The Women of Petronilla: Female Onomastics in the Recipes of Amalia Moretti Foggia

Abstract

Amalia Moretti Foggia, a pediatrician, wrote for La Domenica del Corriere and other periodicals between 1926 and 1947, using various pseudonyms according to the audience and subject matter. She adopted the masculine pseudonym “Dr. Amal” for the medical advice column, while “La massaia scrupolosa” and “Una mamma” were used for topics related to domestic education and childcare. In the culinary column Tra i fornelli, the pseudonym “Petronilla” animates the otherwise rigid recipe format by introducing female characters, whose presence serves both narrative and dialogic purposes. Onomastics plays a significant role in constructing gender-based complicity and fostering the loyalty of a female readership, supporting an overarching aim of verisimilitude. The names used often correspond to real women, reflect the bourgeois milieu of the time, and occasionally carry diastratic connotations. There is also a notable preference for names tied to regions familiar to the author, including instances of so-called “portrait names.”