In the farmhouses of the plain around Parma, a young woman who married into a family was asked one thing early on, and she was asked it in dialect: Sit bón’na äd fär la fojäda? “Can you make the sfoglia?”
The fojäda, like the Italian sfoglia, is a sheet of egg pasta rolled out by hand on a wooden board, and asking a new bride whether she knew how to make it was not quite as innocent as it sounds: a young woman who had never yet managed a kitchen of her own might well have had little practice, so the question gave the older women a quick way of judging how capable she was likely to be, once the cooking became her responsibility.
