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by Allison Scola

Packaged in a delicate glass bottle with a long, thin neck and cork seal, a bottle of colatura resembles an alchemist’s ancient potion or my grandmother’s favorite perfume. It is an amber colored liquid with the consistency of soy sauce, and crudely explained to be “salted anchovy sauce” or “anchovy syrup.”

I heard whispers of colatura from various cooks, but because it can only be found in specialty Italian food stores, I hadn’t tasted it or cooked with it until this week. Food historians trace its origins to an ancient Greek and Roman condiment known as garum—giving colatura even more mystique. When my order arrived from Gustiamo.com, I sat with the bottle for some time. I turned it upside down to examine how the liquid flowed. I held it up to the light to see the spectrum of colors. I knew it was something special—something to be coveted—but I wasn’t sure what I would encounter.

Finally, I unsealed the packaging, a difficult task that reminded me of when I was a child attempting to open medicine from my parent’s cabinet. When I eventually cut through the seal and unplugged the cork, I was shocked by the pungent smell that rushed out of the bottle like the smoke of a trapped genie rushing from his lamp. On first impression, it could be described as the type of odor one encounters while walking past open fish markets on Grand Street in China Town.

Colatura has a sharp, brinish smell. The initial sensation is unambiguously fishy anchovies, but when used in small doses as it is meant to be, it transports you to the picturesque fishing village on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy from where colatura comes. Its essence is smoky, oak-aged, and sea-salty with a hint of espresso.

I made a light pasta sauce with colatura by mixing it with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, lemon rind, minced garlic, red pepper flakes, extra virgin olive oil, and freshly chopped parsley: a cold sauce, perfect for a hot summer day. Southern Italians add it to vegetable dishes that feature escarole, potatoes, broccoli, and cauliflower.

The taste of colatura is derived from the careful, strategic process that is employed to create it. Plump, Mediterranean anchovies caught during the peak season of March through August are rinsed and cleaned of their insides and heads. Their bodies are then placed in rows inside an oak or chestnut barrel about the size of an antique water pail. Each layer of the silver bodies is sprinkled with sea salt and then layered with another series of anchovies. Once the barrel is two-thirds full of the anchovy-salt strata, the mixture is covered with a wooden disk and a heavy stone is placed on top of it in order to create pressure that prompts the barrel’s contents to ripen. After six months, during which a liquid that rises to the top of the barrel is periodically removed, the final stage of production is to pour the collected liquid back into the barrel. The purveyors then drill a small hole at the base of the barrel prompting the collected liquid to travel through the strata and finally, drip through the hole. Collected in glass containers, this liquid is then filtered through gossamer linen sheets and ultimately bottled for distribution.

Like a fine wine that has been aged and cared for in order to capture the essence of the earth, sky, and seasons where the varietal’s grapes grow, colatura captures the tastes and smells of Cetara, Salerno, the sunny, Mediterranean fishing village where it is created. It is an ancient potion with rewards for those who aren’t afraid to let the genie out of the bottle.

Allison Scola is Director of Communications at Columbia University School of General Studies and a professional musician with a great passion for Italian, Sicilian, and Italian American culture.

