Ignazio’s spell
How a Latin American cake found its way to the Balkans and beyond.
By Altin Raxhimi | October 2, 2024
The first tres leches cake that I have been able to identify in Albania stopped at an Italian coastal town not far from the Slovenian border before landing in Tirana at the turn of the millennium.
Renata Casadei was a restaurant owner in Staranzano, around 30 kilometers northwest of Trieste, and her husband was Staranzano’s cab driver. In a small town, your clients are your friends, and many of her husband’s clients became hers, among them Dominican or Colombian sex workers. In the mid-90s, she visited their friend’s family in the Dominican Republic and was treated to a portion of tres leches, “the country’s national cake.” She loved it, got the recipe and even tried it once or twice in her restaurant.
That cake reached us a few years later. In 2000, Casadei’s son lost his life in a car accident; grief made her close the restaurant and a psychologist acquaintance advised her to get away for a while. At the time, Albania wasn’t really your average Italian’s idea of travel, but she ended up making herself busy there. One day in spring 2002, she prepared seafood risotto and turbot on alla graisana broth, her area’s typical fish stock with vinegar and garlic, for a symposium of 15 local dignitaries and tastemakers that included Ismail Kadare, the worshiped novelist. “Noblesse oblige, you know,” she told me. The following day she started work as chief cook at Piazza, the top restaurant of the Albanian capital, right in the center behind the National History Museum.
She was known for her fresh pasta: her tortellini, tagliatelle or ravioli. She’d make Lombard pizzoccheri for Tirana’s nouveau riche, whose journey to local prominence had begun as emigrants to northern Italy. When the U.S. ambassador to Tirana said her veal Orloff was the best he ever had, she saw how Ekrem, Piazza’s owner, from the excitement became two meters tall from his normal one sixty. She expanded the fish and seafood menu (“Ekrem, we can’t be offering meatballs all the time!”) For dessert, she’d often make strudels and Sachertorte of Viennese decadence.
Photo courtesy of Casadei collaborator Artion Kurti.
One day, she tried her Dominican friend Lina’s recipe. She battered the sponge cake flour for half an hour and placed the tray to bake. When she pulled it out of the oven, she poked the crusty top at several places with a fork. She drenched it in a three-milk mix — condensed, evaporated and cream — mounted a thick mass of whipped cream on it, topped the cream with berries and pineapple slices and served it cold from the refrigerator.
The processed milk dessert
The use of baked dough to ferry juices to the palate is something primordial for humans. Before processed and packed baby foods and the pervasive advertising they came with, our mothers weaned us off with bread soaked in milk. Then, think of the butter on toast or the lump of bread that mops the plate. On the savory side, cooking stocks must have at least in part been invented for such uses, and fillings had made use of bread, say, in stuffing roasted turkey to preserve cooking juices. To the sweet tooth, there’s the honey, the syrups and the spirits, in things like the Greek melomakaroni, the revanis of the Orient, or the zuppa inglese, which would then be topped with chantilly, custard, and additions like cocoa powder, jams, berries and whatnot.
Before processed and packed baby foods and the pervasive advertising they came with, our mothers weaned us off with bread soaked in milk.
One can imagine a timeline of when sponge cakes began to be drenched in milk. Though they were created around the 18th century, sponge cakes became popular in the West in the next one. There are accounts of a cake floating in flavored milk, called Isla flotante or Floating Island, from the Mexican state of Tabasco in the first half of the 20th century.
But the use of three milks places the Latin American invention later than that, when processed milks become industrially available. Though the matter has not been reliably researched, it has been claimed that the tres leches cake followed milk-processing plants Nestlé built in Latin America in the 1930s. According to that conjecture, someone would have come up with the idea in recipe contests Nestlé called to promote its product. It would then be printed on cans, the same way Barilla boxes teach you how to make orecchiette with lemon and pistachio.
I have yet to see a tres leches recipe on mid-century Mexican condensed milk cans, nor have cuisine scholars I spoke with been able to find early references. Rachel Laudan, the prominent British food historian, says it must be linked to the affordability of kitchen ovens among Latin American middle classes, well after World War II. Indeed, there are accounts that it became widespread across Latin America only by the 1980s or 1990s, appearing in the U.S. areas with strong Latin American presence later in that decade. According to Laudan’s entry in the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, by the 2000s, it had been sighted in the rest of North America and western Europe.
