A Recipe for All Souls' Day
Pasta, chick peas, and a little political commentary
We were due at Crair’s at noon, but my mother thought we should eat first.
“You don’t know what kind of mood she’ll be in today,” my mother said. It was November 2, the Day of the Dead. I had driven two hours to Long Island from New Haven to join my mother in watching my 85-year-old aunt make a traditional Calabrese dish for the day: ceci e lagane: pasta with chick peas.
We were at the same McDonald’s in Lynbrook where she used to take my late grandmother every week for coffee and a Quarter Pounder. We left the drive-thru at McDonald’s with two cheeseburgers and one soda, and went to the parking lot. “Pick a spot in the sun,” my mother said. It was a warm Monday. The presidential election between Trump and Biden was the following day. My mother had been diagnosed with glioblastoma in October. On that All Souls’ Day, she hadn’t started her treatment yet.
“Crair has her own ideas about lunch,” my mother said, as we ate in the car. Sometimes it was Bulgarian-made Caciocavallo cheese and Wonder bread. The last time we visited, my mother yelled at Crair to turn off green beans that had been bubbling on the stove for hours. “You are turning them to mush!” my mother yelled.
“They’re fine!” Crair said. Our family called her Crair instead of her given name, Elda Pia, because when the family came to the U.S., in 1956, they started calling her the American-sounding Claire. Which, in their Italian mouths, became Crair.
Wonder Bread aside, Crair prided herself on being the keeper of family recipes, from Calabria, where she and my mother were born, and we looked to her when craved those traditional dishes over the American cooking which was becoming increasingly typical for us.
“Why does she want to watch me make pasta?” my aunt asked my mother as she pushed her back door open for us. She pointed at me. “She doesn’t know it’s just eggs and flour?”
I do know that, but I don’t remember ever associating pasta with chick peas with All Souls’ Day. I hardly think about All Souls’ Day at all. But I wanted to be there and watch her, because it made me feel closer to her, and to my mother.
Fall was turning into winter, and my mother’s cancer wasn’t going to go away. While she still could walk and talk like the person she always was, I wanted to be in that kitchen, and capture the smell of raw dough that reminded me of my childhood home, where my grandmother had made lagane too, laying long noodles to rest on a sheet covering the bed in her darkened bedroom. My mother didn’t cook those noodles, and I didn’t eat them; but that didn’t matter – it was all part of a picture that I knew would begin to fade as winter came.
“Why cece e lagane on All Souls’? I asked Crair as we began. I was helping her pile flour into a huge metal bowl from a basement cabinet. “I don’t know,” she said. “Get a bigger bowl. No wait, I’ll do it.”
And that was that. There was no story of enveloping dark, as I was hoping for with steaming bowls and candles lit to call back the dead. No metaphors, connecting the humble chick pea to Jesus or John the Baptist. More like, eat your pasta and call it a day, like every other day.
But the internet always knows. Later, searching in both Italian and English, I couldn’t find any connection of pasta and chick peas to All Souls’ Day anywhere. The dish itself has its own English Wikipedia page, where it is called lagane e cicciari. It lists the basics: it’s from Calabria, it contains chick peas, lagane, garlic, and oil. A click on lagane brings you to a page for pappardelle, which is a Northern Italian pasta; a dead end.
There is no counterpart entry on Italian Wikipedia. A search for lagane, though, kicks over to the entry for lasagna, an interesting connection. Both words come from the same source: from Latin laganum, and before that, the ancient Greek laganon, λάγανον, which means limp or soft. So lagane is the Southern Italian word for the most ancient type of pasta in Italy.
Crair began cracking a bunch of eggs into a mound of flour. My mother dropped in some water from a teacup. I don’t know how many eggs; I don’t know how much water. “Can she mix dough?” she asked my mother, pointing her thumb at me.
“I can,” I answered. I put down my phone that I was using to record her, and stuck my hands into the bowl, trying to mix from the center out as I had seen in Instagram videos, and the dough began to form strands that stuck to my fingers. Crair stood over me. “Start from the middle,” she told me.
“I am.” I jammed my fingers into the dough, trying to pull it away whole from the board, but the whole thing was a sloppy mess.
“She’s going to make it stick together,” Crair said to my mother. “She’s going to squash it.” ‘Mbaracchia was the Calabrese word she used. Spelling mine.
“But I’m trying to make it ‘mbaracchia, aren’t I?” I said.
“That’s too much,” she said. I glanced at the TV on the kitchen counter, which was, as always, on Fox News. I didn’t ask her to shut it off. It was never off.
“You really like him?” she asked, when she saw me look up at Joe Biden on the screen. “You really like that stupid voice?” She tried to imitate Joe Biden, pulling a grimace, mashing up her face, talking in jibberish. When I looked up at her, it was almost scary, like a fright mask. I looked back down at the dough.
I picked a shard of eggshell from the forming dough and held it out on my fingertip. “You missed one,” I said.
“Keep mixing!” she said.
I found out more about lagane on a website on the Cilento, an area of the region of Campania, which said that ceci e lagane was mentioned in the poetry of Horace (d. 8 BCE):
…Inde domum me ad porris et cicero refero laganique catinum.
