SIMPLE BISCUITS

Lucia is a woman of unusually sweet and gentle manners, yet this does not spare her the hard work in the fields, where she faithfully accompanies her husband and displays all the vitality that sometimes distinguishes women.

The countryside, family, domestic life: terms associated with simplicity, yet settings for humanity’s greatest passions and tragedies.

Perhaps society’s cultural and emotional impoverishment began when women withdrew the attention these spheres need, I suspect from age-old exhaustion rather than superficiality.

Yet that ancestral strength is so deeply rooted in our DNA that the seed of the history that brought us here cannot die out.

When I asked Lucia what traditional sweet her family used to make, she hesitated, her expression uncertain.

At first, I regretted what I thought was a memory so distant it had been lost. Then, with all her simplicity and spontaneity, she replied:

“When we make bread, we use some of the dough to make biscuits, adding sugar and other ingredients.”

Her use of the present tense dissolved my fear.
The link with tradition had not broken; on the contrary, it was so deeply woven into daily life that it could not be distinguished from it.

There is no before and after industrialisation. They have continued sowing and growing wheat, making bread with their own flour and baking it in a wood-fired oven, then, following a now-uncommon logic of household economy, adapting the dough to give the family a sweet moment.

By “sacrificing” some bread dough and adding a few ingredients, Lucia continues baking what she simply calls “biscuits with yeast”, never thinking they might have a particular name or tradition.

Simple, wholesome and good, like dear Lucia.