Lindsay Marie Morris

Among the cornerstones of rural life in Sicily was the tradition of using and maintaining a public oven. It was a practice born from necessity. Because few rural people had their own ovens throughout Italy's history, communities would rely on one that was communally shared. 

 

Ancient Rome once hosted a vast network of at least 500 public ovens, which spread throughout Europe from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Citizens would bring dough to bake bread together in the community oven, which was a place where the rich and poor would bake side-by-side, stories would be swapped, and relationships would blossom.

 

It lasted until after World War II when most people purchased their own ranges and baked in their own homes. Much was gained in convenience, but was something lost in shedding this ancient practice?

 

Several people have asked that question, which has led to the creation of community ovens across the United States.

 

Vermont art teacher and former librarian Jen Burton and her friend Mark Woodward, a former state legislator, founded the Johnson Community Oven in 2017.

 

A family-friendly place where locals have gathered to communally dine on fresh-baked pizzas, the oven is primarily supported by donations and grants. Elmore Mountain Bread, Jasper Hill Farm, and Foote Brook Farm have all contributed food. And residents have donated building materials and wood. The oven has served as a glue, further connecting people in this town of just over 3,000 people.

 

Jen and I recently sat down to chat about how she and Mark got started, what goes into running a community oven, how it's used, and how the Johnson Community Oven ties to public oven tradition.

 

 

What exactly is a community oven?

I guess it doesn't have to be the same thing everywhere, but in Johnson, it's an oven that sits on town property and is available for anyone in the community to use. You need to sign up with the town, fill out a form, and say when you'll use it. Hopefully, you will get a little bit of training from an oven volunteer. Often, people will reach out to someone on the oven committee, and committee members will run the oven for their event.

 

There's a community pizza night that happens for about eight weeks each summer. The oven committee, along with other volunteers, organizes and hosts it. The pizza is free—by donation—and the committee often gets grants and other donations to supplement the cost. 

 

Tell us how you got started.

My stepmom and her partner built an oven in their backyard, and they sometimes fire it up and invite people in the neighborhood to bring their own baked goods, like bread and other things, to bake. I knew about that, and then I heard a piece on Vermont Public Radio about an oven in Norwich, VT. It had been there for a long time, and somebody had just started using it to bake bread once a week. People would sign up for a loaf of bread.

 

Mark and I both independently heard that story. He kept talking about how he wanted a bread oven in town, and I decided to take action.  

I did the groundwork to get the approval from the town. I had to defend the idea at a select board meeting, where everybody grilled me with questions for an hour. A big question was where to put it; there was a lot of conversation about that.

 

Once we had the approval, we hired a local mason to build it. People contributed stones and other items to be built into it, which added another aspect of community involvement. That was Mark's idea and turned out to be pretty cool.

Describe the oven and the space where it's located.

It's a big stone wood-burning oven, probably about six feet across each side, and it sits in a 12 x 16 structure. It's on a green in town next to an elementary school. In the summer, we have a Tuesday night live concert series there. So, the oven is kind of an extenuation of how we use that space in town.
 

How many pizzas can you fit in there at a time?

About three pizzas can be cooked at once. On a good night, they've made up to 90 pizzas for people in just a few hours, so they really crank out the pizzas. They do a great job.

 

How else is the oven used?

It's been used for birthday parties, retirement parties, and a few fundraising events. The library has started to collaborate with the oven committee on pizza nights. They've been providing some activities and music.

 

How has the use of the Johnson community oven changed?

It was built in the fall of 2017. We didn't use it much that winter, but we started to use it more the next summer. Initially, it was a free-for-all, with everybody bringing toppings and everybody making pizza, including kids. It was nice—messy but nice.

 

Then COVID happened, so we couldn't really do it that way anymore. The committee worked together to formulate a new plan in which just a few people made the pizzas, and nobody else was around. A pickup system was developed where we would tell people online what would be available that day, and they would come to pick them up.

We started to give people whole pizzas in boxes, and they would pick them up and leave instead of hanging around the field. Once COVID started to abate, people started to come onto the field again and spend more time with their neighbors. We had more volunteers helping with the baking, but this core group of people was still doing all the work, like making and cooking the pizzas.

 

Just this year, they started to open it up again and have more people come in, with more people bringing ingredients. And now it's a bit back to being more of a community-involved event.