This was the pool from which Casadei drew to make her three milks pastry in Albania in the spring of 2002, but her whipped cream-topped tres leches did not stick — the restaurant has been known mostly for its strudels — and she gave the Latin American cake little thought until we chatted about it on the phone last year.
The Tajvan trileçe
The tres leches made another apparition in Tirana three years after Casadei’s, in a new restaurant one kilometer south of Piazza, also through Italian mediation.
Tajvan was the popular informal name of a bar in the city’s Rinia Park, which stood on a large green lawn off large Soviet-style apartment blocks across the street, the way Taiwan floats in the waters across the strait from mainland China.
Left to abandon after communism, it was taken over by a businessman who made his money in oil and invested it in prestige endeavors: football clubs, sports grounds and now, this. Austrian architects gave the rectangular building white arachnid leg-like buttresses and billiard-shaped, clown-colored columns. Italian-trained gardeners restored the hedgerows, added grass and flower beds and ornamental trees. Tajvan turned into a gambling, bowling and fine dining spot. It also had a popular terrace bar fronting a big fountain.
The regular Italian chef, lured from a boutique eatery of Puglia, the south Italian region facing Albania, had quit when his salary was halved without notice, Tajvan staff said, and the management had now invited a 63-year-old man who said he hailed from Rome.
The staff liked Ignazio Piazza. He always wore his uniform, with its giant toque, but was approachable and good-humored. The two women on the staff would laugh heartily when he’d call them Clara or Lidia, Italian names. “Eh, Majlinda,” he’d say. “I keep mixing things up. Clara is my wife; Lidia is my girlfriend.”
“But Ignazio, I wouldn’t expect someone your age to talk about such things,” Majlinda Selimi, a sous-chef, giggled.
He’d give his office to workers to rest, the key to his apartment to aides to bring girlfriends in.
It struck them that he was curious and worldly, as Italian cooks tend to be local. He knew about Russian and Arab cooking. He’d gesticulate with the owner of the French patisserie on the finer points of French cuisine. He always asked what people ate. In Tirana, he was told jokingly: “Bread on milk and toffee candies.”
They were blown away by his stories: that he had run mess halls in cruise ships where he had met his tourist wife; that he had sold a catering business to Qantas, the Australian airline; that he had cooked for the president of China, in the princess of the Netherlands’ wedding and at the wake for the founder of North Korea’s communist dynasty, where he scared his interpreter to death by cursing the regime.
Every day, he would propose dozens of concoctions and combinations: chocolate-glazed spark-dusted pears, the spectacle of slow-cooking calves in full display, whose cuts he’d put on beds of honey mushroom cream. He employed a freezing process for the carbonara that saved time and intensified taste.
“I learned the degrees and the nuances of cooking meat from him,” Eno Joxhe, then a 16-year-old apprentice, told me.
“Didn’t he have a Michelin star or something?” Selimi asked me at one point.
“Didn’t he have a Michelin star or something?”
Late one sunny morning in April 2005, he had to make the day’s lunchtime menu. Such crises had to be managed. Iganzio noticed a tray half full with sponge cake and asked about its use. “For the crostate,” he was told. The fruit tarts that were his predecessor’s legacy. Thin strips of the cake were placed crosswise into the tart base, which was then sprayed rum water and covered with jelly.
He took the sponge cake out of the tray and put a layer of heavy milk cream on before placing it back in. He then poured some diluted Nestlé condensed milk, added glazing on top and placed it on the fridge.
Pulling it out in half an hour, he said: “That’s the trelece. That’s what we used to make 45 years ago.”
From Tajvan to the mainland
The topping Ignazio Piazza used was neither some fancy custard, nor exotic fruits, but a thin layer of liquefied caramel glazing from the can he found in the counter, the one that sometimes tops cheesecakes. He gave half of the two dozen portions he made to whoever was in the kitchen. The cake had turned into an off-white viscous mass from the milk, the liquid brown glazing almost dripping from the top edges. The cold mass tempered the aggression of the sugar’s assault on the taste buds.
“Well, this is heavenly!” said Selimi.
