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Enchiladas: A Culinary Monument to Colonialism historytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Beethoven and Napoleon historytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Have Your Simnel Cake and Eat It | History Today historytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The History of the Picnic | History Today historytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A History of Pizza | History Today historytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from historytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Panettone, Italy’s Favourite Christmas Cake Rich enough to appeal to lords and dukes, the success of panettone is down to its festive, egalitarian simplicity. Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve always loved Christmas stories. I can’t count how many times I have read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Match Girl’. I’m also fond of Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’. But my favourite has to be Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s ‘La gioia e la legge’ (‘Joy and the Law’).Set in Milan in the early 1950s, this unsung classic of Italian literature is the tale of Girolamo, a downtrodden clerk at the Big-Name Production Company. All through December, he has been dreading Christmas. He is behind with the bills and, even with his bonus, he knows he won’t be able to buy his children much food – let alone presents. But he is in luck. Just before the holidays begin, his boss names him the company’s ‘most deserving employee’ and gives him a magnificent seven-kilo panettone as a reward. On his way back home, he can hardly contain his excitement. But before he can cut ‘the golden strings which some industrious Milanese artisan had tied so beautifully around the package’ that evening, his wife taps him on the shoulder. The lawyer, Risma, had done them a favour a short while ago, she sighs; rather than eat the panettone themselves, they should give it to him as a ‘thank you’. Dolefully, he agrees and, after handing his prize over to his wife, goes out to buy another, smaller panettone. But no sooner has he done so than he remembers how much his colleagues had complained about not getting a taste of his prize. Setting aside the second panettone to share with them after the holiday, he buys a third, even smaller panettone for his family. To make things worse, Risma doesn’t even seem to have received the first one! Fearing that it might have got lost in the post, he tries to establish its whereabouts, to no avail. After Epiphany, however, a card arrives from the lawyer ‘with warmest thanks’. ‘Honour’, Lampedusa notes, ‘had been saved’. But not much else.