Why This Celebrity Chef Keeps Christmas Traditions from Oppressed Homeland Alive
By Movieguide® Contributor
For celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich, Christmastime recalls idyllic holiday memories fraught with recollections of oppression.
Growing up on Istria, the largest peninsula in the Adriatic Sea, she remembers choosing a tree from the nearby woods, making homemade ornaments and the delicious smells of her grandmother’s tea. But along with those memories come memories of hardship.
“In 1947, the Italian region where my family lived was ceded to Communist Yugoslavia,” Bastianich said in a Guideposts essay. “Many ethnic Italians in Istria headed across the Adriatic Sea. We stayed put because my mother, Erminia, was eight months pregnant with me. Soon the border was closed. By the time I was nine, my parents had devised a plan to get us out. My mother convinced authorities she had to visit her gravely ill aunt in Trieste. [Her brother] Franco and I were allowed passports, but my father, Vittorio, was not. He escaped by foot weeks later.”
“In Trieste, we lived in a refugee camp,” she continued. “My courageous parents kept our spirits up. They assured us we’d have a good future in America one day. Finally, in 1958, we emigrated to the U.S.”
Bastianich and her family arrived in the U.S., and she remembered it feeling like a “whole new world.”
But despite being in a new world, her family kept their holiday traditions alive.
“We continued our old ways of life,” the chef said. “On Christmas Eve we made the traditional baccalà, salted cod. And Mom and I whipped up the batter for frittelle, round yeast-risen fried pastries rolled in sugar, a warm sweet before midnight Mass. I knew our relatives in the Old Country were doing the same.”
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She previously told NPR that traditional foods helped her connect with those her family left behind.
“And so that feeling of unfinished work — I hadn’t said goodbye to my grandmother, to my friends, but when I realized that I wasn’t going back, food became my connector,” Bastianich explained. “When my aunt would cook the food, the smells, it brought me back to my grandmother.”
She eventually turned that passion for cooking into a career and hosts LIDIA’S KITCHEN and is the author of numerous cookbooks.
Years later, Bastianich now cares for her mother, and “When my family gathers on Christmas Eve and I heat the oil for the frittelle, I think back to how long we’ve been doing this. Our Old World faith and food traditions are such a big part of us.”
“‘Tutti a tavola a mangiare!‘ is how I close my cooking shows. ‘Everyone to the table to eat!’ On Christmas Eve when I serve dessert this request is all the more sweet,” she concluded.
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