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by Nikki Burst

It would seem that being both a poet and a writer of a food blog would make it easy for me to bridge these topics of poetry and food, but it doesn’t. In fact, the more I think, the hungrier I get, and so I stop to make myself a butter, banana and cheese sandwich. And then I photograph it.

Poetry and food are both about filling voids.

I figure that only about one percent of the time we experience shared human experience brought on by heightened awareness when we are touched by art – poetry, music, a painting, what have you – or an outstanding experience –birth, sex, death. In those moments, our lonely places tune in to each other.

But what has food got to do with this? I don’t know exactly.

What I do know is that within that ephemeral interconnectedness, our souls are filled with something and that something is nourishing. It gives us energy to wake, to speak, to shower, to lug ourselves to work, to buy groceries, to drink only so much wine, and to go to bed at a decent hour because we know that at some point we’ll come across one of those magical things again – whatever it is – and we will be full with it.

If I could spend my days overindulging, I would be obese on art. I would also be fat on weird sandwiches. But I think if I tried to fill either void all of the time, my senses would dull, and I would potentially miss out on the especially delicious moments in life. Therefore, I am arguing that we actually need to allow ourselves to grow hungry. Fulfillment must be fleeting to be fulfilling.

 

Nikki Burst is a writer and food blogger living in New York City. Her work can be found at Endive CivilizationNerve.com, The Greenpoint Gazette, and Birdsong.

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Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with.  Craig is our poet for April, 2014.  

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books, most recently To Keep Love Blurry, and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.

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Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with.  Craig is our poet for April, 2014.  

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books, most recently To Keep Love Blurry, and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.

 

 

by Nikki Burst

It would seem that being both a poet and a writer of a food blog would make it easy for me to bridge these topics of poetry and food, but it doesn’t. In fact, the more I think, the hungrier I get, and so I stop to make myself a butter, banana and cheese sandwich. And then I photograph it.

Poetry and food are both about filling voids.

I figure that only about one percent of the time we experience shared human experience brought on by heightened awareness when we are touched by art – poetry, music, a painting, what have you – or an outstanding experience –birth, sex, death. In those moments, our lonely places tune in to each other.

But what has food got to do with this? I don’t know exactly.

What I do know is that within that ephemeral interconnectedness, our souls are filled with something and that something is nourishing. It gives us energy to wake, to speak, to shower, to lug ourselves to work, to buy groceries, to drink only so much wine, and to go to bed at a decent hour because we know that at some point we’ll come across one of those magical things again – whatever it is – and we will be full with it.

If I could spend my days overindulging, I would be obese on art. I would also be fat on weird sandwiches. But I think if I tried to fill either void all of the time, my senses would dull, and I would potentially miss out on the especially delicious moments in life. Therefore, I am arguing that we actually need to allow ourselves to grow hungry. Fulfillment must be fleeting to be fulfilling.

 

Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with.  We are proud to have hosted Nikki during the month of March, 2014.  

Nikki Burst is a writer and food blogger living in New York City. Her work can be found at Endive CivilizationNerve.com, The Greenpoint Gazette, and Birdsong.

Michelle Wildgen is a writer of impeccable tastes. As culinary and literary mentor, she took me for my first scoop of pear and blue cheese ice cream and gave me my first copy of MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. As an editor at Tin House, she’s brought food writing to the table from the likes of Francine Prose, Steve Almond and Ann Hood. Now, in her third novel, Bread and Butter, Wildgen follows three brothers running two very different restaurants: Leo and Britt’s smartly-polished Winesap, and younger brother Harry’s envelope-pushing startup, Stray. It’s a novel filled not only with the intricate stuff of cooking of the highest order, but of sibling rivalry and affections, as temperamental as any soufflé. It was my pleasure to speak with Wildgen about the world’s best waiter, editing a dish versus an essay, and the supreme goodness of the French fry.

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky: For me, a chief pleasure of Bread and Butter lies in not just vicariously tasting all the food being served and eaten by the brothers, but in savoring the sensory details of its preparation as you describe it. The slicing of fish has never sounded sexier than when you write about it here, for example. I wonder, what kind of research did you do for writing so intimately about the making of the food in the book? Did you cook the dishes that we get to read about?

Michelle Wildgen: I’m a home cook and not a professional, but I have enough familiarity with it to feel comfortable describing some of the process and problems of cooking, whether it’s resting your meat or not lowering the temp of your frying oil by over-crowding it. For the most part, I just relied on a lifetime of eating and cooking, which could have been described as “greed” until now, but which we will now commence calling “research” instead. The lamb’s neck dish, for instance, was something I tasted a version of at San Francisco’s Incanto, and Alinea in Chicago was doing a whole chocolate menthol geode thing when I was there a few years back. I’ve cooked many a noodle dish, though, right down to stepping on my plastic-bagged udon noodle dough to knead it (yes, this is a thing). Other dishes, I tried to make but failed to source the ingredients for—it turns out that when you get a yen to make ramen broth on a Sunday afternoon, pig femurs can be a bit thin on the ground. And some dishes I made up, like Hector’s sugared kaffir lime dust, or read about: Harry’s self-saucing duck breast is based on a self-saucing chicken dish by chef Michael Symon, as described by writer Michael Ruhlman in his series on professional cooking.

