Bitter Almonds Read online

  Bitter Almonds

  Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood

  Maria Grammatico & Mary Taylor Simeti

  Maria at the Istituto San Carlo, circa 1959

  ‘Facciamo tutto a mano, partendo dalle sostanze naturali, dal latte, dalle zucche, dalle mandorle, ai pistacchi. I costi delle materie prime oggi sono proibitivi ed esigui sono i margini di guadagno. Svolgiamo questa attività per tenere aperta una finestra, sia pure protetta da grate, sul mondo che non ci è ostile e che dobbiamo pur amare.’

  ‘We do everything by hand, starting with natural ingredients, from the milk and the squashes to the almonds and pistachios. The cost of the raw materials today is prohibitive, and the margins of profit are very narrow. We continue this activity so that we may maintain a window open—albeit protected by an iron grate—on the world, which is not hostile to us and which we have, after all, to love.’

  From an interview with a Benedictine nun,

  Palermo, Il Giornale di Sicilia, 5 October 1981

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  RECIPES

  BASIC RECIPES

  1 Pasta di Mandorla

  2 Pasta per Dolcini

  3 Pasta Frolla

  4 Pan di Spagna

  5 Crema Pasticciera

  6 Crema di Ricotta

  ALMOND PASTRIES

  7 Frutta di Martorana

  8 Belli e Brutti

  9 Dolcetti al Liquore

  10 Sospiri e Désirs

  11 Cuscinetti

  12 Bocconcini

  13 Palline all’Arancia

  14 Palline al Cioccolato

  RECIPES USING PASTA FROLLA

  15 Lingue di Suocera

  16 Genovesi

  17 Panzarotti

  18 Crostata di Marmellata

  19 Crostata di Ricotta

  20 Crostata di Crema

  21 Crostata di Frutta

  BISCUITS

  22 Biscotti al Fico

  23 Mostaccioli di Erice

  24 Biscotti al Latte

  25 Biscotti all’Anice

  26 Reginette

  27 Mostaccioli di Vino Cotto

  28 Amaretti

  29 Quaresimali

  JAMS AND PRESERVES

  30 Conserva di Cedro

  31 Marmellata di Limone

  32 Marmellata di Cotogne

  33 Cotognata

  34 Marmellata di Pesche

  35 Marmellata di Arance I

  36 Marmellata di Arance II

  CORDIALS

  37 Rosolio alle More

  38 Rosolio alle Erbe

  39 Rosolio agli Agrumi

  MISCELLANEOUS

  40 Cassatedde di Ricotta

  41 Cannoli

  42 Torta Paradiso

  43 Torta Divina

  44 Cassata Siciliana

  45 Sfinci di Natale

  46 Polpette Dolci

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  I consider it an honour to have been the recipient of Maria Grammatico’s friendship and of her reminiscences, and I hope that in putting her story and her recipes on paper I have done them justice. For purposes of narration I cut and rearranged the transcriptions of my interviews with Maria before translating them, but I have added nothing that Maria herself has not said to me on one occasion or another.

  I would like to emphasize that this is her story, and it tells of life in the Istituto San Carlo as she remembers it, her memories coloured by the circumstances of her entrance into the institute and by the way in which her personality reacted to its strictures. Had I listened to Ninetta or to Titì, I would probably have been given a somewhat different picture. The isolated and repetitive quality of life at the San Carlo has also blurred Maria’s sense of the passage of time; she has a poor memory for dates and the chronology of her story is occasionally shaky. I have been as exact as possible within the limits of the material at hand, but have always felt that it would be neither correct nor necessary for me to run outside checks on what Maria has told me.

  Maria and I are extremely grateful to Susan Derecskey, unsung power behind many cookbooks and official recipe tester in the United States for this endeavour. Her enthusiasm and encouragement for our project and her professional skill and scrupulousness, both in testing and in writing the recipes, have made an enormous contribution.

