The Lap Desk Series: Week 8

“Making Struffoli”

Gouache on paper

Last week’s lap desk series was a reflection on my Italian American identity and my Italian heritage.

For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in The Bronx in New York City in a neighborhood that transcended cultural borders; many of my classmates were first generation mainland Americans whose parents came from Serbia, Albania, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Italy, Trinidad, Korea, Thailand and so many other places. Hearing other languages spoken in the neighborhood was not out of the ordinary and many of us identified each other not by our citizenship as Americans, but by the cultural upbringing we experienced at home. Living in rural New England now, I reflect often on how lucky I was to experience such a culturally rich childhood that has given me a stronger sense of intercultural competence. I suppose this is an underlying theme within this week’s painting.

My family has this strange back and forth relationship between Italy and the United States. On my mother’s side, my great grandmother grew up in an Italian speaking household in Utica, New York. She left for Naples, Italy and studied at a musical conservatory as an accomplished pianist. She returned to Utica and met an Italian man who recently came to the United States to write for an Italian language newspaper. They married and my grandmother also grew up in Utica, speaking Italian in an Italian Catholic household. My great grandparents decided to move to Naples, Italy after my grandmother was already married. However, my grandmother divorced when my mother was three years old, and she moved to Italy with her children to join her parents. Eventually my great grandparents returned to America, but my grandmother chose to stay in Italy for about 16 years and remarried an Italian man. When my mother was in high school, they came back to the United States. Like I said, it’s this weird back and forth story. On my father’s side, his grandparents were immigrants from Southern Italy as well. His grandfather was a tailor by trade. My grandfather grew up speaking a Southern Italian dialect in the lower east side tenement neighborhoods of Manhattan. They eventually made their way north into the southern Bronx where my father grew up, but by then English was the dominant language in the household.

This is kind of a quick snapshot, but it’s made to illustrate the background I was born into as an Italian American, always existing somewhere between Italy and the United States, between identifying as Italian and identifying as American. When I arrived to college in New England, it was a cultural shock for me. Not everyone ate octopus for Christmas? I never have really felt fully one or the other culturally speaking, and now that I speak Italian fluently and have an Masters degree in Italian Cultural Studies and Literature, it’s even more strange. I know more about the literature and history of Italy then I really do of the United States. At cocktail parties people quote Henry James, Chaucer, and Edith Wharton whereas I only know intimately well Italo Svevo, Boccaccio, and Natalia Ginzburg. Yet all of my education has been in this country. That’s the thing about being Italian American, your identity acts as this bridge where your two cultures pass each other often, greeting one another, or sometimes leaving the other behind. It’s a constant coming and going, and it is the only way I really know how to describe it.

So what does this have to do with this week’s painting? A lot and a little I suppose. It has been on my mind as I think about my New England life and my Bronx Italian upbringing. What are the cultural traditions I want to remember? What are the aspects of my heritage I never want to let go of? Food and stories. It always comes back to food, doesn’t it?

One of the traditional desserts for Christmas Eve from the city where my mother grew up is Gli Struffoli . Typical of Naples, Italy, the dish is comprised of tiny dough balls made with lard and flour that are then deep friend in vegetable oil and coated with a honey/sugar mixture. While still warm enough to shape, the dough balls are then arranged in the form of a ring on a plate and sprinkles, and maraschino cherries are added. I’m sure every Neapolitan family has there own way of making these, but in my family, this is how they are done. When I lived in Northern Italy outside of MIlan, I remember one of my English language students was also from Southern Italy and we bonded over this dish as something that reminded us of home.

This dish is also special because it’s one I recall helping my grandmother with a few times over the years after school while I waited to be picked up by one of my parents. She would let me make the rolls and cut the little dough balls and she would do the frying. She made a little station for me at her dining room table since her kitchen was really only big enough for one person. I don’t remember even talking much during this. She had the radio on, some classical music station playing. I liked the silence and the rhythm of the work. I also loved learning to cook.

This past Christmas, I made the struffoli with my niece who is 5 years old. Similar to my grandmother, I set her up with her own station and she rolled out the dough, as I cut the pieces. This is the part of my Italian heritage I would like to pass down to the younger generations of my family: an act of togetherness, the value of making something for others, and the importance of nourishment in our lives. Food does that. It brings us together and allows for shared purpose, language, creativity, and selflessness.

This week’s painting has a lot wrapped up into it. It’s about making struffoli with my niece. Of course it’s a blend of fiction and reality since we didn’t make it in what looks like a quaint cottage in New England, but rather in my brother’s apartment in New York City - but I’m not always interested in conveying the absolute reality as an artist, but rather the authentic sentiment I felt when making struffoli with my niece: the warmth, the living hearth that exists within your heart and within the action of cooking, and the meaning for me as someone who can pass down this tradition from the ancestral women in my life to the next generation of women in our family.

In the painting you’ll see a nod to my grandmother when I made struffoli with her in the form of a little portrait on the right. The flour all over the table because that’s what happened when I made it with my niece as she played with the dough and got her hands messy (she loved that!). I added my cat because I told myself I’d try to add him in all of my paintings if I can and I think it adds a warm element to how other things go on as we live out our stories. Or rather, that life is full of many stories happening all at once: such as the houses outside with their chimneys going, the freshly brewed coffee cup on the left, and the evidence of what happened before with the cookbook open and the ingredients left on the table. It’s easy to forget that our story is not the only one happening - that there were many before us that are left unknown and that there will be many more that will be left undiscovered, but I’d like to think this act of making struffoli with my nieces is way to honor all of those lost women in forgotten kitchens that inhabit my Italian ancestral past.