 

I think people like it to be more participatory, and I think the people running it appreciate not having all the pressure on them. Also, there tend to be just one or two people who cook the whole time because that is more of a skill, but I think a wider range of people are coming in, bringing things in, and making the pizzas.

 

You talked about pizza. What other dishes can be made in the oven?

Richard Miscovich's book From the Wood-Fired Oven is a really great resource. I took a class from him to learn more about using ovens, which was really helpful.

 

I still love his onion recipe. He just put onions in a pot and put them in the oven; they're one of the best things that comes out of the oven.

 

But I've made bread, cookies, and garlic knots in that oven. The nice thing about the oven is that after the high temperatures of the pizza cooking, you can use the lower temperatures to do other things in it. So there's a cycle to it where you can cook at the high heat with certain things and then cook other things at the lower heat. People don't take advantage of it in that way as much as they could.

 

How does this oven tie to public oven tradition?

NPR's Shankar Vedantam has talked about how food really brings people together, so a lot of the reasoning behind doing it was based on that. It just felt like there needed to be something to bring different factions of the town together.

 

It's something that has been a central component of a community for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. Some towns only had one oven, where people would come to cook, so everybody would see each other there and have to cooperate.

 

So, part of the foundation for wanting to build it was to build something that would bring people together and make them work together toward a common goal.

 

In Vermont, we have Town Meeting Day. It's a cultural phenomenon. It's one day when people come to vote on their town budgets. It's an interesting thing that I don't think many other states, if any, have.

 

We have a potluck on Town Meeting Day. The oven is right next to the elementary school, where the town meeting is held. Over the past few years, people have made pizza for the potluck.

 

How would you describe the experience?

Overall, it's been a positive experience for the town. I think a lot of people really do like it. It's a very positive, family-friendly experience.

 

 

 

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A classic Italian soup, traditionally made from vegetable scraps and paired with beans and sometimes pasta, minestrone is the perfect first course for a Sicilian supper. There are a variety of ways to prepare this meal starter, but I was drawn to a recipe by Nadia Fazio of Mangia Bedda.

 

Nadia's blog reflects her quest to transcribe all of her mother's classic recipes. It has an even deeper meaning for her now that their mother has passed. 

 

I sat down with Nadia to discuss her Sicilian-Canadian upbringing, the origin of Mangia Bedda (and its name), the right way to make minestrone, and the art of shelling your own beans.  

 

 

What's your background?

I'm Italian-Canadian. Both my parents, however, were born in Sicily. They are actually from the same little town in Sicily (Naso in the province of Messina). My father emigrated to Canada in 1954. My mom, after they got married, came here and joined in 1959.

 

What was it like growing up Sicilian Canadian?

My siblings and I grew up with all the typical Italian traditions that they brought over from Sicily. It's interesting because it appears that when people came here from Sicily, it was sort of like time froze. They maintained the exact same traditions, with regard to food and family, that they practiced in Sicily. 

 

I grew up with the typical Sicilian foods, all the traditional foods, all homemade from scratch, especially at this time of the year, all of the preserving, making the tomato sauce and all the different vegetables, the beans, and roasting the peppers and the eggplants and all of that.

 

I grew up surrounded by that, and I think my memories of my childhood and my parents are all, for the most part, actually centered around food, and I didn't appreciate it at the time. I really did not appreciate it.

 

I remember being dragged to a local farmers market in Montreal, and I found it so drab. I mean, I was a kid. It was boring, and it's one of my favorite places today.

 

Another memory that stands out is going to a farm outside of the city to get fresh milk (probably unpasteurized at the time) so that my mom could come home and make ricotta with it.

 

Tell us about your project, Mangia Bedda.

I started this blog almost 10 years ago as a little part-time hobby. It slowly grew and evolved, and I realized that my mission was really to transcribe all of my mom's recipes so that they wouldn't be lost. Most importantly, I wanted to write them down and get the correct quantities of ingredients because whenever you speak to an Italian nonna about how much flour goes into a recipe, it's as much as needed.

 

I started going to my mom's home to prepare one recipe at a time, watching her make it and stopping her at every step. "Wait, Mom, I've got to measure. I've got to weigh; I've got to write down how much it is." So that's what I did because I wanted to make sure that I had my favorite recipes. And that's even more dear to me now. I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to do that.

