The Recipe

Amazing Grace.  That’s what my father called her, with the greatest respect for this Sicilian woman whose family merged with ours more than four decades ago when my oldest sister married her son.

Her home was always open to us. She cooked and baked and when she left the house to visit, never went anywhere empty handed. When Christmas came, she magically produced honey-glazed pignalata (peen-ia-la-tha) -- nuggets of cookies that were stuck together and sprinkled with cinnamon chipped like bits of bark, and cuchidata (cooch-y-dah-dah) -- the fig and raisin filling just peeking through tiny slits in dough which was glazed with confectioner’s sugar; and chocolate drops laden with nuts. These were my favorites and I loved hearing her pronounce their names.

My sisters' families and my husband and I all gathered together on Christmas Eve back then. Before she was even through the door, Grace was directing my brother-in-law to give me a batch of her pignalata.  I always gave her a gift I hope she liked. I will never forget her kindesses to me. 

*****

Come in! she calls when you knock at the door.  She is sitting in her brown vinyl chair, watching The Godfather on television, drawing in a breath of dismay and shaking her head when the characters swear in Italian. We laugh.  On the end table next to her is a lamp, and into its shade she has tucked wallet-sized cards from the Catholic church she no longer has the strength to attend, each a printed portrait of the Madonna. Surrounding her cloudy glass of water are the medicine bottles she picks up one by one and counts like rosary beads.  Once she has extended her welcome, she heaves herself with care and dignity onto the frame of her walker, and you follow her into the kitchen.

Sit down, sit down! she commands.  I used to think she was yelling at me.  But I was much younger then.  Coming from a small family with midwestern-German and southern roots, I wasn’t used to such outward exhuberance.  She opens a plastic container -- homemade cookies inside -- and offers to make coffee.  Mangia, mangia!  Eat, eat! 

Though she was born in Michigan and her parents returned to Terrasini, Sicily with her as a small child, all the years I knew her she lived in an apartment house on Addison Street in Gloucester. She rented out three of the apartments, one where my oldest sister lived after she married into the family. When the apartment above it became available, my father and I moved in. I was fifteen.  My mother had died just two months earlier, in February of 1971. My father was a commercial fisherman who, as owner and skipper of the Sea Breeze, a 90' trawler, was out fishing the north Atlantic waters much of the time.  My sister Sharon lived downstairs with her husband and was expecting her first child.  My middle sister Lynn lived with my father and me for a while, but would be married soon, and as an airline stewardess for Northeast Airlines, was traveling a lot.  I was the youngest and a sophomore in high school.  

Fifteen isn't an easy age even without so many changes in my life. That first Easter without my mother seemed gray and cold. Where I had been used to my Magnolia neighborhood friends and walking just blocks to the beach with my dog, Brandy, and Westie's pond where we skated in winter, I felt locked in on Addison Street. It was right in the middle of town, surrounded by busy streets. At home alone, I was surprised when Grace knocked on the back door, a few steps from her own, and delivered an Easter basket unlike any I had ever seen before. Instead of a traditional woven container, hers was shaped from braided dough and baked in the oven.  Instead of being filled with candy, it contained a single egg, colored blue, and baked into it.  Every Easter she made one for each of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and that year she included me.  

Grace and her husband Busty, short for Sebastiano, made baking and cooking a day-long project then.  There were homemade sausages and sauces, and flavorful dishes like spedini --  cheese on top of a slice of ham rolled up into a slice of cube steak and skewered with a toothpick.  Rows and rows of them were baked in the oven. The smell of tomato sauce wafted through the door.  Sometimes, on Sundays, they invited my father and me over for meals.  Mangia Franco day, my father called it.  Freeloader’s day.  Eat for free.  He had fished for thirty years with the Italians and had learned their expressions, if not the language. The street was lined with parked cars because all the neighboring Sicilians made Sunday family day.

Mangia! Mangia!  Grace would say above the shouting, talking over one another, standing up, sitting down, scraping chairs across the linoleum floor. The food was abundant. The plates were cleared quickly and removed or filled again.  I’d say my thanks and get up to leave, to go back to the sanctuary of my room and my stereo, to playing James Taylor and John Denver albums over and over. The grooves of the LPs must have been worn down. I've seen fire and I've seen rain. Years later my father called to tell me he'd heard the song and thought of me.

You should help with the dishes, my sister would say as I rose to leave Grace's table, but with more people arriving, it was hard to know where to stand, where to be.  

Grace didn’t seem to mind.  She never spoke to me about my loss nor did she ever reprimand me for being a useless girl, though I learned that, when she was just fourteen, she already knew much more than I did – how to cook, embroider, what was expected of her.  So much had been done for me all of my life.  My mother had made all of my clothes until she was too sick with cancer to sit at her sewing machine.  Her philosophy, like Grace's was It’s better made at home. She would have made my skirt for my Girls’ Drill Team uniform that year, and I knew how to sew it myself, but didn't take the initiative. The skirt that I bought was too long.  Skirts were worn so far above the knee then, all the girls had them shortened.  My sister suggested I ask Grace to hem it and when I did she gladly took the skirt back to her chair.  This short? She asked incredulously.  Aye, yi, yi.  She left a hem of about four inches in case I changed my mind.  Her cross-stitches, perfect X’s, were so uniform and tight, they would never unravel.  The length was perfect. 