Photo courtesy of Suzanne Parker
Photo courtesy of Suzanne Parker

Ombreglio di Brancoli

by Suzanne Parker

So I have traveled to a place where I can’t speak the language though it is not an unusual language—Italian—but it is not my language and so feels like darkness in a hotel room. I am in a house on a high hillside, part of the foothills of the Appenine Mountains. It is very beautiful and the bees like a fleet of tiny genies are busy above the cracked surface of the meager lawn so there is a constant, shifting hum and an occasional bee will detour into the house and set up a hive. I have a study on the second floor with a view of two hills riding up to the left and right and I am wedged between them like a secret. Closer to home are the bright orange flowers of a persimmon tree so vivid with flame they demand painting—a talent I want but lack. And there is the smell—everywhere and flowing like a river through the open window—of honeysuckle, making all a kind of sweetness and even the spiked artichoke plant growing untended in the barren yard next door seems bathed in nectar, and if we picked and wallowed the overshot chokes in water, they would sigh and open in the night. And the food is the strong flavor of eggplant, eaten from the dish we baked it in last night, each slice dragged through flour and cast into good olive oil to fry then returned to the dish and layered with the fresh mozzarella that sweated a white water on the wood chopping block. And the coffee from the press—so strong I first fill half of the cup with hot milk so the coffee swells into it. All this is a morning and fills the time—eating, sipping, sitting on the terrace before the view, and then finally making it upstairs to the study and more view and sitting at the desk until the back is hurting and it is time to go downstairs and eat another mouthful of the eggplant and pour out a glass of mineral water and it is time for touching and distraction but mustn’t so back up to work and the worry that there is no use to this, no good in it, and why not simply sit and listen to the swallows who are so industrious in their looping and clearly have more already accomplished than I do, particularly one who has taken to sitting on the wire outside the window and expelling a startling array of squeaks and gurgles at such a rapid pace it’s as if there’s been an enemy landing— my presence at the window—and he’s in charge of the Morse Code, rapidly and expertly fired off and then he finishes with something impossible and operatic and pauses, head titled aloft, then busies his beak in his hind feathers and begins cleaning. Even the lizard, busily baking against the stone wall and heating his core for nightfall, is engaged. But, no, this is not that kind of bitterness, not with the air suggesting sex, not with an afternoon like a narcotic, and after the inner battling and the fingers that need cracking from lack of use, there is the realization, truly, in the bones and flesh, the understanding of why all the shops close for lunch, why all the world disappears behind shut doors and does not work nor sell things nor attempt to move on in life but instead pulls the shutters over and does what is meant to be done from 1-4pm. And it is not worry the Italian feels, leaving the house to re-open his business, of having lost a few possible Euro, it is the fact of his full stomach and the satisfied hour comparing Pavarotti singing the act II aria in Don Sebastiano at Milano’s opera to the small performance he gave in Modena to mark the anniversary of his birth town, and, though a bootleg recording, he is sure the Modena’s is the better. It is clear in the feeling in the lower registers and in that penultimate note, the way it lingers, without effort, just there, as if the listener is invited to reach out and pluck it from the air, heavy like a plum ready for his lips. What the man knows without being told or having to learn, as he raises his store’s shutters and tells the few people waiting it’ll be a while longer, is that this is the purpose of time in Italy; that it is not to be spent but held in the mouth and eaten.


Suzanne Parker is a winner of the Kinereth Gensler Book Award from Alice James Books.  Her poetry collection, Viral, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was included on the American Library Association’s Rainbow List of Recommended Books of 2013.  Her poetry has appeared in “Barrow Street,” “Cimarron Review,” “Hunger Mountain,” “Drunken Boat,” and other journals.  She is a winner of the Alice M. Sellars Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a Poetry Fellow at the Prague Summer Seminars. Suzanne’s creative non-fiction is published in the anthology “Something to Declare.” Suzanne is the managing editor at “MEAD: A Magazine of Literature and Libations.”

Photo courtesy of the author.

