I absolutely had to share one of Aunt Gilda’s favourite recipes with you! But before I give you the recipe, allow me to tell you a bit about this fantastic woman who, unlike my mom, her sister, didn’t have a life full of roses and flowers. However, despite that, every gesture of hers was a hymn to life.

Born five years before my mother, she started working in a bakery at the age of eight because Grandma Alberta and Grandpa Giuseppe needed an extra hand in the family. At sixteen, she married the love of her life, Osvaldo, and with him, she barely had two daughters, Claudia and Patrizia, before the angels took him away, as she used to say.

Despite the family’s insistence on the importance of starting a new life, Gilda never wanted another man by her side, remaining faithful to the young man she had fallen in love with.

It was during those dark early years of her widowhood that fairy tales entered her life, keeping her company on long winter nights and transporting her to some enchanted world where she could finally forget her pain.