For two years I lived next door to Grace, and while I spent little time with her, it was a comfort to know she was there.  Her family was not mine, but they were rock solid if you needed them.  I would never forget how her daughter Tina, two doors down the street, had insisted that my small family come to her house immediately after my mother’s funeral.  We really had nowhere to go other than back to our solemn home. That day I sat at her table in stunned silence, surrounded by the noise, the movement, and the food they offered.  What can you do?  It was God’s plan.  Mangia!  Mangia!

College was not an option after high school.  I worked at various jobs, following my mother’s lead, for she had had a career.  No one in my family had ever gone to college, and we couldn’t afford it. Finally I landed a good job that blossomed into a career in marketing communications thanks to the company paying for me to take college courses at night.  I met my future husband, Rick, at work, and we finished our bachelor’s degrees together.  Along with my two sisters and their families, we forged new traditions, spending holidays together and celebrating birthdays and graduations.

Grace remained an important part of our family.  Rick and I drove her to my sister’s house where all the family gatherings were held on the other side of town.  We took her out on Christmas Eve to see the lights.  When a special statue of the Madonna was brought to St. Anne’s Church, she was beside herself with excitement.  Pam, Pam, go see the lady.  She’s so beautiful.  Go see the Madonna.  For her, I did, and reported back that our lady was indeed beautiful.  For years I admired the afghans she crocheted for every member of her family.  At my sister’s suggestion, I hesitantly asked, could she make one for me?  She told me what yarn to buy.  Two months later, I received a phone call.  Pam, I have an afghan for you.  When I offered to pay or give something in return, her response was an emphatic wave of her hand.  Bah!  I don’t want nothing! 

*   *   *

Grace calls me a week before the following Christmas, taking me up on my wistful hint that I wished I knew how to make the little honey-covered cookies with the cinnamon and nuts, and asks, Pam, you gonna come make the pignalata? We decide on a time. 

Do you need me to pick up anything? I ask.

Eggs, a couple dozen.

How about honey?

Yeah, yeah.  But I want to pay you.

That Sunday night Come in! greets me from behind the door at the top of the stairs.  Did I really once live here?  The kitchen is ready.  Grace has already set out the enormous old yellow mixing bowl and her mixer. Mounded in another bowl is Semolina flour.  She rubs it through her fingers and explains that she has gotten the best quality flour from the local bakery for her cookies.  The apartment is warm, a comfort to an aged woman.  She had once been round and soft, and had bounced the family babies on her ample bosom to the wild dance tune of La Tarontella, for she had no lap to speak of. On her doctor’s advice she had dieted till she was now nearly half her original size.  She is cold now, not warm. 

Off comes my wool sweater and we set to work. 

Put a dozen eggs in the bowl she says from her chair at the table, the very same one I had sat at so many years before, wondering when I could leave.  Her watchful, hungry eyes miss nothing, so I crack them with what I hope is workmanlike precision.  Mix them.  Yeah, yeah.  Let me have a look.  She peers keenly into the bowl.  More, more.  Now you get the flour.  Put some in the bowl with the eggs.  Use your hands.  That’s enough flour!  Up now and leaning on her walker, she transfers her balance to the dough in the bowl, and turns it over and over, pressing with the heels of her hands.  She had always been old to me.  But now that she is really old she looks somehow more youthful, her tightly cropped grey hair curled around her face, slimmer now since her diet.  But still the heavy ornate gold and garnet earrings weigh down her earlobes the way overly-ripened fruit pulls down the branches of a tree.

See between the stove and the closet?  She points.  What does she want?  I try to be quick to comprehend while she struggles for the right word in English.  No, no.  There.  My mind goes blank.  There is the dough in the bowl before us, and something between the stove and the closet.  I am nearly forty, but feel fifteen again, trying to do the right thing.  Then, like a revelation, I realize she is pointing to two big laminated boards for working the dough on.  Get the big one and put it here.  Bring the flour.  She takes a handful and sprinkles it on the Formica-covered board – a clever use to put it to – and works the dough in pensive silence, feeling until it is right.  Then with a knife, honed by years of sharpening, she cuts the dough into three pieces.  Get the other board and put it there.   Put some flour on it.  She takes one of the lumps of dough, cuts slices off of it, then rolls the pieces into thin, pencil shapes.  You take these and put them to dry.  Don’t let them touch.

I watch in stupified silence, then realize I could be doing this, too.  What must she think of me?  The first pencil I roll out has a lump in the middle that will not behave.  This is not so easy.  But we roll the dough together, and the conversation leads to family matters and of her move here from Sicily, after she’d married Busty.  All the Sicilians in Gloucester had come here to fish these bountiful waters off the coast of Massachusetts.  They took up residence in tightly packed neighborhoods, like Addison Street, where they all knew one another and one another’s relatives in the old country, and intermarried and raised children they named Gaetano, Vito, Giuseppi.  Grace had learned to speak English very quickly.  She taught the others who were not so adept.  She returned to Sicily for a while, lost a baby or two, had many more there and here, too. Grace and Busty bought this apartment house, and had lived comfortably if not lavishly.  Her youngest son, my brother-in-law, was younger than his niece, his sister’s daughter. 