Ignazio left Tajvan shortly later that year. For all his vaunted creativity, the job was demanding for a man his age, with hundreds of orders à la carte every day. The kitchen area was too small and his physical limits showed. He battled diabetes and high blood pressure. Furthermore, he was now talking to his brother-in-law Rosario about bringing equipment from Italy for a pastry shop he would open in Tirana with Tajvan’s gardener.
Most of his creations struck the staff as too pricey or complicated, and the only thing that remained from his time was the trelece, by now spelled trileçe. It was a dessert that could be made quickly, freeing time for more complicated dishes. The women in the staff fell for it. At some point, regular milk was added.
Most of his creations struck the staff as too pricey or complicated, and the only thing that remained from his time was the trelece, by now spelled trileçe.
When Ignazio left, Joxhe took over the desserts section. The location was a boon. It was popular with the city’s elite and commoners alike, as well as with day tourists unloaded at lunchtime. Very soon, they were selling 300 portions a day.
The Puglian chef who preceded Ignazio, eventually back with a reduced salary, would mutter to his subs: “Go and make some of that guy’s cake.”
During the first year few people would ask for the recipe, and it was a somewhat guarded secret. Then, the word got out. Armond Kikino, the Tirana chef and food sleuth, for example, told me the shopping center where he worked at the time had gotten it from a Tajvan employee who moonlighted at its food court. By 2007, trileçe had spread like wildfire to bakeries, pastry shops and restaurants in Tirana and the rest of the country. Cost or availability made them try other milk combinations: sometimes two, either condensed and evaporated, or condensed and plain; sometimes all three; or just one. In most cases, the three-milk mix was simply poured from the top, instead of having the tray layered with heavy cream first. At times, Nestlé was replaced with Panda, its Chinese counterpart. A fervent creative environment for a caramel-topped milk cake. Nothing was as good as the Tajvan one, though.
It was a matter of time before it would cross Albania’s border.
A restaurant owner in western Kosovo told me he had to wait a week in the fall of 2006 to get the recipe from Joxhe, and other restaurateurs there acknowledged similar experiences. By 2008, trileçe had gone past the Ibar River into northern Kosovo and then onto Serbia, a Belgrade-based pastry maker originally from Kosovo, told me. A Tajvan employee claimed that he had sold the recipe for 500 euros to a pastry maker from North Macedonia.
The competence landed Joxhe a job with a large Albanian distributor of primary ingredients. Among his duties was popularizing trileçe to sell its components, teaching pastry makers from Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo how to make it. In fact, he is considered the single main person responsible for spreading trileçe in the region.
But then, the population between the towns of Tetovo and Gostivar in North Macedonia, wherever they migrate they make pastry and run candy stores. They took trileçe to the Slovenian litoral, to Sarajevo’s Baščaršija and to Zagreb mosque’s mess hall. In a few years, the western Balkan patchwork was all covered.
Latin incursion into the land of the Turks
“If it wasn’t for Turkey, trileçe would not become that big a phenomenon,” Olsjon Bilani, who worked at Tajvan at the time and now runs his own deli in Tirana, told me. “It would have been confined in the Balkans. Turkey is a huge market.”
In the center of Tetovo, there’s a venerable pastry shop called Amfora. The family who runs the shop learned making trileçe from a trainer from Albania in 2007. They were told it was an Argentinian cake wildly popular in Italy.
In October 2008, relatives who operated a pastry shop in Istanbul visited the family, and by the end of that year, trileçe debuted in the working-class Fatih neighborhood on the city’s European side. In a couple of years, it turned into a craze.
“Caramel flavor and milky dessert notes are a 100% match with the Turkish people’s taste,” Arda Türkmen, the Istanbul celebrity chef, wrote me explaining its success. He once authored a newspaper column about Istanbul police stopping a BMW only to find its trunk jam-packed with trileçe trays.
He once authored a newspaper column about Istanbul police stopping a BMW only to find its trunk jam-packed with trileçe trays.
In Bursa, the Albanian-owned pastry shop in the town’s central park had the family women make it at home and the men load the trays in vans and bring them to the shop. Other venues began making it too. It hit pricey restaurants, Cevat Ademi, an Istanbul-based journalist, recalls. Food bloggers and social networks helped spread it further.
