Odds and ends

Here are a few things I've been meaning to add to my catalog of observations about the goings-on here in Fidenza.

A tale of three hospitals. A while ago I described our visit to the Pronto Soccorso, the emergency room, at the local hospital. (Danny is just fine, thanks.) There are in fact at least two other hospitals in town, aside from the modern one we went to, but neither of the others functions as a hospital anymore.

Before the modern hospital was built fourteen years ago, on the outskirts of town, Fidenza depended on a hospital down the street from us. Now it stands empty and partly demolished. We hear it's eventually going to be turned into housing, but at the moment it's a sinister hulk surrounded by fences.

Not far away is the town's first municipal hospital, which dates back to the end of the 18th century, when a wealthy couple left their palazzo to the town for that purpose. Later the building became a movie theater. Nowadays it's a bingo hall, that I swear I am going to go into one of these days, if only to see whether the interior architecture is as elegant as the outside.

Edible antiquities. Fall is harvest time and a season for food nostalgia. In Fidenza, that means that old-fashioned taste treats I hadn't noticed before are now being spotlighted by local vendors.

One is sugo d'uva, grape sauce, which the Latteria 55 downstairs started advertising a couple of weeks ago. It's actually more like a pudding, as you can see.

Another is a chestnut cake that Danny noticed being sold in a couple of the stalls during the San Donnino fair. He'd walked by, wondering how this delicacy tastes, and the next day decided he had to have some. But by then the vendors had moved their stalls or left, and he spent several days wandering around town looking for the chestnut cake. He was thrilled when he finally found one of the vendors and brought home a big slice.

Unfortunately, it turned out that both these delicacies are pretty uninteresting. The grape pudding tasted just like what it was, grape juice cooked with a little flour. And the chestnut cake, also rather pudding-like, was just a big slab of cooked chestnut, with maybe a little sugar added. It didn't help that, as Danny pointed out, the inside looked a lot like underdone liver.

Maybe if we'd eaten these as children they'd have the added savor of memories of our sainted nonna. But to our jaded palates both these things seemed like they'd taste exciting only if you'd been eating nothing but pasta for months and hadn't ever experienced the thrill of refined sugar.

Speaking of refined sugar... Are Pop-Tarts a kind of ravioli? This was the provocative question put to me by our son during his visit a few weeks ago. He was struck by the variety of filled pastas in this part of Italy--tortelli, which is what they call ravioli around here, plus anolini, agnolotti, cappelletti--and wondered if anything with dough outside and filling inside would qualify. Why not Pop-Tarts, a childhood favorite of his? It was just this kind of outside-the-box, irritatingly logical thinking that made his years in middle school such a joy.

No, I assured him, Pop-Tarts use another kind of dough. They're obviously an entirely different sort of thing.

No sooner had he left town when I noticed that our local market sells jam-filled cookies that are a lot like Pop Tarts, albeit I imagine they're considerably tastier.,,

..and that they are called "baked tortelli."

Apparently our son understands the way Italians think better than I do.