  We would also like to thank Professor Vincenzo Adragna of the Biblioteca Comunale of Erice, who has been very generous with his time and with his extensive knowledge of Erice’s history, and Nino Privitera, for allowing us to reproduce the mono photographs he took inside the Istituto San Carlo in the early 1970s.

  Finally, we would like to thank Maria’s brother, Leonardo Grammatico, whose contribution goes well beyond the interview recorded here; he has been as supportive of this book as he has been of all of Maria’s undertakings.

  MARY TAYLOR SIMETI

  1

  A fresh almond pastry, dusted with powdered sugar or coated with chocolate, has been a part of every trip to Erice for almost as far back as I can remember. I couldn’t have eaten one on my first visit, of course: when I came to Sicily in 1962, just out of college and ready for a year of volunteer development work, Maria Grammatico was still closed up in the Istituto San Carlo, the convent-like orphanage where she spent all of her adolescence. Her pastry shop didn’t exist, and I didn’t know enough then about Sicily to realize that there were convents where you could give your order to a dim figure behind an iron grate and place your money upon a ‘wheel’, a revolving hatch that slid the coins through the wall and brought out pastries in their stead.

  It was an austere world that I encountered upon my arrival in Sicily. The first half of the twentieth century had done little to leaven the extreme poverty bequeathed by centuries of foreign conquest and domination, a poverty that, if anything, had been exacerbated by the economic policies of the Fascist regime and by the Second World War. If the city of Trapani, the major seaport on the west coast of the island, had undergone a degree of modernization in the preceding decades, followed by a degree of bomb damage during the Allied invasion in 1943, in the lonely farms of Trapani’s hinterland and in the little town of Erice, hovering on a mountaintop above the city, little had changed. Daily life continued much as it had in the nineteenth century.

  In the early 1960s the effects of the economic boom that was transforming Northern Italy were just beginning to trickle down to Sicily. In subsequent years, a wave of prosperity and modern technology descended, altering the face of the countryside and rendering the inhabitants of Sicily’s towns and cities more or less indistinguishable from anyone else in Southern Europe. The world in which Maria Grammatico had grown up all but disappeared.

  The story behind the almond pastries was slow to reveal itself. In an account of a trip to Erice in the early 1980s, I wrote in passing of purchasing ‘Erice’s special almond cakes in a pastry shop just off the main square’ but devoted much more space to describing the classical origins and the abundant flora of this medieval village, whose spectacular location, on the top of a solitary mountain that rises 2,400 feet above the coastal plain, has inevitably attracted myth and speculation. Thucydides claimed that Erice and her sister city, Segesta, were founded in the twelfth century BC by Trojans escaping from the fall. These descendants of Æneas became known as the Elymians, and they were one of the three peoples that inhabited Sicily when the Greeks began to colonize the island in the eighth century BC.

  Archaeological data confirm the Eastern Mediterranean, most probably Anatolian origin of the Elymians, but a
s of yet, nothing has been found that establishes the date of their arrival in western Sicily. It is probable, however, that they found a goddess already installed. The Great Mother of the Mediterranean Basin has been worshipped at Erice since time immemorial. The Carthaginians called her Astarte; the Greeks knew her as Aphrodite, and claimed that the lady had risen from the waves just below the sacred mountain, had lain on its slopes with an Argonaut, Butes ‘the Beekeeper’, and had given birth there to the king of the Elymians, Eryx, whose name means heather. Daedalus dedicated a honeycomb wrought of gold to Aphrodite’s altar at Erice, and the Romans lay with sacred prostitutes at the shrine of Venus Ericina.

  It is to be expected that so ancient a tradition would be slow to die, yet it is nonetheless astonishing to read that vestiges of the pagan cult were still to be found in the sixteenth century. A document dated 1554 states that the mid-August festivities in honour of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary were established by papal order ‘to distract the large flow of people coming to the temple of Venus’. In the second half of that century, a portrait of the Virgin was miraculously saved from a shipwreck and placed in the nearby town of Custonaci, and in the following years the Madonna of Custonaci gradually displaced Aphrodite as the patron saint of Erice. There are those who claim that something still persists: Erice’s traditional wedding biscuits, known as miliddi, are said to descend from mylloi, the ritual cakes sweetened with honey and sacred to the goddess that are described in the poetry of Theocritus.