She steps over to the counter to get the oil, then pauses to open the cabinet.  Look, Pam, see what I got here.  My husband made these twelve years ago.  Everybody says, ‘Why you keep those?’ I tell them, ‘You leave them right there.’  On the shelf, holding a place of honor are quart-sized jars of homemade tomato sauce.  I recall how Busty had grown his own basiligo (basil) and tomatoes on the back porch we used to share.  I rise to take the oil from her, Spanola she had gotten on sale some time ago and laments that now it is twice the price at the local market.  We open the bright yellow plastic jug.  On the label is a vivacious Italian girl. 

How did you meet your husband?  I ask.

When we lived in Sicily he used to go across the beach in front of my house to get to the fishing boat.  I used to see him.  One day he asked if he could be engaged to me.  My father said he didn’t know him but he knew his family and it was a nice family so it was alright.

You were fourteen?  I know some of this story.

Then my husband went in the Navy and I didn’t see him for two years.  We were married sixty-two years.

I look around and imagine him sitting here at the table.  My father, too.  Each summer when he came to visit from Florida he always visited Grace, recalling the old days when he and Busty once fished together as strong young men.  Little did we know that one day our children would marry, he marveled.  The Italian fishermen, who are fond of calling one another by nicknames, called Busty Sea Bass then and my father Scotch-a-Poopa.  Even today if you mention the name, some of the old Italians know him.  Scotch-a-Poopa!  The one who takes the fish from the hold!  That was your father!  Billy.  Billy Mansfield.  He was the southerner.  They look at me as though I am a messenger from their past.  They no longer see me.  They see through me and are transported back in time. 

At the stove a deep pot waits, dented and dimpled with use.  We pour the oil into it and the level rises to about an inch or two deep.  Grace cuts small wedges off of several of the rolled out pencils of dough and I do the same till we have a cutting board covered with them.  Give me the first ones you put there.  They’re more dry.  She drops a piece in the heated oil to test it, then puts enough pieces in so that they fill the bottom of the pot and bubble in the oil.  She stirs with a slotted spoon.  When her shoulder hurts too much, I take over, but she watches from her chair.  When the cookies are golden brown we put them in a colander to drain. We set the pot on the back porch for the oil to cool, then start the process again.  She tastes a cooled nugget of cookie.  These are nice.  They’re tender inside.

It takes nearly two hours to fry all the dough, and as she picks through to remove any burned cookies, I tell her that Rick calls all her cookies by the same name – cucchidata --  a word that tumbles off the tongue and wants to be said over and over.  Even though I told him I’m going to make the pignalata, when I get home he’ll ask me about the cucchidata.  She laughs, her soft face brightened by a smile that curves in a wide arc.

By 10:30 that night we are cleaning up.  I want to pay you for the eggs and the honey, she says.  Bah!  I reply with a wave of my hand, in imitation of her.  She puts the night light on and asks me to stay until she gets safely to her bedroom.  Tomorrow we do the honey, she reminds me.  I’ll be here a little after 4:30, I reply, the earliest I can leave work, and let myself out, locking her door behind me.

When I arrive the next day, she has already started shaving the blocks of chocolate with her knife.  I take over that job while she gets out the bowl of almonds, already chopped.  It is so warm in the kitchen the chocolate melts in my hands before I can cut it, so I take it out on the back porch.  The old pot is clean and back on the stove, honey and sugar warming in it.  A mixture of sugar and cinnamon waits on the counter.  We stir the cookies in the honey, then she dunks her hands in a bowl of cold water.  Always have the bowl of water here, she advises.  She takes the cooled cookies out with her hands and forms them into mounds on a series of paper plates.  Then we sprinkle them with chocolate, nuts, the cinnamon mixture, and finally powdered sugar.  After two nights of work, we are finally done.

We cover the cookies with Saran wrap and they are ready to be given out for Christmas.  You only give these to your good friends.  They’re too much work, Grace tells me, loading my arms with several plates. And then I realized just how special her gift of the cookies had been each year. 

*   *   *

I look forward to the next Thanksgiving with family, but the night before Halloween, Grace calls for help, looks fixedly at the nurse who comes to her, smiles at something in the distance, then she is gone. 

At her funeral, I wear a black dress and for her I wear the cross I have not worn since I was a child.  I don’t understand the procession at St. Anne’s Church, the old women who walk down the aisle holding the picture of a saint in front of them, a woman who is not the Madonna but surely someone that everyone else but me recognizes.  I can hear Grace’s voice, The lady, the beautiful lady.  Family alone goes to the cemetery.  I stand by her grave when the coffin is lowered, and gently toss a flower onto it.  We all go to her daughter’s house and eat.