In Italian, food is rarely just food. It organizes time, relationships, and expectations. This column explores Italian sayings and proverbs as ways of thinking shaped at the table.
These expressions preserve that knowledge in compact form. Read literally, they speak about eating. Read more closely, they offer insight into how experience, pleasure, and social life are understood.
The aim is simple: to treat language as another ingredient—handled with care, tasted slowly, and shared. No prior appetite required. It tends to arrive along the way.
Non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco
Literal translation: Not all ring cakes come out with a hole.
Meaning: Not everything turns out perfectly or according to plan.
Sometimes, the difference between success and disappointment lies in the middle. In the case of a ciambella, that middle is nothing more than a hole.
This is the consoling possibility captured by the Italian proverb non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco. Italians invoke it when things do not go entirely as planned: a project reveals an unforeseen defect, a plan requires adjustment, or careful preparation produces something recognizable and usable, but not quite right.
A ciambella can take many forms depending on the region and the recipe. It may be baked or fried, simple or elaborate, and its ingredients may vary considerably. Within the logic of the proverb, however, one characteristic is nonnegotiable: the ciambella should be round, with an opening at the center. If, despite the baker’s care and skill, the dough expands until that opening disappears, the finished pastry has failed the visual test of being a proper ciambella.
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Remove the hole, and you have something slightly puzzling: delicious, perhaps, and still recognizable, yet not quite what was promised. It is hardly a tragedy, however. The pastry may have failed at geometry, but it can still succeed admirably as breakfast.
What makes the imperfection tolerable is the choice of food itself: a defect is easier to swallow when it arrives disguised as pastry. The culinary image recasts failure as a question of form and substance. The expected shape has been lost, but the dough and flavor remain; as long as the substance survives, the flaw does not spoil the whole. An abstract disappointment may sound severe. Place it on the kitchen table, and it becomes far more manageable—not perfect, perhaps, but still perfectly passable.
Here lies the distinctive force of the Italian expression. Food does not merely illustrate an idea; it interprets experience. The proverb may reflect a cultural inclination to soften disappointment by attending to what remains, but language also helps preserve that inclination by giving it a familiar and repeatable form. The Italian language turns to food not simply to describe what happened, but to suggest how one might live with it.
If the closest English equivalent ‘you can’t win them all,’ offers consolation by placing failure within a larger tally of wins and losses, the Italian proverb does so by questioning whether the result should count as a failure at all. Rather than counting losses, it inspects what remains. The Italian speaker looks at the result, shrugs, takes a bite, and decides that it is not too bad.
Non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco can therefore console, excuse, or gently lower expectations. It does not deny the imperfection or pretend that intention and outcome are identical. It simply refuses to treat every defect as a disaster. Perfection cannot be guaranteed, even when the recipe is familiar and the hands are experienced. Occasionally, the hole disappears.
After all, the hole was never the part anyone planned to eat.
