My Italian Thanksgiving

Back in June, my Italian roommates began asking me about Thanksgiving. Any holiday focused primarily on food can’t be too off-putting for Italians. Finally, the time had come. Early this week, my roommate Claudia and I sat down in front of allrecipes.com and team-translated the following dishes:

• l’insalata con clementine, uve, noce, olio (salad with clementines, grapes, walnuts, and oil)
• il pane di zucca (pumpkin bread)
• il pane di banane, noce, e cioccolato (chocolate-chip banana walnut bread)
• il pane di mais (cornbread)
• il ripieno (stuffing)
• la salsa di mirtilli (cranberry sauce)
• il pure di patate
• il “pie” delle mele (apple pie... pie cannot really be translated since the closest word for it in Italian is torta, literally “cake”)

We found ourselves missing a few key dishes: il tacchino con il sugo della carne (turkey with gravy) and il “pie” della zucca (pumpkin pie), but in the end we had our Thanksgiving feast, albeit somewhat unconventional. There was quite a hubbub in the small kitchen as guests began filtering in at 9pm. (Having a Sicilian roommate means starting dinner at bizarre hours of the night.) We hurriedly finished preparing the last dishes, shouting back and forth in both English and Italian. The night brought together my Italian, British, and American friends. (Nina Chen and some of her NYU-London friends had flown down to Pisa that morning, and the British guest happens to be studying Italian literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore here in Pisa.) The evening was a satisfying mélange of confusion and joviality, but I believe it was quite a success. As my British friend said afterward,

Grazie mille for a bellissima festa. I will always remember my first Thanksgiving. In Italy.