Azdora: the woman who ran the Romagna household

If you ask anyone from Romagna over the age of fifty who taught them to roll out the sfoglia, the sheet of egg pasta, the answer is nearly always a woman. A grandmother, a mother, an aunt. And if you ask what she was called at home, one word often turns up: the azdora. Today you read it on restaurant signs and on packets of pasta at the supermarket, but for more than a century it named a real role, with hours, responsibilities and concrete power within the walls of the house. It is worth telling it as it was, without the postcard version.

Where the word comes from

Azdora (you also hear arzdora, depending on the area) is the feminine of azdòr, which in the dialect of Romagna is the one who rules, the head of the family. The verb is azdè, meaning to rule, to govern, to keep in order. The azdòr ran the farm: the fields, the animals, the accounts with the landowner. The azdora ran the house: the larder, the kitchen, the henhouse, the vegetable garden, the washing, the health of the children and of the old people. Linguists still discuss the deeper origin of the term, but its sense has never been in doubt: the one who holds things up is the one who commands.

It was not an affectionate title. It was a role, and in a farming family of twenty or thirty people only one woman held it at a time. The azdora was usually the wife of the head of the family, or else the oldest and most capable woman; the daughters and the daughters in law came under her and learned, waiting for their own turn.

The house as a business

The patriarchal family of Romagna, for the most part a sharecropping family, worked like a small enterprise. The azdòr dealt with the outside world; the azdora governed the inside, and the inside was no small thing. She kept the keys to the larder and decided what was eaten, how much and when. She managed the eggs and the poultry, which were often the only money that passed through her hands: selling eggs and hens at the market paid for salt, sugar and the cloth for clothes. She counted the sheets of the trousseau, organised the work of the other women, decided who went out to the fields on harvest days and who stayed at home.

It was real power, but inside a system that remained a male one. The azdora did not sign contracts, did not inherit the land, did not decide marriages on her own. She held up what was entrusted to her, and she did it with an authority that nobody in the house questioned.

The sfoglia, every day

In that world the sfoglia was not a Sunday recipe: it was the daily meal of people who baked bread once a week. Every morning, before the men went out, the azdora rolled the sfoglia out on the board, with the long wooden mattarello, the rolling pin, and her apron tied tight. Flour, eggs when there were eggs, water when there were none. Out of it came tagliatelle, maltagliati for the bean soup, strozzapreti kneaded with water alone in the lean months, and little shapes to drop into broth.

The gesture was a rite because it was a necessity. A young woman was judged by the way she rolled the sfoglia, and that was no joke: a thin, even sheet meant strong arms, patience and a good eye, all qualities that counted in a family. People said the sfoglia should be thin enough to show the grain of the board through it. The tagliatelle al ragù we make on Sundays today come from that everyday morning gesture, only with more meat in the sauce.

Anyone who wants to understand what really went on under that rolling pin can start from our guide on rolling pasta by hand: the movements have been the same for at least two hundred years.

Cappelletti and feast days

On feast days the role of the azdora became a public one. It was she who decided the filling of the Christmas cappelletti, who measured out the cheese and the nutmeg, who ruled when the broth was ready. The other women closed the cappelletti at her side, at the big table, and the quality of the work showed on the guests’ plates. A successful feast was a point in favour of the house, and therefore of the azdora.

What remains today

The sharecropping family disappeared between the nineteen fifties and sixties, with the end of the system and the rush towards the cities and the coast. The azdora as a social role disappeared with it: no woman today governs twenty people and a henhouse. But the gestures stayed, and they changed hands.

They stayed with the sfogline, the women (and by now the men too) who roll the sfoglia for a living in fresh pasta workshops, in trattorie and at market stalls. In many villages of Romagna the workshop of the sfoglina is still the place you go on Christmas Eve to collect the cappelletti, with your own tray under your arm.

They stayed in the pasta courses, which are held everywhere in Romagna, from the Pro Loco village associations to the cookery schools, and which often have as their teacher a lady of seventy who has never read a recipe in her life. And they stayed in people’s houses, where the sfoglia is still made for feast days, perhaps with a machine instead of the rolling pin and the freezer instead of the cellar.

What we at Du Caplet keep from that world is not nostalgia. The life of an azdora was hard, and not one of them would have wished it on her granddaughter. We keep the skill, the pride in work done well with your hands, and the idea that a house is also held up from a pastry board. The rest, happily, has changed.