Pope francesco he is perhaps the most interviewed pope in history, but no one has yet asked him for the recipe stuffed squid. «Jorge cooks very well, he makes amazing stuffed calamari, the pontiff’s sister confided in an interview, Maria Elena Bergoglio, a few days after his brother’s election as pontiff. From that March 13, 2013Bergoglio no longer had the opportunity to cook and the recipe for that “stunning” dish remains a well-kept secret.
The credit for the pope’s culinary skills goes to the mother Queen Marywho in turn had learned cooking secrets from Rose, Bergoglio’s paternal grandmother, who emigrated to Argentina from Italy. Lunches in the Bergoglio household were plentiful and long, especially on Sundays, when the women of the house went at it with their traditional dishes: risottos, homemade pasta, baked chicken, desserts.
The young Jorge Mario glanced into the kitchen, memorizing the skillful gestures of his mother and grandmother. “My mother,” Bergoglio said in the interview book El Jesuit, published in Argentina in 2010, «she remained paralyzed after giving birth to her last child, her fifth. When we returned from school, we would find her sitting peeling potatoes, with all the other ingredients for lunch already laid out. She told us how we should mix and cook them.”
Thus Bergoglio, even as a simple priest and then as bishop, he has always felt at ease around pots and stoves. When he was a professor at the Collegio Massimo, the future pope cooked for his students on Sundays, a day of rest for cooks. «He always prepared a fantastic paella for us, recalled his Jesuit brother, Father Angel Rossi. To those who asked him if he is really a good cook, Bergoglio replied: “Well, I have never killed anyone with my food.”
Elected pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, did not want to occupy the papal apartment. For him, therefore, no personal cooking service. No private chef or even, as often happens with ecclesiastics, cooking nuns. Pope Francis sleeps in a small apartment in the Domus Santa Marta and eats lunches and dinners in the common canteen.
The Pope is served at a secluded table. The cuisine is simple and not different from that of many other canteens: pasta or rice first courses, soups, meat and fish second courses, vegetables, salad, fruit. We drink white and red wine, generally Piedmontese. The products of the farms of the Pontifical Villas of Castel Gandolfo also arrive on the pope’s table: milk, ricotta, yogurt, cheeses, meat, vegetables and excellent honey. The Pope probably also enjoyed the gifts that Queen Elizabeth of England brought him during her visit to the Vatican in April 2014, all products of the royal estates, or rather, “of my garden”, as the Queen said to moment of exchanging gifts: honey, twelve eggs, ribs of beef, apple juice, cider, chutney, jams, shortbread, tea and even a bottle of whisky.
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