In 2014 and in 2015, it was the most Googled recipe in the country. A local touch would be added. People tinkered with its thin coating: strawberry, lemon or other jellies, with mixed results. They reinterpreted the three-milk dictum: sheep, goat and cow; that didn’t work. They would powder it lightly with a pinch or two of pistachio powder, as was often done with baklava or kadaif. As in other cake coatings, they would line the dark brown caramel topping with parallel stripes of white cream, then pass a dull knife across, turning the white stripes into wavy arabesques.
Dr. Oetker, the German bran and oatmeal giant, sought to capitalize on it the way Danone did in the West with its adulterated yogurt. From factories near Izmir, it packs the ingredients for sponge cakes, milk and caramel into pouches for supermarket shelves. Such packages rolled the trileçe back to specialty food marts in the Balkans, Western Europe and the Americas. Other Turkish primary ingredient producers followed suit.
For many, business went well. The trileçe’s success helped the Sütçüoğullarıs, a family-run patisserie in Istanbul, move to a more upscale neighborhood. The name became a brand. There is a Tritat Trileçe pastry shop in Bursa and a Miss Trileçe one in Ankara. A wholesaler is named Trileçe Dunyasi, the World of Trileçe. A Master Chef show pitted contestants making trileçe against one another, and there were media stories of people who were trileçe fanatics.
Ubiquity made one feel it had been there forever. In a recent movie, migrants from Yugoslav Macedonia to Istanbul owned a cake counter named Trileçe in the 1950s, half a century before the term was even coined.
Among some Turks, it provoked soul-searching: what could happen now to national points of honor like baklava, kazan dibi, or kadaif? Rifat Sütçüoğulları, the pâtissier, sought advice. “Don’t worry Rifat,” his mentor told him. “It’s just a fad. Baklava will always remain the baklava!” In fact, the craze for caramel-glazed tres leches has abated after a peak in the mid-2010s. By 2016, the Turks had moved on to the charms of the San Sebastian cheesecake.
Still, trileçe has withstood the test of time. I found it in most of the pastry counters I saw in Istanbul this spring, and it still commands dedicated TV shows. Back in Tirana, Selimi sold a record 1,000 portions for Tajvan on the 100-year anniversary of Albania’s independence in 2012. The internet is inundated with trileçe recipes not only in all the Balkan languages, but also in quite a few global ones (I’ve seen it even in Farsi!).
Even the story Türkmen, the Istanbul chef, was told by his gym buddy, that trileçe had been reverse-engineered in the 1990s by an Albanian population glued to Latin American soap operas, even that story was ultimately a measure of its popularity. This theory made it to Atlas Obscura, the U.S. magazine of refined trivial pursuits, and was added to the English-language Wikipedia page for “Tres leches cake.”
All this had been lost to Ignazio Piazza, whose Dolce Italia pastry shop in Tirana did not survive a full season before shutting down in 2006, and whose equipment, which he valued at 100,000 euros, he now claimed back from his Albanian partner, in kind or in cash.
Ignazio’s trileçe
As the caramel-topped, milk-drenched sponge cake, trileçe was no Albanian ingenuity, no matter what people say, Loran Lami, a chef who was a busboy at Tajvan at the time, told me. “That trileçe is Ignazio’s trileçe.”
Ignazio became aware of his simple invention’s Albanian success on his fourth or fifth visit to Tirana. His business partner would not return the pastry-making kit to him, nor would he pay for it, saying its value was inflated and was needed to cover the shop’s losses anyway. Ignazio threatened to sue, saying he’d use the influence of a son-in-law who was a supreme court judge in Italy. But he scared nobody. And as he was mulling his position at a Tirana bar, he was treated with a trileçe portion. “The one you made at Tajvan,” he was told. He just smirked. He eventually gave up the hope he’d get anything back from the failed pastry shop and stopped coming.
A few years earlier, when his son Simone had proposed to follow in his footsteps and attend a catering school, Ignazio slapped him. “You will not have this shitty life,” he said.
Ignazio was born during World War II in a two-room house in the poor Santa Caterina quarter of Sciacca, a small Sicilian fishing port facing Tunisia. In a town where everyone had a moniker, the Piazzas of the Santa Caterina were the Culutunnus, the Roundbutts. He was the fifth child of the neighborhood’s baker, who went on by the name of Cincuranedda — Fivedimeloaf — and a livestock trader father.