Summer 2009 Italy 667

Tasting

by Suzanne Parker

We were going to try the wines of Chianti. To do this, we had rented a car and driven up some very long roads on very steep cliffs that surprised us as we had thought that all of Tuscany was as unobstructed and undulating as the postcard image we carried in our heads across the Atlantic and into the rental office and onto the highway we could not exit because Italians seem to like expressing from one side of their country to the next. It had all started with a map and a thought that an obligation—to taste, to buy, to become the figures beside the emblematic tree—must be fulfilled, so we had driven from one vineyard to the next. Many were closed or locked behind ornate iron gates with a family crest like a wine label impressed upon them. We passed one, talking ourselves out of going in, then two, and on a third stiffly u-turned out of the long driveway, sure that cameras watched us and guards laughed. What were we afraid of? Being made fools, possibly, slurping from our tasting glasses, secretly whispering that we thought the cheap stuff best. There seems to be nothing as imposing as knowledge to which you don’t have access—a classic, a Tolstoy or Dickens, assigned in school but, instead, you went sledding and then ate ten Oreos dunked in milk, crumbs scattering the sheets and smashed between the pages of the book used as a plate then kicked to the floor as the dog hauled himself up and curled against you in sleep. Or simply, we were feeling yet again our American natures. So often I cram what is in front of me, swallowing because the time is passing, another forkful already in transit, and because there will always be more, because I am American, and there will be an endless supply of takeout containers. Knowing this, I consume with more force than passion, with speed too impatient for the subtleties to be deciphered with the nose or eye. Having finally chosen a vineyard based upon the hour and threat of everyone closing, we found ourselves lifting our glasses with a Sicilian couple on vacation as we listened to color gradations and though—red. Swirling the we’re-waiting-for-the-cue mouthful in its big bellied orb, I hoped for a genie to rise and announce—clove, vanilla, a back hoe of oak. It was all lovely and polite and formal even though we found the wines shallow, fast disappearing, which we thought for their cost was a bit unfair. Instead, we bought olive oil, a grassy, green magic that in winter we would open and it would be summer again and the long drive through stepped terraces to the winery and how we stopped on the way out to pet a huge white dog sprawled in the middle of the driveway and then returned to the road and another steep climb to more vineyards we no longer wanted to enter. Once, we had been ignorant and faked it, we thought, convincingly. Twice, might be a mistake, so we decided on dinner in Greve and the owner-tested wine list, and it was lovely sipping our litre beneath the lights and waiting for a food that would return us to confident people who knew the chingale, the boar stew, is delicious and tender and only a fool refuses to order it in this part of Chianti.


 

Suzanne Parker is a winner of the Kinereth Gensler Book Award from Alice James Books.  Her poetry collection, Viral, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was included on the American Library Association’s Rainbow List of Recommended Books of 2013.  Her poetry has appeared in “Barrow Street,” “Cimarron Review,” “Hunger Mountain,” “Drunken Boat,” and other journals.  She is a winner of the Alice M. Sellars Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a Poetry Fellow at the Prague Summer Seminars. Suzanne’s creative non-fiction is published in the anthology “Something to Declare.” Suzanne is the managing editor at “MEAD: A Magazine of Literature and Libations.”

Photo courtesy of the author.

[La Festa di San Giuseppe – March 19]

by Allison Scola

At this time of year, New Yorkers are starting to see a lot of green in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day. Yet in Sicily and southern Italy during these last days of winter, Sicilians and Italians are wearing a lot of red in honor of La Festa di San Giuseppe, or Saint Joseph’s Day, a Christian holiday that is celebrated annually on March 19.

Saint Joseph was the spouse of the Virgin Mary and the guardian-father of Jesus Christ. A carpenter by trade, he is regarded as the protector of all men who earn their livings through laborious work. He is also the patron saint of fathers. (March 19 is also Father’s Day in Italy.) Legend is that in Sicily and southern Italy during the 10th century, a drought caused a severe famine. The faithful prayed to Saint Joseph to bring rain, and in return, they promised to hold a feast in his honor. Rain and recovery from hunger did come, and since then, Saint Joseph has been one of the most venerated saints south of Rome.

It is no mistake that Saint Joseph’s Day coincides with the spring equinox and pre-Christian rituals that were celebrated to mark the end of winter. In the Northern Hemisphere, March marks a period of scarcity, when stored supplies are dwindling yet there are still some months before the Earth will yield a new crop. The festivities of Saint Joseph’s Day are linked to the land, vegetation, and the animal kingdom. It is a feast of thanksgiving for having survived through the winter months and a request for abundance in the spring and summer seasons ahead.

