A swirling galaxy of tiny semolina stars churned in the boiling water.

My grandmother stirred the pot in concentric circles, like she was enacting a ritual in some magic cauldron.

And she was. A generous heap of those whimsical dots, called pastina, was always the answer for what to eat when we were sick.

Because pastina is no ordinary pasta. It has another name: “Italian penicillin.”

In my grandmother’s hands, the boiling water, the spoon and the specks of pasta — accompanied by a plop of butter that formed a molten river down the center of the bowl — became more than a prescription. They were a supernova, radiating healing energy. Before long, those five-pointed stars would propel me from a day languishing in front of “The Price is Right” right back to school.

This soft, soothing bowl of warmth binds generations in New Jersey, Italy and beyond. From first meals to last meals, pastina is one of the ultimate comfort foods, often combined with the “liquid gold” that is chicken soup (dubbed ”Jewish penicillin”).

So when Ronzoni announced this month that it would no longer be selling pastina, it was like someone had poured cold water on all those boiling pots of childhood memory.

“We regretfully announce that Ronzoni Pastina is being discontinued,” the brand said in Jan. 3 posts on social media.

“Discontinued.”

It hit like a collective gut punch.

Turns out Ronzoni’s supplier up and decided not to make pastina anymore. Despite a vigorous hunt for a replacement — “We searched extensively,” the announcement said — the Missouri company that owns the brand, 8th Avenue Food & Provisions, couldn’t come up with an alternative.

Sure, there are other brands of pastina, but the Ronzoni news appears to have triggered a run on the stuff across dozens of supermarkets in New Jersey. The panic is real.

“It creates this snowball effect,” says Barbara McQuade of Paramus.

Rutherford’s John Genovesi prefers a topical comparison: “Pastina has become the toilet paper of 2023.”

In spiking demand for the petite pasta, Ronzoni’s disclosure cut off access to a homespun tool for fighting illness and bad days.

We are, after all, still in a pandemic.

“Yeah, it’s the Great Pastina Panic of 2023,” deadpanned an employee at Bagliani’s Market in Hammonton on Sunday.

But a pastina shortage?

“Ronzoni’s not the only brand of pastina ... Everybody lost their minds,” says Rosanna Pizza of Rutherford.

The natural evolution of this: pastina price-gouging. Pizza has heard about people paying $30 for two boxes on eBay. She also spotted posts online where people were trying to cash in by selling pastina from their pantries.

Life, death and pasta

Like many Italian Americans, Pizza grew up eating pastina.

“It’s what you remember and what gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling that you remember from being young or with your parents or your grandparents,” she says. “I guess that’s what’s got people in a tizzy.”

Pizza, 55, certainly doesn’t dispute the food’s “medicinal” properties, treasured through generations of her family.

After her father survived septic shock, he wasn’t eating. Nothing tasted right to him — almost nothing.

“Invariably, he’d always want pastina,” Pizza says.

Pastina was the meal she made her father before he went to the hospital and died in 2019 — one last comfort from home.

It was also a must during her recent case of COVID-19, “something quick and hot” to eat when she lost her appetite.

But you don’t have to be Italian to get in on the micro-pasta’s benefits, even if they have more to do with peace of mind than medicine.

Since the pasta has limited surface area, it takes only a few minutes to boil and expand into a salve for what ails — even if what ails is simply lacking for other food options. Pizza prefers hers in chicken broth or beef broth, extra soupy, sometimes with carrots and celery, sometimes with a beaten egg or grated cheese.

In Italy, however, pastina is an entire category of very small pasta shapes. Star-cut pastina is called stelline.

“I have a whole stash of different-shaped pastinas in the house,” Pizza says.

She’s cooked up pastina for her nieces and nephews, now ranging in age from 10 to 20, since they were babies.

“Food is love,” Pizza says.

There’s no right or wrong way to prepare the dish, she says — only what you remember.

Sabrina Colandrea’s mother was always the pastina chef.

“The minute she heard a sneeze, a sniffle, a cough — anything — it was straight to pastina,” the Paramus resident says. She would make it with chicken broth, onions, tomatoes, celery and occasionally garlic.

“Anything just to make it a little more hearty,” she says. “Sometimes she would even put rice in it.”

