©
2014 by John LaTorre
It
is December, and as usual I am making “Ossi di Morte.” These
little bone-shaped cookies come from southern Italy. Sources on the
Internet inform me that they are traditionally made for the “Day of
the Dead” in November, but my family has always regarded them as
Christmas cookies, and I have followed suit.
They
are not the easiest cookies to make. It's not the ingredients, which
are simplicity itself: flour, eggs, confectioner's sugar, and baking
powder. (Several recipes call for using just egg whites, and adding
almonds, almond extract, or vanilla, but mine doesn't). The only
thing I add to the family recipe is a teaspoon or two of water, which
makes the dough easier to handle.
For
this is where the difficulty comes in: to make them in the
traditional way, you take a small handful of the dough, squeeze it
into the approximate shape and size of a hot dog, and roll it out on
an unfloured board, using only light pressure from the flat of your
hand. Push too hard, and the roll crumbles. My Aunt Molly Guido, who
taught me how to make these cookies, stressed this. “It's like
petting a kitten,” she would say. “Light touch! Light touch!”
Gradually, I got the hang of it.
Molly's
name wasn't always Molly. When she was born, in 1914, she was
christened Carmela LaTorre, after her mother's sister. She was the
fourth child born to her parents, who had moved the family from Italy
three years before. She had three older sisters, two born in Italy
and one in the United States. Two boys and another girl would
complete the family before the decade was out.
When
the children entered school, they didn't know English. Perhaps to
help with their assimilation into American culture, some were given
non-Italian nicknames. Porzia became “Grace,” Carmela became
“Molly,” Giuseppe became “Joe” and Vincenzo became,
inexplicably, “Jimmy” (creating so much confusion in later years
that he had it legally changed to “James”). Joe was my dad. None
of the documents I'd ever seen ever referred to him as “Giuseppe,”
only as “Joseph,” so perhaps that was his legal name from birth,
but he was always called Giuseppe until he entered school. Only my
aunts Anna, Antonia, and Angelina used the names they were given
at birth, although the latter two preferred “Tony” or "Antoinette" and “Angie.”
I
can picture Molly with her sisters, watching their mother make the
“bones.” They would have talked in Italian – or more
specifically, Barese, a dialect so different that my father had
trouble speaking conventional Italian when he visited that country,
although the farther south he traveled, the more familiar the
language became. As I roll the dough down from the diameter of a hot
dog to that of a Sharpie, I am wondering what my grandmother used
for a metric, since she probably had never seen a Sharpie in her
life. A finger's thickness? Which finger? Whose finger? It is too
late to ask Molly, since she died years ago.
I
roll the dough, I roll the dough.
As
I form the dough, I am thinking about my ancestors. My brother Joe
has just sent me a CD with hundreds of pictures on it, all from my
late father's photograph albums. Some of the faces are familiar to
me, although they look impossibly young. There are many pictures of
my grandfather, and I recognize him instantly, although I have no
direct memory of him, since he died the year after I was born. But
all his children bear some resemblance to him. He is usually shown
seated. And there are many of my grandmother, in various stages of
her life, gardening and talking and holding grandchildren.
Other faces are strangers to me. Their pictures date from the turn of the last century, and they glare out at the camera as if it would bite them. I wish I knew who they were. I'm afraid that their identities will be forever lost, since my father seldom took the time to caption the pictures he kept. Most of these pictures are cracked and faded. For that matter, most of the memories I have of my relatives are also cracked and faded, and some of them, like the smells of our family's summer house on Otisco Lake and the feel of my mother's winter coat, are lost forever. My memories are now inaccurate and can no longer be trusted for veracity. I have idealized my past.
Out
of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of our black cat Sable darting
out of the room. Sable died three years ago. There are many ghosts
walking tonight.
I
roll the dough, I roll the dough.
I
agonize whether to add a little more water to the batch. “Never add
water,” Molly would say. “It makes the dough sticky.” Well, yes
it does, but it also facilitates the shaping of the dough into a
cylinder of ever diminishing thickness. I compromise by wetting my
hands and then wiping them dry, hoping that the residual moisture
will suffice to make the dough tractable. This is not the traditional
way. There are all sorts of traditions wrapped up in the making of
these cookies: beat the eggs for five minutes, let the cookies sit
overnight for twelve hours (some recipes say twenty-four) before
putting them in the oven, don't add water, bake at 325 degrees. What
would happen if I beat the eggs for six minutes, and let the cookies
sit out only eight hours, and baked them at 350? I don't know; I've
never tried it. If I did, the magic might not work. Magic and
tradition go hand in hand with this sort of things, commingled so
tightly that they are impossible to separate.
I
think all traditions are like that, at heart. As I work, my mind
drifts to Christmas eves of past years, of midnight Masses in cold
churches, of the Christmas music my parents played on their hi-fi or
stereo. I am listening to some of that music right now. My father
transferred most of his old Christmas records onto cassette tape, and
my brother has transferred those tapes to CD. So I am listening not
only to the music but to all the artifacts of that process: the pops
of the record, the hiss of the tape, the unsteady “wow” of worn
record changers and tape drives. If I listened to clean copies of
those recordings, would they evoke the same nostalgia that I feel
when I hear the flawed ones? Or would the magic not be there?
I
roll the dough, I roll the dough.
On
the CD my brother sent me, there are many pictures of my father as a
vigorous young man, working in the camps of the Civilian Conservation
Corps or sailing a canoe on the lakes around Syracuse. And there are
pictures of my mother as a young woman, very glamorous. I see them on
their wedding day, and in the first house they lived in as a couple.
There are other photos of various aunts, uncles, and cousins on their
wedding days. My brother's two weddings are pictured, but not mine.
There are no pictures of my first wife at all. There are a few
pictures of my present wife when she first visited Syracuse and New
Port Richey in the mid-1990s, before we married. She had a chance to
meet most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father's side. Now
all those aunts and uncles have passed away, along with my father and
mother.
Many
of my older cousins have also passed away now, and I find to my
surprise that my cousins and my siblings and I have become the
patriarchs and matriarchs of the family. I will mail a package of
cookies to those who were closest to my father, to thank them for
giving him so much support after he'd had his stroke. In a way, they
were better children to him than I was, because they were closer,
whereas I had to close my business down and travel the length of a
continent to spend time with him for a week or two every season. It
was they, not I, who saw to most of his daily needs, and for that I
am grateful.
Finally
the cookies are all formed and on the sheets, a hundred and twenty of
them, waiting to stale for the requisite twelve hours. It has taken
me three hours to get it all done, including the wash-up of the
bowls. Every year, I think that this might be the last year I do
this. It's a lot of trouble, after all. But it's still the best way I
have for connecting to my family, and to my past, and to the ghosts
who have gone on before. I am painfully aware now, as I never was
when I was younger, that soon I will be part of that past; my own
images and writings and perhaps a few guitars and mandolins will be
all that survive me. My presence, like my family pictures, will crack
and fade. Children unborn will look at those pictures and wonder who
I might have been. I'm still trying to find that out myself. And
that's a good thing, because it means that the journey isn't over
yet.
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