| Chapter 2: | Street Life |
a wine merchant who delivered the bottles to our house. Grandma bought provolone and dried sausages in the small grocery store.
Easter was my favorite holiday. I got new clothes for Easter. Grandma bought her only new dress for the year at Easter. Grandma made pignolata for the holiday and I would help her. She beat eggs into the sugar, gradually adding milk and olive oil. Flour came next. We would then make long round sticks. These would be cut into bite-sized nuggets. After these were tossed in boiling oil and golden brown they would be mixed in honey and sprinkled with cinnamon. I still associate the smell of cinnamon with Easter.
The pastry store was located on the corner of First Avenue and One Hundred and Seventh Street. During the Easter season, the baker became a great artist. He made marzipan white lambs on green bases. Sometimes he made a mamma and two or three little ones. To prove that they were American lambs he stuck American flags on toothpicks in the back of each mamma lamb. At a time when Italy was at war with us, it was prudent for the baker to show his patriotism in this unique manner. Years later, Italian American pastry shops found their poet in my friend Rose Basile Green:
Pastry Shops
Let us give praises to embellished breadBy beauty lifted from the sod and cane;
Gross hunger by plain wheat is eased and fed
But barely can the artist’s taste sustain.
The flower exudes its perfume from the bower
And makes a garden where the grasses grow;