At five, his father sent him to herd goats in the mountains; at six he climbed a box to reach the espresso machine lever and make coffee at neighbor Paolo Bentivegna’s restaurant in the town center.
At Da Paolo, which was known for its pasta alla mafiosa, with anchovies, capers and olives, he washed dishes and made tables and cleaned, a jolly tuttofare, jack-of-all-trades, his childhood friend Taddeo Scalici told me. He learned his work ethics there. When he ditched work one morning to spend the day with other kids at the beach, his father whacked him that evening, because the family needed the money. Paolo the restaurant owner whacked him the next morning, because he was left short of helping hands. As a result, “cooking became his obsession,” Scalici said. “He was self-made, but he learned quickly.”
By the time a cult Italian comedy was shot in Sciacca in 1963, Ignazio said he served the film crew at his own restaurant, Il Carretto — the Pushcart — which he had owned since turning 18. Much of the money he made at the restaurant he’d spend on trips to Rome and women. True to many travelers, cooks and other seducers, he’d spice up his stories. “Dad traveled a lot with his mind,” his daughter Stefania told me.
Soon after, he left Sciacca to join a small and recently formed community of his townspeople in Aprilia, a town 40 kilometers south of Rome, on the edge of a large marshland reclaimed in the 1930s by north Italian workers brought south by Mussolini. There, he won over a French-speaking hairdresser, a Sicilian settler recently driven out of Tunisia. After a couple of years of renting an apartment in central Aprilia, they bought a plot out of town to build their single-story house.
He worked all sorts of odd jobs: cooking in restaurants in the Alban hills surrounding Rome and in tourist hotels on the Tyrrhenian coast, he ran the mess hall of a tractor-making plant. He had an eye for detail: in a beach restaurant, he would offer French beachgoers a full-course meal in French flag colors. He also responded quickly to challenges, once making two dozen late-coming German diners happy with leftovers from the closed kitchen, including potato and carrot rinds. “He was ‘zero-waste cooking’ before there was zero-waste cooking,” Ettore Introcaso, a friend and apprentice, told me.
All the family worked at home as they tried to raise a catering business, and later, he built a 1,500-square-meter shed next to the house for that purpose. He’d make ice cream cones for bars in Latina or sandwiches for a six-month contract with Alitalia, the now-defunct Italian airline.
At home, he was a Padre Padrone, (“grumbling about my lasagna even when I followed his instructions to the point,” his daughter Sabrina said. Simone: “I’d put my earring on the day he’d leave abroad!”), just as he was outgoing and generous outside. He surprised his family when he invited the local priest for long lunches (“But dad! What do you talk to him about if you keep swearing all the time?” “Why, do I?”). They also felt he could be gullible. He complained often of not being paid dues, whether from intermediaries in the Alitalia contracts, or in lease money. His children often mentioned how difficult life was keeping the business together in that plot in the town’s outskirts.
They often had their moments, he and his wife Clara — personality clashes, exhaustion from work, or else — but when his van, due to transport a catering order, failed to move one morning, he began whimpering for emotional support: “But Clara! Clara! This is not starting! What do I do?”
Hard work and contacts made him well-known in the area. He led juries of Aprilia’s ethnic food fests and evaluated culinary school graduates. His wife’s Tunisian roots and his own background earned him a first prize in an international competition in Sicily in 2002. In the Guardian, food writer Claudia Roden extolled his team’s fish and crab couscous served on a parmigiano tray, an accolade as good as any: “The Italian team won. Theirs was sublime.” He traveled to Russia and Romania to promote Italian cuisine, to Riyadh or Seoul to set up restaurant kitchens.
He weaved stories around such travels. They had begged him to stay in Moscow, all expenses included, but he had to refuse. Neighbors asked the children about Ignazio’s bar in Tenerife, which didn’t exist. He learned to treat people well after the staff revolt at a luxury resort in Costa Rica, run by someone from Velletri near Aprilia, forcing him to cook a large dinner with very few hands.
We don’t know with certainty where and how Ignazio ran into a pastel de tres leches for the first time. None of the friends or colleagues I spoke to seem to have any idea. He might have learned it anywhere, through his curiosity or professional network, his friend Taddeo Scalici surmises. It might have come from the week or so he spent visiting Scalici in South Florida in 2000. The cake had been introduced in Miami by a Nicaraguan community assembled there after the fall of the U.S.-supported regime of Anastasio Somoza. I’ve seen press reports that credit Somoza’s nephews with introducing the tres leches there. But Ignazio’s family believes it was in Jaco, the Costa Rican town on the Pacific coast, where he spent six months in the mid-1990s setting up the kitchen of that resort, where he must have gotten wind of it.