 

I lost my mom a year ago, actually. So I am ever so grateful that I had that opportunity to do that because I have the recipes, not only for me, but I see how much they're appreciated by the types of comments and feedback I get from my readers, who are so happy that I took the time to document them. They share these memories of growing up with these recipes and are so happy that there's a place where they can get them.

 

Where does the name of your blog come from?

Bedda means my pretty one or beautiful one. And that's of significance to me because when I was little, I only met my nonna twice in my lifetime. She lived in Sicily, but I remember I was two years old when I met her, and apparently, I didn't want to eat. She always said those words to me, "Mangia, bedda," to coax me to eat.  

 

What does this minestrone remind you of?

The first thing that comes to mind is memories of this time of year, specifically because this was when my mom made huge batches of minestrone, and she had all the vegetables from my dad's garden. So, if I look at all the ingredients and the recipe, the celery came from the garden. The tomatoes came from the garden. The zucchini and the green beans came from the garden. Oh, and some of the greens, I put in fresh spinach that's easily accessible, but you can use any greens in the garden.

 

I remember my mom making huge batches. She would freeze it before adding pasta and put it into freezer bags. She had a freezer full; we used to have the deep-chest freezer that we had in the garage at the time. She would take out a bag at a time and cook it up for us.

 

So, what exactly is minestrone?

It's an Italian vegetable and bean soup. The key component is that it's vegetables and beans. The beans are always present. Usually, they're Romano beans, but they could be white beans. It's just a medley of vegetables cooked down with these beans. There's a tomato base, and in my mom's case, it was always fresh tomatoes from the garden.

 

Usually, pasta is added to it as well. It's usually a small shape, like a ditalini. It could be small shells or elbow macaroni. Another typical addition would be taking spaghetti and breaking it up into small pieces. We call this spaghetti "sminuzzati." That was very, very common. In fact, sometimes, my mom might've even mixed pasta.  

 

How do you flavor your minestrone?

Most minestrone soups are made with plain water, which is the classic way. But you could use chicken stock or vegetable broth if you want.

 

The herbs are also important—fresh basil, parsley, and thyme. You could add flavor with bay leaves. In just about any soup, I always add a couple of bay leaves.

 

I also add Parmesan rind. I think that makes such a big difference. If you want to stick to using plain water and not some kind of broth, just throw in a Parmesan rind, and I think it's fantastic. It gives a lot of flavor. And, of course, I always serve it with Parmesan cheese. Having minestrone or anything with pasta without cheese is hard for me.

 

Another thing you could add just before serving is a nice drizzle of olive oil. Olive oil on top adds tons of flavor.

 

What did your mother add that was unique to this recipe?

In our house, it was always made with freshly picked vegetables from our garden because, as I said, my mom made large batches. At this time of year, my parents often headed out to local farms and picked their own vegetables to supplement what we had. We could get more tomatoes, more zucchini, and so on.

 

I should add that the beans used were not dried beans that you just bought and soaked from the grocery store. They would always go out and get fresh beans. I actually did this recently. I went to a local farmers market and got a huge 20-pound bag of beans in their pods.

 

There was a lot of time spent shelling these beans at this time of year. They were the beans that we shelled ourselves. She also froze bags full of these beans to make pasta fagioli as well during the winter months.

 

What do you get out of that experience of shelling your own beans?

Oh, it connects me to my mom. When I was a kid, I was always trying to find a way to get away from these tasks. And my mom didn't force me. She let me go out and play and wouldn't hold me to these tasks. But for the last few years, I made sure to head out with my mom every year to get those beans. So we spent time the last few years sitting here, actually in my backyard, bonding while we were shelling the beans and chitchatting and talking about family and so on. So it's really special. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to do that. And now I do that with my husband and my daughter. It's just continuing that tradition.

 

What do you hope readers will take away from your recipe?

What I hope readers will take away is a few things. I think, first of all, the importance of preparing a simple, healthy meal from scratch with fresh ingredients for themselves and their family. I want to show them that it's really not that difficult to do so. Also, the importance of preserving family food traditions and passing them on to the next generation.

>>Get Nadia Fazio's minestrone recipe here.<<

 

 

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