  My curiosity about the later periods of Erice’s history was whetted by a 1985 trip to see I Misteri, the Good Friday processions that take place on a grandiose scale in Trapani, and on a much smaller, more intimate scale in Erice itself. Here my sister and I followed the almost life-sized statues representing the Passion of Christ and the Sorrows of the Madonna, a Renaissance reworking of the mystery plays of the Middle Ages, through narrow cobbled streets, past abandoned churches, medieval houses, and baroque mansions. The mist that floated in from the Mediterranean, curling under the arches and around the bell towers, seemed to cut us off from the modern world below and project us backwards in time to the period of Erice’s second flowering, when the town became known as Monte San Giuliano. (The classical name was restored by Mussolini.) Almost completely deserted in the Byzantine and Arab eras, Erice owed its rebirth and subsequent wealth to the lands assigned to it by the Norman King William II in the twelfth century, a grant reconfirmed in the following century by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. These vast communal territories, which were not carved up definitively until the middle of the nineteenth century, nurtured a flourishing middle class, which built itself miniature mountaintop palaces in which to escape the heat of the Sicilian summer. Hoping perhaps to escape the heat of eternal perdition as well, it also endowed some forty-two churches and a number of convents and orphanages. Yet the prosperity of Monte San Giuliano did not survive the dismembering of its territory. The buildings still stand, but the doors of many are boarded up and their roofs are falling; only a handful of resident faithful remain to follow Erice’s processions.

  The Good Friday procession disbanded just a few steps from Maria’s pastry shop. We entered in search of something to warm us up and were greeted by a counter full of marzipan lambs. Unlike most of the paschal lambs on sale throughout Sicily at Eastertime, which are made in standard moulds that vary only in size and portray the lamb sitting in a grassy pasture, Maria’s lambs were lying down. Eyes open, tongues hanging out a bit, fleece beautifully executed curl by curl, they gave little clue to the fact that they represented the sacrificial, slaughtered lamb.

  By that time I was doing the research for a second book, a history of Sicilian food, in which a chapter was to be dedicated to the pastries traditionally made in convents throughout the island. To my knowledge, no thorough study of this tradition has been made: cultural anthropology in Sicily, perhaps because of its ideological matrix, appears to concentrate on the peasantry and to take less interest in institutions, especially those, such as convents, that were religious in nature and often aristocratic in origin. And historians of the church are perhaps uncomfortable with—or at least uninterested in—an aspect of convent life that is almost totally devoid of religious content. Even before making pastries to sell became a source of income for the convents, pastries as gifts were an acceptable currency by which the cloister could purchase the attention of the outside world, a tray of marzipan or almond cakes in exchange for a visit and a bit of gossip.

  Early reference to convent pastries in Sicily reflect the ambivalence of the Church towards this activity. At the end of the sixteenth century, the nuns of the Diocese of Mazara del Vallo were forbidden to make cassata during Holy Week, that they might not be distracted from their prayers. Yet some fifty years later the manufacture of marzipan and other sweets was a monopoly awarded to the monache di casa, self-appointed celibates living at home, so as to ensure them ‘lo honesto vivere’—an honest income.

  However much earlier the tradition may have begun, by the end of the eighteenth century the manufacture of pastries in the convents was extremely widespread, flourishing in some cases beyond the limits of propriety. After the unification of Italy in 1860 and the confiscation of the Church’s properties, many convents closed, and others were forced to make the pastry trade one of their principal sources of income. In the years since the Second World War, the number of convents that produce pastries has dropped abruptly: the elderly nuns are dying and the new recruits, when they can be found, are no longer attracted to this sort of activity. The one nun capable of making the exquisite marzipan grapes I described in my first book, On Persephone’s Island, had taken her secrets with her to the grave before I completed the second book, and other such recipes are disappearing unrecorded across the island.