“I’m going home, to my plate of leeks, chick peas, and lagane.” (Satires, 1, 6, 114)
The dough came together, and we put it on a large rimmed wooded board that my grandfather had made; the rim held the board in place while we kneaded the pasta dough. Then she had me divide the dough in two, and we let it rest. Ideally, the dough should rest for several hours, but there was no way my mother was going to wait around for that long. Traditionally, she was a fan of very short visits. Today she watched us, mainly quiet in her chair.
Crair sent me down to the basement and directed me to a large wooden dowel leaning against a wall in a corner, about a yard long, and the width of a rolling pin. This was a druca. The spelling is mine; in my aunt’s pronunciation of this dialect word, the “c” sounds almost like a “g” – it walks the line between both.
“This is the most important thing,” she said. The druca is the traditional tool needed to roll out pasta into large, flat sheets. I began to roll, pushing outward as she showed me, to keep the thickness of the dough even from center to ends.
“What’s the matter with you?” she took the druca from me. She took over the rolling, and when the dough was large enough and thin enough, she let me work with her to roll up the dough, forming a long, coiled tube. “Don’t squeeze it!” she admonished me, because then the dough would ‘mbaracchia.
The ancient Greek word laganon signified some kind of pastry dough – probably not pasta, but a sheet of rolled dough, cut into strips. And that’s what Crair did: quickly cut the dough into thin strips.
It turns out the only thing that is ancient about lagane is the shape – not the ingredients, and not the cooking methods. The old dough was likely made from pasta madre – sourdough starter. In Greece, apparently, the lagane were cooked on hot stones. In other times, and other areas, they were boiled in hot oil, instead of water.
I asked Crair if on All Souls’ Day in Mongrassano, people would visit the cemetery, or pray for the dead. I couldn’t imagine how the day was marked, aside from the chick peas.
“You don’t pray for the dead,” my mother said. “What’s the point of that? They’re dead already. What are you going to do for them? You can remember the dead.” On the anniversary of her mother’s death, for many years, she brought a Quarter Pounder and a coffee to her tomb, placing it on a bench before her tomb on the wall of a mausoleum, smooth stone and out of reach.
My mother had a seizure, which came as a shock, just a few weeks before this day. None of us had come to grips with her disease yet; she still carried on like she always did. We all just tried to put the impending illness and treatment out of our heads, hoping that somehow, if we kept on, the tumor in her head would wilt away.
In Mongrassano the cemetery lies at the edge of town, at the end of a tree-lined road. Beyond its walls are bare mountains. Within, the tombs rest above ground, like little houses, and many are cracked, or on a slant, tossed off center with the passing of time, the wind, the rain, and periodic earthquakes.
Those who are remembered still live, in their way. In our minds we replay their voices; they walk through our memories as though they were in the next room, just over the threshold.
As Crair cut coils of dough I picked them up and loosened them with my fingers, tossing them with flour to keep them from getting stuck together.
“Don’t do that!” she said. “It’s too much flour. What’s the matter with you?” she said, cutting dough.
Now my feelings were beginning to be hurt. I looked over at my mother; I would never hurt her by talking back to her sister. She didn’t seem bothered. It’s just the way we talk, I knew she would say. I kept my eyes down, and gently tousled the dough between flourless fingers.
In silence, we lined shallow cardboard boxes with wax paper, and dropped the lagane in. Later, when I got home, I boiled them in water for a minute, then tossed them with chick peas fried in garlic and olive oil. One of my sons liked it; the other didn’t.
In the morning, I awaited the phone call.
The boys loved the lagane, I told Crair. If you had a cell phone, I would text you a picture.
“I’m sorry I was hard on you yesterday.” She was probably thinking about it all night. There was no need. I felt like I should have apologized to her, for recording her, how she speaks, how she cooks; it felt like stealing.
Really, I was the sorry one. I am ignorant of old ways, and feel the need to codify these skills which used to be innate, and a necessity.
“I don’t know how to be,” Crair said. “I get nervous. I try to make jokes, to be mean. To be funny. I want to do it right.”
There is no need to relearn what you already know to please me, I wanted to say. “I just enjoyed being with you,” I said. We didn’t mention the election. We just gossiped for a while about some cousins and then hung up to watch the results of the vote pass slowly before our eyes.
At that time in the Fall of 2020, I still wasn’t thinking about what was happening to my mother, and neither was Crair. My mother died the following June. I think back to visiting her in the hospital right after the seizure, before the diagnosis. She seemed in good health sitting on her hospital bed, in her street clothes, in her half of a curtained-off double hospital room. She seemed healthy and would continue to appear so for another couple of months. But somewhere in my mind, once she entered the hospital, she had already slipped beyond the threshold. And the gap between us began its inevitable widening.
If I don’t remember how to make ceci e lagane on the Day of the Dead, and pull out my phone to record my mother dropping water from a teacup into the dough, and my aunt wielding her druca, then I am standing to the side of the doorway, ushering everything they have ever meant to me to go. I watched them, and I wrote it down. But will I make ceci e lagane next November?
Amazing