In Sicily and southern Italy, Saint Joseph’s Day is a communal holiday, and in many communities, especially small villages such as Salemi near Trapani, Valguarnera Caropepe near Enna, and Giurdignano near Lecce, starting days before the feast, they perform a series of rituals. For example, on the night of March 18, it is customary to light purifying bonfires where the faithful burn old and broken possessions they don’t want to carry into the new agricultural year. Most common on March 18 and 19, men of observing communities process a statue of Saint Joseph through village streets accompanied by the local marching band and needy children who are dressed up as angels and the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

The most notable and distinct ritual of Saint Joseph’s Day however, is the prepared altars or tables, known as le tavolate di San Giuseppe (or a Tavulatu di San Giuseppe in Sicilian). Customarily built by women as a prayer of thanks for the mercy and generosity the Saint has granted to their families and friends, the altars are an exhibition of abundance and a dialogue with God. They are a grand display of local specialties and sweets surrounded by citrus fruits, vegetables, wine, candles, pictures of the Saint and deceased loved ones, and plant elements such as nuts, seeds, beans, flowers, and laurel leaves. Most prominent, though, are the sculpted loaves of bread that represent fertility and prosperity.

Saint Joseph’s Day is primarily a celebration of bread, which in Sicily and southern Italy is sacred because wheat is the most important crop of the region. Bread-making is a devotional act that represents the presence of God and spiritual nourishment. It combines the fundamental elements of nature: earth, air, water, and fire. And Saint Joseph’s Day bread, most of which is not meant to be eaten, is artistically shaped as an act of prayer into wreaths, lilies, daisies, fava beans in their pods, fish, butterflies, doves, chalices, hearts, hands, and carpentry tools such as ladders, hammers, and pliers, and importantly, symbols of fatherhood, such as beards and flowering staffs.

The devotional tables are traditionally dressed with white clothes and branches of myrtle and laurel, which are agrarian symbols of good fortune. The tables are built with three tiers, recalling the holy trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They also don baskets in which the faithful place their prayer petitions for the year ahead.

After days, and sometimes weeks of preparation which often comes at a great monetary expense to the creator, a priest will come to the home or piazza where the altar was built in order to bless it. It is traditional to make as much food as one can afford with the aim of giving most of it away to the community—and specifically, to hungry and poor children of the village.

An essential element of the feast day’s activities is the tupa, tupa, or knock, knock ceremony. In a symbolic reenactment of Joseph seeking accommodation for his family the night of the birth of Christ, children dressed as the Holy Family knock on three homes’ doors—again recalling the holy number three. The first and second knocks are ceremoniously ignored or answered with, “There is no room for you here.” The knock on the third door is positively answered, and the three saints are joyfully invited to enjoy the bounty of the table.

The children, dressed as Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, are served a portion of all of the dishes prepared. Because the feast is during lent, the main dishes are meatless. Most Sicilian tables will include macco, a dried fava bean puree.  Fava beans are recognized as having saved the population from hunger back in the 10th century because they were the one crop that thrived during the noted severe drought. Macco is eaten as a mash, spread on bread or as a soup, with or without pasta. Other dishes are made with wild fennel, artichokes, cauliflower, asparagus, or chickpeas. Most recipes include breadcrumbs, recalling the sawdust of Saint Joseph’s carpentry craft.

The highlight of the Saint Joseph’s Day feast however, is the sweet sfince di San GiuseppeSfinci are fried cream puffs served hot with a dusting of cinnamon, confectioner’s sugar, and honey or cold and open-faced with a smear of ricotta cream and decorated with candied orange. Depending on the town, sfinci may have a different appearance and different ingredients. In Naples, for example, they even have a different name: zeppoli. In Rome, they are called Bignè di San Giuseppe.

Once the saints have quietly and earnestly eaten, the hosting family and all their guests are invited to join the meal which is a communal and lively gathering of several families and a grand celebration of food.

Some historians believe that Saint Joseph is the Christianized representation of the ancient Greek and Roman mystery-cult figure Liber-Dionysus-Bacchus whose ancient, annual public rites were celebrated on March 17. Liber-Dionysus-Bacchus was the god of fertility, male virility, vegetation, ecstasy, and wine, hence his association with spring’s awakening and the beginning of a new agricultural cycle. Imagery of him includes a staff decorated with flowering vegetation—similar to popular images of Saint Joseph and the shape of many of the loaves of bread found on Saint Joseph’s feast day’s tables. Whatever the origins of Saint Joseph’s Day, the ritualistic activities used to celebrate it are a beautiful request for future abundance and wealth and a wonderful expression of thanksgiving and charity.

