The Recipes

After my Nonno passed away in 2018, my dad took on the mentally and physically insurmountable task of cleaning out the house he grew up in—the house my Nonno bought in the 1960s, after immigrating to the US to be with my Nonnie. 

 

Amidst six decades’ worth of religious trinkets, expired cans of beans, and fraying linens, my dad found a most unlikely family heirloom: a wooden cranberry rake, its scoop filled with minuscule photos of distant relatives, funeral prayer cards, and recipes. Dozens of recipes.  

 

Grease-stained index cards, folded pages torn from tiny notebooks, magazine clippings, cardstock recipe cards with burgundy floral borders; culinary blueprints to identities new and old transcribed in cursive flourishes, trembling capital letters, languages both real and imagined; a trail of breadcrumbs that winded through family history, immigration and assimilation, marriage, death and disease. Tucked in the back of the windowed kitchen cabinets, a family gastronomical genealogy had sat, waiting to be discovered, since my Nonnie’s passing almost a decade prior. 

 

Between the lines of ingredients, measurements, and instructions was the domestic day-to-day of my Nonnie’s life, her communities new and old, her growing family, her resilience and wisdom. Add 1 capa ziuchero and 2/1 tispun bechin soda to Zucchini dropos, she wrote phonetically in her cursive script—what better way to cope with the uncontrollable influx of zucchini from my Nonno’s garden mid-summer? Fold in 1 cup cranberries—the tart little fruits that grew all around her new home, the South Shore of Massachusetts—to the coffee cake batter for a simple breakfast sweet. Ground 1 cup quahogs, as Darlene, her half-Portuguese daughter-in-law, wrote, to make quahog fritters. The morning before Easter, blend 1 tazza di chrisco into flour for sciatun, or Easter pizza. And before the grandkids get home from school, beat 3 eggs and 3 tepol spun sugas for biscotti con le uova; we always loved those little rainbow sprinkles. 

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My Nonnie, matriarch and breadmaker, collected and transcribed her family’s favorite dishes— their nourishment and their identity—in Italian, molisano dialect, English, and a mix of all three, as she put her children, and their children, on the school bus for more years than she ever went to school. Like flipping through an old photo album—when the faces of your ancestors begin to look strangely familiar, and unknown times, places, and people become a part of your own memories—these floured and fading fragments unearthed days, people, meals, and words that I never knew. And yet, they’re a part of me all the same. 

 

I still mourn my grandparents’ absence. The smells of my Nonnie’s kitchen, the creaky floors of their house, the strange mix of wonder and familiarity I felt standing in my Nonno’s garden, the dozens of tomato plants tied to grooved metal rods. I crave the sense of surety and predictability dinners at their house brought to—what felt like, at the time—a tumultuous, frenetic adolescence. 

 

But still, I am lucky. From a house that is no longer theirs, and no longer ours, emerged a most invaluable inheritance: the recipes.