Aromatherapy, Italian Style

Copyright 2013 by John LaTorre

I made my "bones" today.

No, I didn't whack anybody at the behest of some Mafia don. Instead, I made a sort of cookie called the "ossi di morte," or the "bones of the dead," which my family used to make every Christmas. "Bones" are small white cookies made of a dough that is rolled out into long strings about a half an inch thick and cut into segments about an inch or two long. 

When they are baked, the little cylinders rupture and the insides spill out, leaving the cookies hollow. 

 

I used to work in a factory in Salinas, California, which had a number of Hispanic workers. I made the bones every Christmas, as I do now, and brought them to work. The Anglos at the shop thought that cookies resembling bones was a bit too macabre for Christmas, but the Latinos were totally down with it, coming from a culture that celebrates the Dia de los Muertos by baking little skull-shaped cakes and cookies.

I think I'm the only one in my family that still makes them on a regular basis anymore. And that's about the only tradition in Italian cooking that I'm still preserving. For instance, I haven't made tomato sauce from scratch in over forty years. It's been years since I've even tasted any. My mother stopped making it when the premium canned tomato sauces like Ragu appeared in supermarket shelves, claiming that it was as good as the stuff she made. That could be true, because my mother was of Irish and English extraction, and learned to make tomato sauce only after being married to my Italian father. So her redaction of the family recipes she was given by her sisters-in-law might have left something to be desired. I'll never know, since all my father's sisters have passed away, and their daughters and sons have probably given up home-made tomato sauce for the store-bought variety, as I have.

It may be just as well. I remember my Aunt Anna cooking tomato sauce from scratch. She was a heavy smoker, and always had a cigarette in her mouth. She would keep up an incessant line of chatter as she stirred the pot, the end of her cigarette bouncing up and down as she muttered, and occasionally the ash would shake loose from its moorings and fall into the pot. Being a child at the time, I took this to be part of the natural course of events and thought nothing of it. The sauce was excellent, but whether this was due to that secret ingredient is something I'll never know.

Which reminds me of another thing: my aunts all spoke Italian before they could speak English, but I seldom heard them speaking that language, except in three instances. The first was, of course, when they when they spoke in the presence of members of our generation, who could speak only a few words of Italian. That usually clued us to the fact that they were speaking about something they didn't want us to know about. What they didn't realize was that, while we couldn't speak the language, we ended up understanding a great deal more than they suspected, so the ruse was not as effective as they thought it was.

The second instance was in those infrequent times when they swore. These were all God-fearing ladies, and curse words seldom escaped their lips. But when the hot fat spattered them or they dropped a dish onto the floor or my cousins and I had finally pushed them to the breaking point by our shenanigans, they would swear, and they would usually swear in Italian. Maybe it was because profanity was much more expressive in Italian than in English, and more capable of conveying the distress of the heart. Or maybe it was because God Himself was thought to be Italian, and the theory was that He would be more sympathetic to profanity expressed in His native language, in the hopes He would give a fellow paisano a break. We knew that God was Italian, of course, because the Popes were always Italian back in those times.

The third instance was when they were talking about food and cooking. I would overhear two of my aunts talking in the kitchen. They'd start in English, mainly, with something like: "Do you remember how Mama used to make the cannoli? I think she used ..." and when listing the ingredients, the language would slide into Italian, using the terms my grandmother herself used. By the time they were talking about the actual cooking process, they'd be speaking almost entirely in Italian, that being the proper language for speaking of the culinary arts, just as French would be the proper language for ballet, or Hebrew would be the proper language of the synagogue.

I don't know if anybody has commented on this before, but I believe that the Italians invented aromatherapy. If there was any great distress in the house, like a death, or a sickness, or the prospect that any family member might end up marrying a non-Italian, the proper thing to do was to fry up some onions or Italian sausage and perhaps bake some bread. The house would be filled with wonderful aromas, and somehow things didn't seem as dire as they did before. Modern realty agents know this, of course, and make sure that the house they're selling has the aroma of baked bread or even vanilla (which they would paint on the light bulbs so as to release the fragrance when the bulb was turned on). In this way, they would subconsciously telegraph the fact that if you bought this house, somehow everything would turn out just fine.

(I suppose I should add that I was not a witness to the distress caused by my Italian father marrying my Irish/English mother, because I wasn't born at the time. But I was given the story later on. My father's marriage opened the floodgates, though, and by the time my own generation got around to picking spouses, they were non-Italian as often as not. We even started marrying outside our religion, triggering another round of distress in our elders. But my grandmother was very old by then, and probably beyond caring.)

To get back to the subject of cooking, most of my cousins are still quite capable of cooking up a storm when the occasion arises. They've probably preserved many of their parents' recipes, but I don't know if the cuisine plays as large a part of their lives as it did in my childhood, where events like Thanksgiving dinner would routinely pack up to thirty people into a small tract house, with tables set up everywhere there was room. To be sure, there was the traditional turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and such, but these dishes would be supplemented by the lasagna and pasta and Italian breads and cannoli and Uncle Santo's home-made red wine and other fare that would have been unthinkable to omit from any respectable family gathering. In the modern age of smaller families, now dispersed throughout the country instead of concentrated in a Central New York city, I doubt if we'll ever see such a congregation again. We can only keep the tradition alive in small, personal ways, as best we can.

I, for example, made my bones today.

(Followup note: I am happy to report that since reading this, my cousins have informed me that tomato sauce is still made from scratch in their households. And I am told that the tomato sauce's secret ingredient was not tobacco but pork.)