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Day of Advent
3
Carmela Martino's award-winning novel PLAYING BY HEART is set in 18th-century Milan. You can't have a novel set in Italy without mentioning food. 😊
So, when writing PLAYING BY HEART, Carmela scoured books on the history of food in Italy to ensure she didn't have her characters eating anything that wouldn't have been found in Milan in the 1700s. One of the foods she felt confident mentioning was panettone, an Italian sweet bread said to have originated in Milan. It's typically made with candied fruit in addition to raisins, but since no one in her house likes candied fruit, she replaced that ingredient with dried cranberries. she makes panettone for her family every Christmas and often gives it as a gift too.
Enjoy her recipe today!
Author's Christmas Fun Fact
In my Italian-American family, we fasted from meat on Christmas Eve and celebrated instead with a special meal featuring seafood dishes: shrimp, octopus, smelt, anchovies, baccalà (salted cod), eel, and my favorite, calamari (squid). It was my job to clean the squid before my mom cooked it in tomato sauce to serve over pasta. I still make pasta with calamari sauce for our Christmas Eve dinner, but since I never cared for baked eel, I don't serve that. There's a scene in ROSA, SOLA depicting Rosa's family eating a traditional Christmas Eve dinner. Like me, Rosa isn't a fan of the eel.
