The fact that spring has arrived has almost everything to do with my ability to shake off the loss of my hour, not your hour mind you but my hour. Everywhere I look there are tiny green shoots poking through the earth. Today may very well be the last time I wear the big red coat that scrapes and swishes making a racket as I walk each morning. Toti Nonna no longer has to wear the sweater or vest or raincoat. I can tell she’s thrilled at the prospect. It’s also the last time we’ll walk through the meadow at the green acres for fear of the tick infestation, I’m pretty sure she’s ok with that too.
There’s no time to wallow in lost hours there are things to be done. The strips of insulation must come off so windows can be opened. The deck is swept and the furniture is in place. The old Adirondack chair has gone to dilapidated chair heaven. The garden needs to be uncovered and Easter is coming.
Easter is a big deal in Italian families, it’s a big deal for all Roman Catholics but the Italian people are in high gear in the kitchen. I am lucky enough to host Easter at my house, you’re shocked I know, and the cooking is traditional and reminiscent. It’s a food tradition frenzy beginning with my Gramma’s Easter bread. I don’t know that all families make this bread, I have a feeling this was her normal bread kicked up a notch with black pepper and the blessed palm from Palm Sunday.
The Palm is historically a problem for me. I no longer go to mass especially when the twice a year Catholics come out, as my mother would say, so I have to rely on someone else to bring me the palm for the bread. My sister and her husband used to go to mass but since he left us she no longer feels comfortable going on her own. So now it’s up to my cousin Nancy to keep me from stealing it from the church decorations like I was forced to one year. I know, I’m not sure the theft negated the blessing but everyone seemed fine throughout that year. God love her she came through this year to keep me from going straight to hell. I always say God ain’t mad at me but that might have crossed the line…just sayin.
So now it’s back to Aunt Millie’s recipe box and pulling everything out and getting going. I use Aunt Millie’s recipe, if you can call it that, because this bread has a long ago special memory for me. The recipe is in my handwriting from when I was first married. I remember taking the notes as she was making the bread because only she could make the bread (they are such a pain in the ass that way) but she talked all the way through it so I couldn’t get in that much trouble getting it all down. When I look at the card now I think if ever I gave this to someone they’d just look at it and scratch their head but when I look at it I’m back in her tiny kitchen on 47th in Astoria. So if you want to learn from me I guess you’ll have to take your own notes too.
There aren’t many ingredients but it requires time. During each rise there were stories, whether she made the bread at her house or at our house there were stories. Her and my mother would argue (about everything) how Mama never made it that way, or Mama used to do it this way. Mama didn’t use that much pepper. You get the picture…my mother thinks mine tastes just like Mama’s. I only this year told her I use Aunt Millie’s recipe….oh. See, what you don’t know doesn’t bother you as they both used to say.
The smell of the bread baking is incredibly nostalgic, it swells my heart, makes me yearn sometime for those days, and worries me that it will disappear one day for good. Sigh… Along those lines I send a loaf to my cousin Jack in South Carolina. He is so damn grateful and we have a wonderful chat each year about this being the best one yet and it tastes just like Gramma’s…ok we’ll just leave it at Aunt Millie learned from her mother.
My mother and I split the other loaf and we enjoy it right out of the oven with butter. Then the rest of the days we toast it with butter. The taste is completely different when it’s toasted, the pepper is more pungent and the crust is even crispier. The butter must melt down your chin or you’ve done it wrong. The smell of this bread toasting brings me back again to Astoria and Aunt Millie’s little apartment. I stayed there once and we had toasted bread for dinner and toasted bread for breakfast and went into the city to see the Sound of Music when it opened at Radio City Music Hall. Almost fifty years later I remember every smell and every taste and every detail. That is the power of food memories and traditions.
And so my cousin’s bread will arrive on Wednesday and we will have our annual chat about the old days and how happy we are that we’ve lived it and loved it and “if God spares us” (as every Italian in the world says before they talk about the future) we will chat again next year.
Next week as we gather around my table there will be other Italian food traditions on it and there will be my tiny little family and my extended family of favorite Jews. Our feast will be all encompassing and we will tell stories of Easter and Passover and family and friends. It will be spring on Stowe Lane officially.
Buona Pasqua
