An Epiphany

We three queens learn some lessons about holiday baking.

It’s Epiphany, Three Kings Day, Twelfth Night, the day that the partridge finally flees the pear tree and we take down our Christmas decorations. But winter is still long and dark, and I may leave them up until Groundhog Day, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, or the day the tree becomes a real fire hazard, whenever that may be.

Look at my Christmas decorations and say wow

Christmas always seems to come and go in a bluster, filled with intentions to stop and appreciate the season, watch holiday movies, and bake cookies, little of which seems to happen as daily midlife chugs on, and I just manage to enjoy the neighborhood Christmas lights out of the corner of my eye as I drive to the supermarket.

Struffoli and scaliddi, Neapolitan deep-fried dough covered in honey, were always a part of my Italian family Christmas growing up. In 2019, I received a lesson in scaliddi taught by three queens: my aunt Crair, my mother, and my aunt Carmela (read about it at the link). And not since that day have I made them, or even eaten them.

There are many reasons: since my mother and aunt Crair have died, it hasn’t been the same without them. Then there is my scattered mind at Christmas, now that I have taken on that maternal role of hearthkeeping, (ie, the mandatory decorating and cleaning and shopping and wrapping and cooking and planning without which holidays don’t happen). And, of course, there’s the mess.

Three Queens in Crair's kitchen, Lynbrook NY, December 2019.

But this year, at my sister Crissy’s house in Brooklyn after Christmas, with left nothing to do but be Christmassy, my niece Julia and I made struffoli.

Based on our performance, the tradition remains elusive. Lessons were learned.

We chose struffoli, marble-sized balls of dough, rather than scaliddi, which are strange, large, and twisted, for ease. We went back to what I learned from Crair, which like many recipes passed down from elder women, is only a shadow of a recipe, a suggestion, an observed instinct.

It pains me that my own instinct was to look on the internet for a struffoli recipe, but I needed to confirm what I already knew with the holy algorithm.

But whose recipe to trust? Which of the Italian food blogs that popped up had the least cringey - or as the Calabrese would say - caccata - name? An Italian in my Kitchen? The Slow Roasted Italian? Giada from the Food Network? Ugh no.

Nonna Box?

The Pioneer Woman???!!

As Julia and I cast about for the right recipe and started piling ingredients on the kitchen counter, the glare from her father, my brother-in-law, was becoming harder to ignore. It was occurring to him that we were planning to deep fry stuff in his spotless kitchen.

I looked over at Julia. “Baked struffoli are a thing,” I said. They’re not, she replied.

But Google provides. Yankee (!) magazine published a recipe in 2008 called “Baked Honey Balls (Italian Struffoli)” cribbed from a place called the Snowvillage Inn in North Conway, New Hampshire. The recipe was plainly written, without all the frills and florid nonsense of the Pioneer Woman. I could feel the kinship between the scoured Yankee woman and the dour Calabrese grandmother, both with hair scraped back and aprons tight, so I decided to trust newengland.com.

What we ended up with was a mish-mash of online recipes guided by what we remembered learning by hand. And some creative embellishments that I regret.

First, we made a dough that my dog Zelda carefully supervised. I thought it would be nice with orange zest, which is not canon.

We used butter, as Crair did, and added baking powder too, although some internet experts disagreed. Everybody’s nonna has something to say about the recipe, but it all comes down to the same thing: a basic dough of flour, butter, eggs, salt, and sugar. It used to be lard or olive oil back in Italy before butter became widespread in the South, and the recipe hewed closely to an ancient recipe for fried dough in honey recorded in sources dating back to Ancient Greece and its colonies, like Naples, in Italy.

The dough had to rest, so we took Zelda for a walk through Boerum Hill. It was two days after Christmas: a no-man’s land.

Note the unsold panettone in the shop window

Then home to finish the job. We rolled the dough out into balls, careful not to make them look too perfect.

As does dough, Zelda must rest.

January 6 in Italy is, as we all know, the day that La Befana, the Christmas Witch, comes to visit children and leave treats in their stockings - or coal, depending. Today I asked my aunt Carmela if La Befana came for her and my mother when they were little, and still living in Mongrassano.

“No,” she said. “Does that answer your question?” Our grandmother, she told me, wasn’t big into celebrating. She was always depressed in the winter, or there wasn’t money, or she couldn’t see the point of it.

“There might have been an orange, that was a big deal in Italy,” Carmela remembered, after thinking about it a bit. “Or a walnut.” When they came to Long Island, La Befana stayed behind. Struffoli and scaliddi, it turns out, came along, and is the only remnant, really, besides a Christmas meal, of the old way of celebrating.

As Carmela and my mother grew up, they would make their own Christmas. “We would go to Woolworth’s and get each other whatever little presents we could get for a dollar, or whatever we had,” she told me. And from that time, until not so long ago, they, hearthkeepers, made Christmas for each other, and then for all of us. As so my sisters, cousins, and I celebrated Christmas with Santa and brightly-lit trees, wrapping paper and Barbie dolls, and those cookie squirt gun things that were so popular in the 80s.

“Spritz cookies,” Carmela said. I should make those too.

Time to bake: Yankee, in retrospect, set the oven too low, and Julia, which I told her at the time, took them out too soon. J’accuse!

They’ll dry out, she said. Or, I said, they could get crispy, which they were not. What we got were little, round, orange-flavored cookies, which were very nice, but also not very struffoli-like. We let them cool a bit and started the honey mixture. It had to be more complicated than just pouring honey on them from a jar, otherwise what are we doing?

We need a lot of honey, I said (Thanks, Trader Joe’s) and we need to add sugar to it, and heat it on the stove, just like Crair did, even though it seems nuts. Then I had the bright, Yankee-esque idea to squeeze the orange we had zested into the honey, for waste not want not. It made for a sickly concoction. To fix it I kept adding honey and it just got worse. And then there was way too much.

I put the balls in the simmering honey to…I don’t know do something. Then we set them on a plate. Decoration time! Can’t mess that up! Rainbow sprinkles are traditional (on struffoli only - not on scaliddi) but the maraschino cherries were another one of my brilliant - and pointless - ideas.

Zelda is not impressed.

Usually by today, January 6, I would still be eating struffoli and scaliddi, wresting them from an enormous tin and out of a mire of Costco honey they could sleep in til spring and still be crunchy and good. But I have none today. I left the struffoli at Julia’s and I didn’t ask anyone, but I doubt they got eaten.

That’s all right. It’s a new year. We leave some things in the past; we embrace what’s new. Recipes and family traditions are living things. Next year, we’ll ask Chat GPT to help us perfect what we three queens - Julia, me, and Zelda - already know. Which is to fry them.

If you are interested in joining me and my friend, best-selling author Lauren Grodstein, in Paris this summer for a one week immersion into writing and publishing, please send me a note or check out pariswriters.com. I’d love to see you there!