  I did not immediately connect Maria’s lamb, lying on a tray surrounded by flower-topped cakes known as pasta di conserva, with Carlo Levi’s description of buying pastries at a convent in Erice in 1951: ‘The pastries appeared on the wheel, tender flowers of green and pink and violet and azure.’ But from a purely visual standpoint, the lamb was memorable, and when in 1988 the American Craft Museum asked me to procure them examples of Sicilian sugar work for a show to be dedicated to ‘The Confectioner’s Art’, I immediately returned to Erice.

  It was in the course of negotiating for a first lamb, which eventually began to ooze its citron preserves, and later for a second, jam-free, lamb to go on tour, that I became friendly with Maria and began to hear about how she had learned to make pastries as an orphan in the Istituto San Carlo. Maria loves to tell stories, and she is worldly enough to know which details of her early life seem the most exotic to a contemporary American. I was rapidly hooked: each return to Erice revealed another anecdote, some new Dickensian detail of life in the orphanage, or some long-forgotten recipe. The following winter I persuaded Gourmet magazine to commission an article about Maria’s almond pastries, and I began to visit her in earnest, armed with notebook and tape recorder.

  The article was published in 1991, but the visits have continued. Now that this book is finished, I no longer have an excuse to tape our meetings, yet I can hardly bear for Maria to open her mouth when the tape recorder isn’t running. She speaks when reminiscing in the strong and musical dialect of her youth, with the lilt, the epithet, and the recurring refrain of the oral storytelling tradition. Her language is slightly old-fashioned, uncontaminated by the mass media, but every so often she injects a very contemporary concept, a reminder that this is not some relic of the past who is speaking, but an artist who is also a sharp businesswoman and a successful entrepreneur. Much of the beauty of her speech is lost in my translation, but the world she describes would, I believe, be fascinating in any language.

  After the war we went hungry, we truly went hungry. In Sicily it was like some primitive time. I can remember, as a child, where I lived someone died almost every day, every single day, and if anyone passed by they walked right over him. A lot h
as changed in Sicily, you see, and I have worked very, very hard, I’ve made it all on my own. I was eleven when I entered the institute. I had no choice but to work.

  I started in right away. I’d already had a little schooling, through fourth grade. So I was put to work. My little sister Angela, who was only six when we entered the San Carlo, was sent to school through fifth grade, that’s all. Nothing more; women didn’t go to school.

  The San Carlo was over there where the Salerniana is, where they have the exhibitions. But it was much bigger then, it went all along the Via San Carlo, as far as the Porta Ercole gate.

  Do you know where La Pentolaccia restaurant is? That was part of the San Carlo, too. That’s where the machines were. During the war they couldn’t make any more pastries, there wasn’t any flour, there wasn’t any sugar, and the nuns began to spin wool to make sweaters with, to make socks, and they sold them to earn their living. So they spun wool. There were all these spinning machines, hand ones though, made of wood, with a pedal. You pedalled with your foot and that turned a crank, and the yarn came out.

  Above the restaurant were the dormitories, where we slept. The nuns too: they had their beds behind a screen. In my room there were me and my sister and two nuns. Then in the next room there were eight beds plus two for the nuns, you see. In another there were three or four. That’s how it was.

  When I entered the San Carlo there were about fifteen nuns, and then about sixteen or seventeen orphans. We were the littlest. My sister and I, then Nuccia, and Maria Franchini—we were the youngest. Then there was Maria, there was Ninetta, there was the other one, Serenedda. There was Titì. But Titì was already older, she was four years older than me, and she didn’t have a big girl in charge of her, because she’d already been there for four years. Anna was big when she came in, Anna was about nineteen, I think. They could leave when they wanted, but not before they were twenty-one—when they came of age. In fact, Maria left later on, she got married and left, Serenedda left too, Nuccia left, Anna left …