EKH: I have to confess, I was thinking particularly of that spectacular dessert of Hector’s when I asked that question. I’ve been hoping that it’s real since I read about it; I’m pretty sure I had a dream about that emerald green dust. It makes me think a little about the difference between food rendered on the page, where there’s total authorial control over the brown on a roast or the shimmer of an aspic, versus food in real life. Is it possible that food is sometimes even better in writing than on our plate?

MW: I think if I tried to make Hector’s dessert I’d end up with Leo’s sad paste. (I may have to ask a pastry chef how one could make this.) In some ways it’s hard to beat fictional food, which gets to do and be whatever the author can persuade the reader it is and does. If I am really on my game, I can persuade you that eggplant mousse with chocolate shards is everything you ever needed (okay, if I am a sorcerer). And even aside from the ease of the writer’s ability to fix burned edges and unrisen dough on the page, fictional food may always have an edge on real food because we get to savor it differently, allowing so many other associations and emotions to thread through the experience. That happens in real life, too, but I’m generally too busy eating to stop and think about what a plate of chicken really means—my thought process is less “Why, this unexpected morsel makes me think of Twelfth Night” than “Yay, food!” It’s in the reflecting on what I ate and where it came from that the other layers open up for me.

Then again, to contradict myself entirely, can even the most delicious food on the page compete with a perfect French fry?

EKH: What’s your own trajectory through the world of the restaurant business been like? You work as a writer, teacher, and editor now, but I know that in an earlier life you spent time in the industry—could you ever imagine renouncing the literary life for, say, your own restaurant on an island someplace in Lake Michigan?

MW: Oh god, no. I like to have good restaurants and great movies playing nearby—a smaller city like Madison, where I live now, is as isolated as I can ever see myself getting. My career trajectory has been a mix of food and writing all along. After college, I went to work at 2 jobs: at a trade newspaper for the dairy industry, and a part-time backwaiter at a high-end restaurant. The newspaper showed me how to craft a story and call up strangers and ask them questions, and facilitated my cheese-eating too. I was tireless in covering the artisanal cheesemaking scene, purely out of professional obligation, of course. The restaurant, on the other hand, taught me almost everything about the culinary life. Or rather it laid a foundation, and gave me the basis to know what I didn’t know, whereas before that I was casting about for knowledge, ignorant but enthusiastic. Eventually I quit the newspaper job and went full-time into the restaurant until I left for an MFA program. One of the reasons I was so happy to start working at Tin House is that we publish literary food writing, which can take just about any form at all, so I keep an editorial hand in food. And in fiction I do too—there is something about the hands-on, tactile feeling of food production that I never tire of writing about. So far I haven’t been a food writer who’s all over the world covering trends and testing recipes. I’ve been more the type to ponder the poetic qualities of the egg. I maintain that this has practical applications too.

EKH: As someone who would like to think she can appreciate an exceptional meal but who has never served behind the lines at restaurant, one of the things that struck me most in reading Bread and Butter is just how much thought and finesse goes into not only the nuances of the food, but the totality of the experience. What for you are the details that make a service extraordinary? And how many of your own restaurant pet peeves and best practice beliefs show up in the predilections of the three brothers?

MW: After seeing the lengths to which a good restaurant will go—and going to said lengths myself—I have zero patience with half-assed service, so Britt’s and Leo’s pet peeves are all mine too. I think servers auctioning dishes (“Who has the frog legs?” etc.) is a hack move through and through. I cannot stand it when I ask a server for her opinion on a couple of dishes and get the reply, “It depends on what you want.” The servers know the menu, or they ought to, and they should have something to say about the dishes that clarifies what the menu cannot, or the willingness to say, “Listen, the pig knuckle is good but the handmade pasta tonight is amazing.” The kitchen discussions about kids dining in high-end places are pretty realistic, too: people bitch about kids in restaurants only when they behave badly. We loved it when children ate real food and just enjoyed the experience.

As for what makes a meal extraordinary, I love smart servers and a challenging menu. I’m not into going out for comfort food I can make for myself; I want to try something I haven’t had before. The small things add up, and the details are everything. They show a restaurant knows how to manage the experience, from the amuse to fill the gap between drinks and apps to a basket of tampons in the ladies’ bathroom. It’s about how you handle the imperfections, too. I once was at a restaurant that accidentally served me a house-made raviolo still cold in the center, and I swear the server appeared at the table the second she saw my posture change. I was so impressed with her I barely recall the cold pasta. Now that’s a professional.

EKH: It’s funny, I feel like you as author are in so many ways like this best-ever server—you tell so much of this story through extraordinary observation of nuance, not only in interactions between diner and server, but between brother and brother, or between the smitten and the crushed-upon. You have this incredible ability to convey the way we say so much through our smallest gesture or subtlest inflection in tone. There’s a little gem of a scene, for example, when at a staff dinner at Winesap, Thea observes the very small thing of a staff member stiffen in reaction to a story another one of the staff is telling; from that, she parses from that the bigger issue of this guy’s treatment of women in the kitchen. It’s something we’re sometimes warned against in writing classes—asking body language to tell the story—but your writing is proof plenty that this advice is garbage. I was captivated your ability to show us who these people are and what they think of each other in the same way we come to know each other in life—by observing a waver in someone’s gaze, the sly exposure of the underside of a wrist.