Main Sources
– Mariella Barbera and Irene Cavarretta, Architettura dei pani di Salemi. (Bagheria: Eugenio Maria Falcone Editore, 2012).
– Salvatore Farina, Sweet Sensations of Sicily. (Caltanissetta: Lussografica, 2009).
– Fabrizia Lanza, Coming Home to Sicily. (New York: Sterling Epicure, 2012).
– Pamela K. Quaggiotto, Altars of Food to Saint Joseph: Women’s Ritual in Sicily. (Columbia University, NY: Pamela K. Quaggiotto Ph.D. Thesis, 1988).

Click  here to see an example of a St. Joseph’s Day altar.

 

Allison Scola is an independent scholar and professional musician and the owner and curator of Experience Sicily, an education and tourism company.

Click here to read more of Allison’s work on TIE: I Cannoli: Nothing Better in the World, and Genie in a Bottle: Colatura tradizionale di alci di Centara

 

[La Festa di San Giuseppe – March 19]

by Allison Scola

At this time of year, New Yorkers are starting to see a lot of green in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day. Yet in Sicily and southern Italy during these last days of winter, Sicilians and Italians are wearing a lot of red in honor of La Festa di San Giuseppe, or Saint Joseph’s Day, a Christian holiday that is celebrated annually on March 19.

Saint Joseph was the spouse of the Virgin Mary and the guardian-father of Jesus Christ. A carpenter by trade, he is regarded as the protector of all men who earn their livings through laborious work. He is also the patron saint of fathers. (March 19 is also Father’s Day in Italy.) Legend is that in Sicily and southern Italy during the 10th century, a drought caused a severe famine. The faithful prayed to Saint Joseph to bring rain, and in return, they promised to hold a feast in his honor. Rain and recovery from hunger did come, and since then, Saint Joseph has been one of the most venerated saints south of Rome.

It is no mistake that Saint Joseph’s Day coincides with the spring equinox and pre-Christian rituals that were celebrated to mark the end of winter. In the Northern Hemisphere, March marks a period of scarcity, when stored supplies are dwindling yet there are still some months before the Earth will yield a new crop. The festivities of Saint Joseph’s Day are linked to the land, vegetation, and the animal kingdom. It is a feast of thanksgiving for having survived through the winter months and a request for abundance in the spring and summer seasons ahead.

In Sicily and southern Italy, Saint Joseph’s Day is a communal holiday, and in many communities, especially small villages such as Salemi near Trapani, Valguarnera Caropepe near Enna, and Giurdignano near Lecce, starting days before the feast, they perform a series of rituals. For example, on the night of March 18, it is customary to light purifying bonfires where the faithful burn old and broken possessions they don’t want to carry into the new agricultural year. Most common on March 18 and 19, men of observing communities process a statue of Saint Joseph through village streets accompanied by the local marching band and needy children who are dressed up as angels and the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

The most notable and distinct ritual of Saint Joseph’s Day however, is the prepared altars or tables, known as le tavolate di San Giuseppe (or a Tavulatu di San Giuseppe in Sicilian). Customarily built by women as a prayer of thanks for the mercy and generosity the Saint has granted to their families and friends, the altars are an exhibition of abundance and a dialogue with God. They are a grand display of local specialties and sweets surrounded by citrus fruits, vegetables, wine, candles, pictures of the Saint and deceased loved ones, and plant elements such as nuts, seeds, beans, flowers, and laurel leaves. Most prominent, though, are the sculpted loaves of bread that represent fertility and prosperity.

Saint Joseph’s Day is primarily a celebration of bread, which in Sicily and southern Italy is sacred because wheat is the most important crop of the region. Bread-making is a devotional act that represents the presence of God and spiritual nourishment. It combines the fundamental elements of nature: earth, air, water, and fire. And Saint Joseph’s Day bread, most of which is not meant to be eaten, is artistically shaped as an act of prayer into wreaths, lilies, daisies, fava beans in their pods, fish, butterflies, doves, chalices, hearts, hands, and carpentry tools such as ladders, hammers, and pliers, and importantly, symbols of fatherhood, such as beards and flowering staffs.