The aftermath
“Are you really sure all this came from my dad?” Simone Piazza asked me one day.
At this stage of my research, Simone’s question meant whether it was Ignazio’s quick fix during a six-week spell at Tajvan in Tirana — adding two milk concentrates to sponge cake, topping that with liquid caramel and calling it an Italianized form of the tres leches, taking the esses out of Spanish nouns and numerals — that caused a regional culinary phenomenon. Whether it was his concoction that made someone in Croatia and another in Turkey try to patent it for royalties. Whether it had ultimately made a pastry shop in Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood threaten legal action against their Alibeyköy relatives, asking their due cut as the original makers (“had he known things reached this point, he would have called the lawyers too,” his daughter Sabrina said). That there are turbo-folk, hip hop and electronica trileçe songs in Albanian, plus a Turkish one, accumulating zillions of views. That the turbo-folk singer had whined in the press about the glitzy electronica beauty. That in those distant lands, trileçe is both a staple desert for fast-breaking Ramadan dinners and an argot word for sexual threesomes.
That in its short lifespan trileçe gave rise to hallucinating inception myths. Post-war Sicilian staple treat. An archaic recipe by Balkan housewives! Conceived in Medieval Muslim Spain, then passed on to this side of the Mediterranean by Jewish refugees driven out of Iberia after the 15th century Catholic Reconquista! Telenovelas!
Which is how I ended up writing this.
The Atlas Obscura article had bemused me but I did not give it much thought. Then, three years ago, I found myself lamenting the sorry state of Albania with Kikino, the Tirana chef. A country where genuine value is never appreciated and sabotage is the norm; where you can’t make out whether that brinkmanship is due to congenital venom, congenital ignorance or both.
“And can you believe it?” Kikino upped the conversation one notch. “They call trileçe pure Albanian cuisine now!” In fact, at the height of the trileçe craze, in the mid-2010s, tourist authorities fronted with trileçe trays the Albanian food stand at an international fair in Milan, angering authenticity vigilantes.
“And can you believe it?” Kikino upped the conversation one notch. “They call trileçe pure Albanian cuisine now!”
“Get out of here!” I said. So, it had not come from “Celeste,” that Argentinian series that had glued Albanian housewives to TV screens in the 1990s?!
“No. This Italian chef at Tajvan came up with it,” Kikino replied.
Engaging outlandish myths of origin — in a region studded with them — with one or two sober facts promises interesting copy, so I cross-checked his claim with my own sources at Tajvan. “You wouldn’t believe what we kept hearing,” Altin Gjini, the Tajvan provisioner who witnessed Ignazio put that first tray of caramel-topped trelece in the fridge, told me.
Hearsay was unrelenting during my research too. In the Istanbul neighborhood of Galata I was told about the mid-century trileçe of Mado, a local pastry chain, but at Mado they told me they get it from wholesalers. “I ate three pieces of Turkish Bosnian Trilecha milk cake,” a newspaper writer said. “A fabulous taste, like the beauty of Turkey and Bosnia.” A connection to koh, a milk-soaked cake of Vojvodina, has been suggested, but impenetrable Dark Ages separate the two products. Some Tetovo Albanians claimed trileçe came from the furuldak, furuldak being a local Turkish word for the revani, the sherbet sponge cake. No milk!
The earliest online trileçe mentions I could track down were of December 2009 in Albania and 2012 in Turkey, which matched the timeframe that concerned me. Many sources I saw touched on hazy Albanian-Italian-Latin American provenance, and a number corroborated the Tajvan story.
“How to put it?!” I responded to Simone, Ignazio’s son. “99% sure, if not fully sure.”
“Right,” he said. “So, it must be true.”
One Saturday this June, Simone drove a party of us to where the family had once lived and worked. Like the rest of the towns founded in the 1930s on former Pontine marshland southwest of Rome, Aprilia is period architecture drenched in Mediterranean sun: low-rise apartment blocks with spacious balconies and terracotta-brick façades pop up among lines of plastered homes with shuttered windows along the odd palm or cypress or medlar.
