10848 A sweet pasta in honour of the dead.

November 2nd, All Souls' Day. It is an important feast day here in Italy. The dead are remembered with flowers at the grave and sweet pastries are sold supposedly to children. Some are rock hard and vividly coloured! In Umbria, at the end of October the country women start chopping the walnuts they have gathered in preparation for the traditional early November Umbrian sweet, la pasta dolce. On November 1st, they roll out homemade tagliatelle (also known as fettuccine, ie, "little ribbons") and after cooking the tagliatelle in boiling water, they toss them with bread crumbs, the crushed walnuts, cocoa, sugar, lots of grated lemon rind, cinnamon and some red liquer called Alchermes. (It’s a sweet liquer with a spicy tang).

This "sweet pasta" is rooted in an impoverished rural tradition: Sweets were made mostly from what the peasants could grow on their land. Every farmhoue had their own flour, eggs (for the pasta) and walnuts and the farmers wife then sold eggs and wild mushrooms in town during the autumn months for the money needed to buy the cocoa, cinnamon, sugar and Alchermes. Recipes vary, house-to-house: The idea is that you first mix the just-drained tagliatelle with a bit of water mixed with lemon juice, before mixing in the other ingredients. Pasta dolce. Is not for the faint hearted. I'll try a spoonful. Then basta!