Colandrea, 51, was born in Frosinone, Italy, about an hour from Rome. She grew up between the United States and Monte di Procida, a small town in Naples where she spent roughly half the year with her family during long summers. Pastina is how she introduced her four children, now in high school and college, to solid food when they were each 6 months old.

But the pasta stars didn’t go the way of pacifiers and bibs. In fact, when she got on the phone with NJ Advance Media, she had just made some for the kids.

Scraping the bowl

Calls or visits to 30 supermarkets and Italian markets up and down the state, from North to Central to South Jersey, showed pastina was out of stock in all but three places.

It was a no-go at ShopRites in Jersey City, Kearny, Elizabeth, Toms River, Little Falls, Passaic, Wallington, Rochelle Park, Lyndhurst, Belleville, Paramus, Newark and West Caldwell. Requests for the diminutive pasta have been plentiful at the Lodi location, but again, no dice. North Bergen ShopRite was down to a single box of Barilla pastina Friday, with more on order.

Colandrea likes to buy her pastina at Piccolo’s Gastronomia Italiana in Ridgefield, one of the scant few places that actually has any.

“Ronzoni isn’t pasta,” owner Sal Piccolo says, as if dispelling some unfortunate superstition. He doesn’t carry Barilla, either.

Standing in a pasta aisle at Piccolo’s on Sunday, he laughed about a run on pastina. The ample selection of peewee pasta shapes at the cozy Bergen County market, open since 1993, comes from imported Italian brands like Granoro and Divella.

“For us, pastina is any small soup cut,” Piccolo said, pointing to other baby-sized pastas, like his favorite for chicken soup: acini di pepe (”seeds of pepper”/peppercorns), which resemble couscous, and seme di melone (”melon seeds”), a flatter, popular pick used in soups made at the store.

The Granoro stelline sold at Piccolo’s is star-shaped, though a tad larger than Ronzoni and Barilla pastina, with a hole in the middle of each star (and six points instead of five).

But at Livoti’s Old World Market in Freehold, the pastina supply has dwindled to nil. Even Corrado’s supermarket in Clifton, a longtime bastion of all things Italian, among other imports, was completely out (more is expected next week).

Hackensack ShopRite reported two (!) boxes in aisle 15. But beneath rows of fettuccine and linguine, the shelf tagged for Barilla pastina ($1.99) remained empty Saturday apart from a spray of pasta crumbs (alas, not star-shaped).

It was the same at the Hoboken store, where the only sign of pastina Sunday was the price tag for Ronzoni’s ($1.69), an artifact that marked a bare expanse next to spills of orzo and acini di pepe (also sold out) — what amounted to Italian tumbleweeds.

An Amazon search yielded the dreaded “currently unavailable,” with suggestions for alternatives like orzo and ditalini. Days later, 12-ounce boxes of Ronzoni pastina popped up ... for $19.99 each. Barilla stelline? Three boxes will set you back $35. Even a pound of acini di pepe is going for $19.99.

Some stores told us all pastina had been “discontinued,” which is not the case. Others received our request with a knowing laugh.

We could barely get out the word “pastina” before an employee at the Nutley ShopRite started in with “Noooo!” (They have called for Barilla reinforcements.)

“Ha-ha!” chortled an employee at the Union Township store. “You and everybody else.”

Brand loyalty vs. im-pastas

Not everyone was fazed by the recent pastina bulletin.

“Ronzoni was not our go-to,” Colandrea says.

When it comes to big supermarket brands, she opts for Barilla.

But the brand has definitely noticed a change, since it’s the only one left at many grocery stores, even if its pastina is out of stock and on order.

“In response to the consumer demand for this beloved shape, we are quickly increasing production and working with our retail partners to get it on shelves as soon as possible,” a Barilla spokesperson told NJ Advance Media.

But McQuade, 51, is reluctant to switch brands.

“When you weren’t feeling well, you got pastina and it was always Ronzoni,” she says.

“I had the Barilla once. It was OK,” she allows. “There is definitely a different taste ... It’s funny, ‘cause there are some things I just won’t buy an alternative brand on. You don’t feel comfortable. You’ve known that your whole life and that’s it.”

A petition for Ronzoni to reverse its pastina decision, posted on petitions.net, currently has 3,275 signatures. Another at change.org has 2,807 signatures. “Jersey wants Ronzoni to keep making PASTINA!” proclaims yet another petition, with 1,259 names backing up the assertion.