The compound lies about five kilometers east of the town’s center. The shingle on the entrance to the shed that carried the name of the business Ignazio ran, Pontina Catering, has paled. Last Christmas, burglars, who Simone says must have known the place was vacated, stole the refrigerators from the freezing rooms. Still, a couple of pizza ovens remained, the pasta-making machine and right in the middle, the conveyor belt where the family must have rolled once the Alitalia lunch sandwiches.
“I’m having palpitations,” Ignazio’s widow Clara said. “We spent a lifetime here.” She has rarely visited since her husband succumbed to a triple stroke in November 2021. The property is for sale.
Simone lifted the shutters from the ocher-painted one-story house and in the small lobby one could see a couple of cupboards. Some framed paintings leant on them on the floor. A prayer leaf on the door handle. Above the door frame, Our Lady of Good Help, which Sciacca venerates every August 15 for the Assumption of Mary.
On plastered walls with patches of mold, a Piazza coat of arms. Professional acknowledgment certificates from the Italian Federation of Chefs, the one that had brought him to Tirana in 2005, and a bird’s view photo of the mass of kitchen dervishes who received the certificate that session. A pasta dish Ignazio created, tonnarelli all’Apriliana, with seafood, seafood stock and arugula, Aprilia authorities certifying its origin. A newspaper clip from the 2004 Denmark trip — he’d been so excited to go to that one, inaugurating a new Alitalia connection with Copenhagen and promoting tourism on Latina’s coast, that he offered the cooking squad he led a glass of champagne before boarding; while preparing the dinner for 400 at the Danish Royal Hunting Lodge, he told them nobody should salt the dishes but him. There, in fact, the big Italian cake had liquified caramel on the whipped cream topping, Introcaso, the chef, recalled.
In his last years at his Aprilia home, he would watch cooking shows obsessively on TV. On his Facebook page, he put his picture with the huge toque, introducing “Lo scef Ignazio Piazza.” He would call his friend Scalici in Florida for old age banter and to complain of his declining health. He could hardly move without a cane, constantly wheezing, and used the time to open up more to his family.
In a rhyming twist, the Costa Rican restaurant where the family thinks Ignazio Piazza got wind of the tres leches found itself four years ago in the middle of an alleged cocaine ring involving Albanian, Calabrian and Latin American suspects. For the trileçe to propagate, Balkan confettieri syndicates took over a popular Latin American cake fixed by a Sicilian chef. Such migrant networks give it a global reach: it pops up in Albanian-run Italian restaurants in French hamlets with names like La Chapelle-aux-Pots, in Kosovar cafés in Southsea or London, in Godfather-themed Serb-run pizza parlors in American suburbia’s strip malls, in the Turkish döner joints of Canada, spilling over to Syrian baklava and kunefe counters there, you find it in Doha and in Dubai.
In his last years at his Aprilia home, he would watch cooking shows obsessively on TV. On his Facebook page, he put his picture with the huge toque, introducing “Lo scef Ignazio Piazza.” He would call his friend Scalici in Florida for old age banter and to complain of his declining health. He could hardly move without a cane, constantly wheezing, and used the time to open up more to his family.
From the trove they found in the hall — yellowing paperwork, disused gadgets and tools, photo albums — Simone’s children picked Ignazio’s Canon camera and were playing with it on the floor. In that trove the family found recently a mysterious flyer for Pontinia Catering’s confectionery specialty, the trelece, which Ignazio had ordered years after its success in Tirana. Something he did not really make in Aprilia, they said.
In fact, in this place, Ignazio had told his eldest granddaughter Alice about the sweet he once made in a country called Albania, so popular they served a portion to visiting Pope Francis in 2014.
“Of course you did, grandpa,” Alice had responded.
At that moment, Ignazio could have been anyone. Who we are is one thing, what we claim to be another and neither may apply to what others make of us. Ignazio would always be Alice’s granddad, and now, she wants to bring the family to Tajvan to try the trileçe. But at the time, given his predilection for exotic yarns, to her he might have as well claimed he had stabbed the moon with a space rocket.
The research about postwar Sciacca and Sicily and Ignazio Piazza’s upbringing there has been generously shared by Dr. Antonino Sandullo.
Feature Image: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0.
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