“What the heck,” Tizi says. “We might as well have another piece.”
One of many reasons I love her.
It’s lunch time, when postprandial delights are in order. Usually we finish with three almond cookies each, dunked in double shots of espresso smoothed with a few teaspoons of milk. Today, instead, we’re having slices of colomba.
Colomba is a traditional Easter cake, in the shape of a dove (“colomba” being the Italian word for dove). Like panettone a colomba will have chunks of candied orange in it. Unlike panettone, on a colomba you’ll also find a handful of almonds baked into a glaze that browns to a crust that is sprinkled with crunchy pearls of sugar.
For a long time–for me, anyway–the crust was the thing. The first decade or two that we were married, every Easter at the Canducci house the dove-shaped cake was pulled from its dove-shaped box, unwrapped, and cut into slices. And I was like, How do you say Meh in Italian? Like this: Embe (pronounced em-beh). Except for the crust. If given permission, I would have de-crusted the cake, cut it into slices, and tossed the rest. These were mass-produced confections baked months in advance of Easter, then loaded into cases, the cases into shipping containers to be shipped across the Atlantic, warehoused, and eventually trucked to destinations like Cantoro Market in Livonia, Michigan. The cake by then would have had plenty of time to dry. No problem with dried crust. But beneath it was dry lifeless mummified bready matter you ate because you were supposed to eat it. But the crust, and almonds and pearls of sugar? There was redemption. But just barely..
Slow forward another two decades. Tizi and I are retired now. The last 5-10 years we’ve been in Italy before Easter. Before coming home, we drive down to Fano, an Adriatic coastal town down the road from San Marino, where recently there was an exciting discovery: a 2000-year-old basilica linked to the famous Roman builder Vitruvius. Memorialized in the popular imagination by Leonardo’s Vitruvian man.
Another exciting discovery, for us: Il Buongusto Enoteca, run by Antonella Antinori. Antonella has wine, organized by region. She has treasure chests of chocolate. She has panettone and colomba. And she has a good friend in Tiziana Canducci. When we drop by, I stand and make nice, check on local wines, exchange a few words, and then go around the corner for coffee. It will be a long coffee because they will have a lot to talk about. Tizi lays in supplies, chocolates by the kilo. If we’re there before Christmas, she will order a panettone to take home with us; before Easter, a colomba. A fresh one. A colomba made local that the Fanese would cut after their Easter dinner. And so will we.
This year we were not in Italy before Christmas or Easter. Tizi has approximated. She found an artisanal colomba. What a difference. Below the crust is a soft moist yellow cake, eggy yellow like you see in the home-made pasta in Italy.
That’s what we’re eating after lunch, instead of three almond cookies each. She bought two colamba at Vince and Joe’s, an Italian market like Cantoro, in her words, “a shitty one and a good one.” Determined by . . . price. The shitty one was . . . shitty. Like those we settled for decades ago. The good one, on the other hand, is good. Very good. The brand? Olivieri. The cake is edible, eggy yellow, soft and moist. With every bite crumbs fall on the table cloth. Between bites we pick at them, like single-minded birds, pecking at bits of cake, pearls of sugar, counting almonds, trying to be fair. Sighing as we do.
“Next year,” she says. With luck we will go in the fall and bring home a panettone from Antonella; in the spring, a colomba. Next year.
