One rainy fall day, Emily was driving home and listened to the audio for Strega Nona by Tomi DePaola. Her mind began swimming with ideas of what it would be like to eat beside Strega Nona herself. Emily called up Hannah and they envisioned how to bring the story and history of Strega Nona to life at a table in the middle of New York City. 

Strega Nona is a classic children’s book inspired by Medieval history, Italian folklore, German fables, and leads a whole series about the grandma witch and her friends. Strega Nona has recently taken on renewed fame as a poster child of LGBTQ+ rights, anti-capitalist sentiment, and radical joy.

Tomie DePaola, with familial roots in Southern Italy, was a renowned American children’s book author. DePaola was a gay man at a time where it was hard to be both gay and a notable literary figure. This experience of not being able to fully express yourself within your community is one that DePaola often reflected in the characters of his children’s books. Strega Nona exemplifies this with her willingness to live outside of social norms and do good by herself, her animals, and community. While the townspeople appreciate her for her healing abilities, they don’t fully understand how she lives so they don’t completely embrace her. It’s also speculated by some that Strega Nona is a queer character and was in a relationship with Strega Amelia, the witch she was visiting when Big Anthony stole her pasta pot. More than anything, Strega Nona is having a renaissance because of her acts of joy, kindness and love of those around her.

Strega Nona translates to “Grandma Witch” in English, although Nona is slightly misspelled (the proper Italian spelling is nonna). Nona is a witch doctor and highly revered, though misunderstood, in her small seaside Calabrian community.

From the riches of the natural Calabrian landscape, Strega Nona uses various herbs, spices, and plants to treat her patients who suffer with ailments from heartbreak to headaches. Her cottage is surrounded by a lush garden and animals; both wild and domestic. This trope — a single, elder woman with power, intelligence, and independence, is an archetype often found in folklore as a “crone,” “hag,” or “wise woman.” These women are often misunderstood in the stories they appear in and are treated with a complicated mix of reverence, appreciation, and fear.

Nona hires a young farmhand, Big Anthony, to help her around her home, taking care to give clear directions — one of which is to never, under any circumstances, touch her magic pasta pot. One afternoon, Big Anthony spies Strega Nona singing an incantation to her pot, which then produces pasta from nothing at all. Surprised, Anthony runs to the center of the village to tell the community of Strega Nona’s witchcraft. The townspeople disregard these claims as blasphemy, so while Nona is visiting a friend in another village, Big Anthony decides to recite the song he heard to prove the people wrong. He triumphs in producing pasta, but cannot stop the pasta from continuously flowing from the pot. Only after the pasta covers Nona’s cottage and begins to flood the town does Strega Nona return and blow three kisses, the magic Anthony missed to stop the pasta pot. The town, while saved, is drowned in pasta, which Anthony must consume to learn his lesson. 

Strega Nona was published in 1975 and came with the subtitle: “an old tale retold and illustrated by Tomie de Paola.” This highlights the medieval inspiration, but, in fact, Strega Nona was an original character whose story was loosely inspired by the German fairy tale, “Sweet Porridge,” often called “The Magic Porridge Pot.” In this tale, recorded by the Grimm’s Brothers, a little hungry girl is gifted a magic pot that produces sweet millet porridge. She takes it home to her mother and they are happy, but one day her mother tries the pot without knowing the key to stopping its magic. The town is covered in porridge until the girl comes to the rescue, but the townspeople must eat their way back home. 

De Paola’s unique take on this fabel is on the list of the top 100 picture books of all time and won an honor in 1976 for the best children’s book of the previous year. In a number of children’s libraries in the United States, the book was banned due to its positive inclusion of magic and witches. 

TwinFish Culinary designed this spring luncheon to honor the book and explore just what type of pasta (and other dishes) might have flowed from Strega Nona’s kitchen. All dishes have been prepared with local ingredients (when available) with many of the recipes pulled directly from medieval Italian cookbooks.