Bright yellow zucchini flowers are sold in neat stacks in farm stands everywhere these days, when they are in season in the height of summer. Everyone seems to be onto the joys of batter-fried zucchini flowers, known in Calabria as pittuli. They are both the most commonplace and celebrated food in my mother’s hometown of Mongrassano, where people throw a pittuli festival once a year (“Sagra della Pittulidda”), yet still eat them all the time. My aunt grows them by the bushelful in her garden in Long Island; you can’t fry fast enough to eat them all before they wither.

Mongrassano, August 20, 2001. I missed the festival by one day.

Right now, the flowers are out of season, and there is no pittuli party in the offing. That is fine with me; I like pittuli best with no zucchini flowers at all. 

Without the flower, pittuli are just little pancakes shaped like oyster shells. We ate them as an after-school snack year round, in a rotation with Hostess cakes, usually Ding Dongs. These pancakes are the best example of Italian cucina povera: homespun cooking that makes something delicious out of few, simple ingredients that were always, or nearly always, available. The batter is made of an egg, some flour, salt, water, and a bit of grated Romano cheese. Once you calibrate the consistency to match pancake batter, you can spoon it into hot olive oil and fry it, unadorned. By all means add the flower if you want, but even without they taste of golden summer afternoons, the most basic proof of how good anything fried in olive oil can be. 

Sometimes people get creative with them, stuffing the flowers with ricotta or mozzarella cheese, or anchovies, or who knows what. Once, some friends and I deep-fried the pittuli and put them on pizza; this was delicious, but it was not pittuli. My mother makes them for my sister without cheese, because she hates cheese. They are still good that way.

There are no flowers in my aunt’s garden now, nor at the farm stands. And there is no flour in my supermarket. Sometimes, there are no eggs either. There is ice cream and frozen pizza, rows of canned and fresh vegetables, thankfully, but the most basic elements of cooking are gone; the things you could eat, in Mongrassano, when there was nothing else to eat, are gone. They are the things, I suppose, that we fear most to be without, and they sit now in pantries and fridges all over this town. I have some flour in my pantry too, not much, but I will save some of it to make pittuli some cloudy afternoon.