I did not grew up celebrating Thanksgiving in Tuscany… I vaguely remember a couple of American kids attending my middle school, and how jealous I was when their family made them skip school for a long November weekend. When two decades later I arrived in the US, got married and started producing kids, I finally started celebrating this Holiday with joy! I like being grateful, as I believe I do have a lot to be grateful for!
However, as I started exploring the menu possibilities for this long weekend affair of family and food, I did realize how unprepared and oblivious to its traditional ingredients I was. Italians do not cook turkey that much (we are not fans of white meat), we really do not bake with pumpkin but rather make risotto with it, and I always got lost in translation with cranberries. So I decided to let go my sense of inadequacy and just rolled with it: what are the traditional ingredients for Thanksgiving? Ok then, let’s see how I can cook them in a Tuscan way.
This dessert is the first item I have ever developed for our Tuscan-American Thanksgiving, and it turned out so good that these days we also bake this batter into mini corn meal muffins that we serve fresh every morning at our shop in Brooklyn.
The cornmeal provides a wonderful and surprisingly homey texture, it is comforting but also has plenty of character because of the “grittiness”, the cranberries pop in your mouth delivering plenty of juice and truly merry well with this simple batter. Needless to say, my kids expect to be served their slice with a dollop of whipped cream… well, to be completely honest, that’s my favorite way to enjoy it as well!