SWEET POTATO DOUGHNUTS

I have always been curious to enter other people’s kitchens, to see how they are furnished and organised, but especially to watch how the women of the household move within them.

You can immediately sense whether there is love and passion for cooking or whether it is simply a duty. I linger where feeling is the secret ingredient in every dish.

The warmth radiating from the kitchen is maternal instinct and affection at work, ensuring that children are properly nourished.

The domestic hearth represents both woman and food, sustaining the family. Fire creates heat; heat nurtures and cooks food, heightening its smells and flavours, and their repetition creates familiarity and reassurance. In the same way, a woman gives life to her children, who are reassured and calmed by their mother’s scent as she holds them close. That embrace returns in the dishes she serves.

Being in the kitchen with someone preparing food makes me feel loved. I listen to and observe a family’s story, the traditions of a couple of generations, the connections that keep a lineage strong despite change.

Such cultural and social experiences are not all that common, so I often return to the warmth of those hearths I have been fortunate enough to know.

Mrs Ninetta is truly unique among my acquaintances. With her, it is less about exchanging recipes than understanding how hard women really worked to provide food for their loved ones.

The vegetable garden, cheese-making, bread, preserves of every kind, half of December spent turning the pig into cured meats and lard, and her wonderful cannoli made with that lard; corn taken to the mill for polenta, and countless lessons in cooking, life and love for nature and others.

I would like to spend hours beside her stove, listening to her tell me about life.

Unusually generous in revealing and sharing her recipes, she has also taught me that there is no sense in guarding a recipe collection jealously: sharing is itself an act of love for food.

So I want to honour Ninetta and lovers of fried sweets, and who isn’t one, by sharing her delicious potato doughnut recipe, which has become one of my favourite Carnival preparations in recent years.