The Italians celebrate Father’s Day on March 19. That’s because it’s St. Joseph’s Day in the Christian tradition—Joseph of course being the adoptive father of Jesus. Eventually it became a day to celebrate all fathers, not just the saint. To be honest, since I’d never celebrated or thought about Father’s Day, the only reason I ended up memorizing the date of the Italian holiday was because it involves food… lol
Zeppole di San Giuseppe (St. Joseph zeppoles) are deep-fried doughy pastries filled with custard cream. The name comes from the term zeppa, a wood wedge used for adjusting the heights of furniture. And since St. Joseph was apparently a carpenter, people might have come up with the name zeppola because the two words sound so similar. But St. Joseph had another line of work aside from his carpentry business; it is said that the fried pastries are enjoyed on St. Joseph’s Day because he also ran a fried-foods shop, or that he set up a fried-food shop to feed Mary and Jesus when the family fled Egypt.
Since this fried pastry was enough to get me to pay attention to Father’s Day, you’re probably wondering just how good it is. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I told you that I eagerly wait for Father’s Day every year wanting to stuff my face with it, but the truth is that it’s not such a limited item that you can only get it on March 19—you can pretty much find it year-round. More recently, I’ve started to see a healthier version that’s baked instead of deep-fried. And even this version is so good that you want it to be Father’s Day every day.
The deep-fried version is definitely packed with calories, but if you start thinking you’ll just cut it into bite-sized pieces and have a taste for that reason, you’ll soon find that there’s not a great way to do it, and that the oil-soaked dough part is hard to cut. If you push through and force it, you’ll just end up squeezing all the cream out of it and creating a huge mess. So it’s definitely better to just pop the whole thing in your mouth and eat it in one bite.
March 19 is also right at the beginning of spring, and there are traditional events all over Italy celebrating the season’s arrival. One of them takes place in the tiny village of Itri, where carpenters and furniture builders clean out all the unusable lumber from their workshops and burn it as a tribute to St. Joseph.
In a world where so many things are made of plastic, you’d think that there wouldn’t be much lumber to burn these days. We are being forced to think about what happens to waste plastic after we’re done with it, which must mean that things aren’t going very well for the planet right now.
So celebrate the carpenter St. Joseph, enjoy a deep-fried cream puff, and think a little more seriously about plastics disposal. Yay for Father’s Day!