“We haven’t given up, but as of today, we can no longer offer Ronzoni Pastina to our customers,” the brand said in its Jan. 3 social media message, in answer to online chatter about the product.

8th Avenue Food & Provisions told NJ Advance Media that sales were still “strong” for pastina, “which is more reason why we are disappointed to have to discontinue it.” The company reiterated that it couldn’t find a manufacturer capable of producing pastina that would meet expected standards — including shape and size, but said it would carry on searching.

“Fingers crossed … maybe they’ll get enough push to bring it back,” says McQuade, who grew up in an Italian family in Garfield. She would make pastina on Friday nights when she was home alone because her mother was dating someone down the Shore.

“I used to eat it plain with butter. That was it,” she says — maybe some salt, but always strained of liquid. “I always liked it on the drier side. Almost like eating a cracker, but happier.”

McQuade’s daughter, 15, and son, 14, still ask for pastina when they don’t feel well.

“My husband, who’s Irish, gets the tea and toast,” she says. “Penicillins from both sides of the family.”

For many households, that’s precisely it — pastina is a warm memory that’s always in the cupboard if someone falls ill.

But for Genovesi, those cupboards are nearly bare. And in his home, saying there’s no pastina is like sounding an alarm. His regular brand was Barilla, but he’s been scouring store shelves for whatever turns up.

“Now, I can’t find Barilla or Ronzoni,” he says.

For Genovesi, 48, the shortage is serious business, and not just because it’s soup season. Pastina with chicken bouillon is a favorite meal of his two sons, 7 and 11.

“Every night around 8 o’clock, my wife knows it’s coming,” he says. “I’m down to my last two boxes. Without it, it’s getting really challenging.”

He’s sought to pre-order cases of pastina to no avail. He even tempted fate by presenting the kids with pastina im-pastas.

“I’ve tried to give them orzo, but it’s not the same,” he says of the rice-shaped pasta named for barley. “For some reason, little tiny stars is what they like.”

While he’s aware of people trying to exploit the situation with outrageous prices, normally, he appreciates just how economical the pasta is. You don’t need a lot to make a bowl, and since the carb-heavy, iron and B vitamin-fortified dish is filling, a little goes a long way.

Gracy Lema has also struggled to find pastina for her kids. She made alphabet-shaped pasta, but it didn’t have the same effect on her daughter, 2, and son, 13.

“It’s just sad for me,” says Lema, 34, an Ecuadorian American resident of Hackensack. “I do it with some garlic and potatoes and chicken — that soup is like penicillin for my kids and even for myself ... Sometimes they just get better with the soup.”

There are a series of other pastina shapes, too, like cuoricini, or “little hearts,” which look like the teeny stud earrings kids wear. They’re made by the Italian company Mellin, which markets its pastina as an introductory food for babies and young children to be started with just two tablespoons and gradually increased.

Ridgewood’s Linda Pizzuti remembers pastina as a baby food — one closely associated with tender care. She lived in Washington Heights, Manhattan with her parents, Holocaust survivors from Austria (her husband is Italian American), before growing up in Paramus.

“You would cook it with milk and you would eat it like farina,” says Pizzuti, 66. “It was better than farina ... It’s delicious.”

She recalls its dark blue package — she’s not sure exactly which brand (Ronzoni has a dark blue box — Barilla is also blue, but a more recent addition to American diets). Her mother, Trude, would make pastina with either sugar or raspberry, strawberry or apricot jam on top.

“It’s just evocative of my childhood,” she says. “It’s about nurturance, really.”

For at least part of this winter, that nurturance will have to take some other form at American kitchen tables.

Lisa Mancusi hails from Cresskill, but moved to Port St. Lucie, Florida in 2021. She tried looking for pastina in local supermarkets, but could only find what she considers a poor alternative to Ronzoni at Walmart.

“There’s nothing quite the same,” she says. “You can’t go to an orzo. You can’t do a ditalini. I mean, who doesn’t like stars? Kids love stars ... It doesn’t weigh heavy in your stomach like other pastas would.”

Mancusi, 59, would make pastina when her husband and son were sick. She couldn’t believe the Ronzoni news.

“Their excuse doesn’t really hold any water as far as I’m concerned,” she says ... unlike any amount of ultra-absorbent pastina. “Their supplier can’t make it anymore? Well, find another one.”

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.