MW: Thank you! That’s about as perfect a compliment as I could ever hope for. I love fiction that pays attention to those little things, and obviously I try to produce it, because really we all take note of everything at an incredibly minute level. We don’t always stop to delineate each clue that gives us an overall impression, but we perceive and respond to this sort of thing constantly—think of how you knew a date wasn’t interested, or that you’d just said the wrong thing among strangers. People rarely say, “I shall never call you,” or “That offended me.” They communicate it through a dozen tiny gestures, glances, sounds, and refusals, and we know so well what to expect from social exchanges that we also know instantly when it deviates somehow. The trick for the writer is how to convey it in a way that conveys the sum and not just a catalogue of weird facial tics.

EKH: In thinking about how carefully a chef and a restaurant staff curate a dinner experience, I also started thinking about the potentially similar kind of work you do as an editor in cultivating a piece of writing. Does that parallel ring true to you? And is running a restaurant to editing what cooking is to writing?

MW: I think cooking has more in common with editing and writing than restaurant-running does, simply because the latter seems so much bigger and more demanding of so many more skills than sitting down to write or edit. You have to thrive on craziness and stress to succeed in restaurants, whereas a writer has to thrive on solitude and weekly bouts of self-hatred. Creating a dish as described in the book, however, certainly has its parallels with writing and editing. Just like a book, you might start with a little idea that is not enough on its own and then build the dish around it. You can edit a dish as you do an essay, taking out the distracting stuff and rejiggering the ratios. Who hasn’t been served a dish with a whole pile of stuff on it that makes you forget what the central taste was intended to be? The same thing happens in a story with too many characters.

EKH: Finally, who are the food writers we should be reading that we’re not?

MW: There are plenty, but a lot of my favorites are well known already. Part of the fun for me of writers like Calvin Trillin or Jeffrey Steingarten is the persona they create for themselves on the page, as well as the glorious food and culinary expertise. Nigel Slater has been a favorite of mine for years and years, for books that look so gorgeous and frankly could teach you not just how to make a recipe but how to cook. I loved the Robicelli’s cookbook (authors of the same name), too, which is from a couple of former restaurant cooks who opened a bakery in Bay Ridge. They don’t stint on the obscenities or the Golden Girls references, and they have zero patience for supercilious bitching about the cupcake craze. Lastly, I will never get over my love of Laurie Colwin’s food essays or food-heavy fiction, so don’t try and make me.

 

Michelle Wildgen is a writer, editor, and teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. In addition to being an executive editor at the literary journal Tin House, Michelle is the author of the novels Bread and Butter: A Novel, But Not for Long and You’re Not You: A Novel, and the editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. You’re Not You has been adapted for film, starring Hilary Swank and Emmy Rossum.

 

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is assistant editor at Tin House. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, Web Conjunctions, The Story Collider, and Hunger Mountain.

[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

 

Betwixt the Arctic and Here

I picked up a specter

and now it follows me as the bone-cold day moon follows me from her intangible
distance.

Everything on this island is melting. Everything is wet. The loss of one iceberg has set into motion the loss of many –

Blue jewels just slipping into the sea.

I am afraid of here. My lips are peeling white. My hands and feet are black. My eyebrows frosted. I have on high top sneakers and they too were not made for the snow.

Sound comes at me as a whooshing: the wind, the waves, the voice of the ghost. When I
finally meet another human, he speaks and I hear him as if I have put my ear to a large cavernous shell.

This morning, I looked the Great White Bear in the face – no, no in the eyes – and she mangled me with her indifference. I could die here if anything cared to devour me. If anything cared, I could be put to rest.

 

Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with.  Nikki is our poet for March, 2014.  

Nikki Burst is a writer and food blogger living in New York City. Her work can be found at Endive CivilizationNerve.com, The Greenpoint Gazette, and Birdsong.

Bhut Jolokia

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John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. A finalist for the Colorado Prize in Poetry, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference contributor, and a guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his family.

Untitled Horse Story

Sometimes, horses for sale on the street
are loosely tethered to parking meters

and, once, I had just enough twenty-dollar bills in my pants
to untie one and lead it nearly home.

Horses don’t follow money, silly, but they do,
curious enough, follow jelly doughnuts.

The salesman said so. And the whole experience
could have been the happiest day of my life,

doughnut and horse in hand,

until I thought of you and your ken doll head
turning side-to-side in a manner

that would only mean one thing and it is
the opposite of Yes, my love, well done.

So, I, who have learned a thing or two
about premonitions,

reparked the pony
and moseyed on home.

We can only hope for good days now that
the great black death is behind us.

 

Each month a contemporary poet presents three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with.  Nikki is our poet for March, 2014.  

Nikki Burst is a writer and food blogger living in New York City. Her work can be found at Endive CivilizationNerve.com, The Greenpoint Gazette, and Birdsong.

 

[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