Note 4 — THE WOOING OF CASSANDRO.1

‘Friggitoria,’ an open shop where all manner of fried dishes very popular among the lower classes, and varying according to the time of year, are made and sold; three or four or more enormous pans of oil and of lard are kept boiling, and at one season fish, at another rice-balls, at another artichokes, &c. &c, always previously dipped into light batter, are cooked therein to a bright gold colour. On St. Joseph’s Day, as it always falls in Lent, a meagre festa-dish is made of balls of batter fried in oil, in as universal request as our pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. A writer in the ‘Giovedi’ mentions two popular traditions on the connexion between the ‘frittelle’ or ‘frittatelli’ and St. Joseph. One is that St. Joseph was wont to make such a dish for his meal by frying them with the shavings from his bench, in the same dangerous way that you may see those of his trade heating their glue in any carpenter’s shop in Rome. The other, that on occasion of the Visitation, the B. Virgin and St. Elizabeth remained so long in ecstatic conversation that the dinner was forgotten, and St. Joseph took the liberty allowed to so near a relation of possessing himself of a frying-pan and preparing a dish of ‘frittelle.’

The writer already quoted narrates in another paper that the ‘friggitori’ formerly plied their trade in the open air, but one day a cat escaping from the attentions of an admirer she did not choose to encourage, sprang from a low roof adjoining, right into the frying-pan of a ‘friggitore’ full as it was of boiling oil and spluttering ‘frittelle’; the cat overturned the frying-pan, setting herself on fire, and carrying a panic together with a stream of flaming oil into the midst of the crowd in waiting for their ‘frittelle.’ Since that day the ‘friggitore’ fries under cover, though still in open shops. ↑