybe a brief anecdote about the first time the cook tried this food on vacation and knew they needed to figure out how to make it at home or about a time when the cook served the recipe and got a particularly favorable reaction. But this is the first time I've ever seen a headnote about the cook discussing the religious experiences of Italian immigrants who sell zucchini. I have no idea why Bagg thought this was a good note to include for the recipe... which is, oddly enough, exactly the thing that made me so interested in it. So, well-played, Ms. Bagg! You got my attention. Still not sure what that adds to the recipe, though.
I guess their prayers for lots of zucchini to sell were answered?
ReplyDeleteThanks to the current produce situation I've noticed that growing your own food is now a gentrified activity that the rich are really bragging about these days. It used to be that poor people grew and preserved their food. Now you have to be rich to have a yard where you can grow a garden and have a big house with storage space for freezers and canned goods.
Yes-- a lot of things that poor people used to do to save money are now rich-people hobbies. (I can't say that I'm personally sad not to be able to grow my own produce, though! I'm too lazy for that and not good with plants anyway.)
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