The devotional tables are traditionally dressed with white clothes and branches of myrtle and laurel, which are agrarian symbols of good fortune. The tables are built with three tiers, recalling the holy trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They also don baskets in which the faithful place their prayer petitions for the year ahead.

After days, and sometimes weeks of preparation which often comes at a great monetary expense to the creator, a priest will come to the home or piazza where the altar was built in order to bless it. It is traditional to make as much food as one can afford with the aim of giving most of it away to the community—and specifically, to hungry and poor children of the village.

An essential element of the feast day’s activities is the tupa, tupa, or knock, knock ceremony. In a symbolic reenactment of Joseph seeking accommodation for his family the night of the birth of Christ, children dressed as the Holy Family knock on three homes’ doors—again recalling the holy number three. The first and second knocks are ceremoniously ignored or answered with, “There is no room for you here.” The knock on the third door is positively answered, and the three saints are joyfully invited to enjoy the bounty of the table.

The children, dressed as Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, are served a portion of all of the dishes prepared. Because the feast is during lent, the main dishes are meatless. Most Sicilian tables will include macco, a dried fava bean puree.  Fava beans are recognized as having saved the population from hunger back in the 10th century because they were the one crop that thrived during the noted severe drought. Macco is eaten as a mash, spread on bread or as a soup, with or without pasta. Other dishes are made with wild fennel, artichokes, cauliflower, asparagus, or chickpeas. Most recipes include breadcrumbs, recalling the sawdust of Saint Joseph’s carpentry craft.

The highlight of the Saint Joseph’s Day feast however, is the sweet sfince di San Giuseppe. Sfinci are fried cream puffs served hot with a dusting of cinnamon, confectioner’s sugar, and honey or cold and open-faced with a smear of ricotta cream and decorated with candied orange. Depending on the town, sfinci may have a different appearance and different ingredients. In Naples, for example, they even have a different name: zeppoli. In Rome, they are called Bignè di San Giuseppe.

Once the saints have quietly and earnestly eaten, the hosting family and all their guests are invited to join the meal which is a communal and lively gathering of several families and a grand celebration of food.

Some historians believe that Saint Joseph is the Christianized representation of the ancient Greek and Roman mystery-cult figure Liber-Dionysus-Bacchus whose ancient, annual public rites were celebrated on March 17. Liber-Dionysus-Bacchus was the god of fertility, male virility, vegetation, ecstasy, and wine, hence his association with spring’s awakening and the beginning of a new agricultural cycle. Imagery of him includes a staff decorated with flowering vegetation—similar to popular images of Saint Joseph and the shape of many of the loaves of bread found on Saint Joseph’s feast day’s tables. Whatever the origins of Saint Joseph’s Day, the ritualistic activities used to celebrate it are a beautiful request for future abundance and wealth and a wonderful expression of thanksgiving and charity.

Main Sources
– Mariella Barbera and Irene Cavarretta, Architettura dei pani di Salemi. (Bagheria: Eugenio Maria Falcone Editore, 2012).
– Salvatore Farina, Sweet Sensations of Sicily. (Caltanissetta: Lussografica, 2009).
– Fabrizia Lanza, Coming Home to Sicily. (New York: Sterling Epicure, 2012).
– Pamela K. Quaggiotto, Altars of Food to Saint Joseph: Women’s Ritual in Sicily. (Columbia University, NY: Pamela K. Quaggiotto Ph.D. Thesis, 1988).

Click  here to see an example of a St. Joseph’s Day altar.

 

Allison Scola is an independent scholar and professional musician and the owner and curator of Experience Sicily, an education and tourism company.

Click here to read more of Allison’s work on TIE: I Cannoli: Nothing Better in the World, and Genie in a Bottle: Colatura tradizionale di alci di Centara