My grandmother’s seadas

How a Sardinian dessert from my past helped me find my way

When I was growing up in Antella, we often ate Sunday dinner with my Sardinian grandmother in her apartment. For dessert, she served seadas—semolina pastry filled with pecorino cheese. She deep-fried them in olive oil, then drizzled bitter honey on top while they were still hot. She made big batches and froze them, so she’d always have some for us.

You don’t find seadas in Tuscany—it was a treat I could get only at her house.

Seada. By Pietro Di Fontana — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

When she lived in Sardinia, in Tempio Pausania, she used miele di corbezzolo, honey from the flowers of the wild strawberry tree, famous for its bitter taste. She couldn’t find miele di corbezzolo in Tuscany, so she used miele di castagno (chestnut tree honey) instead.

Then I moved away, first to study linguistics in Siena, then to teach at the university in Grenoble, and I left Italy behind. My favorite restaurant was Lebanese. I traveled to South America, to New Zealand, to Asia. I visited my family in Florence, and most of my friends were Italian, but I was a citizen of the world.

Then I got married and moved across the ocean to Oregon. And suddenly, I didn’t know who I was. I’d lost my friends, my work, and the Italian culture I hadn’t even known was important to me.

I started compulsively cooking the dishes of my childhood. Pici al cavolo nero. Latte alla portoghese. Spaghetti alle vongole. Pan di ramerino. I bought a pasta maker and made my own pasta. I started a cooking class to teach Italian cooking.

And—in my kitchen in Eugene, Oregon—I made my Sardinian grandmother’s seadas.

Eventually, I found my way. But cooking seadas and all the other recipes was how I took the first step of acknowledging my Tuscan and Sardinian identities.

You can find my grandmother’s recipe for seadas here.

This post is the first in the Bitter Honey project, collecting the recipes the women and men of the Italian diaspora carried across the water—and the stories of how those dishes connected them to their paesi in Italy. Check it out at: https://numenvia.com/bitter-honey. I’m looking for recipes—and stories!