Holiday Ham

Food is extra important to Italians. We like to eat. A lot. And ensuring holiday meals are super special is a custom my people don’t take lightly. It doesn’t even have to technically be a special occasion; we’ll make it one by cooking a whole lot of grub. Normal Sunday meals are cooked all day long, simmered and stirred with fresh ingredients and a keen eye. Grandma Rose used to spend all morning making her sauce and meatballs, we’d go eat and spend hours sitting around a dinner table chowing down, and that was just a regular ole day. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter…these are extra, super, big-deal, special kinds of meals. On Turkey Day, Mom sets her alarm for 4:00 a.m. so she can get up and start cooking. Nothing beats the scent of Mom’s stuffing while Clay Aiken performs “Silver Bells” atop a Hershey’s chocolate float. When I told my parents I was writing a holiday book, they assumed it was going to be filled with recipes—classics like my grandma’s sugar cookies, Aunt Diane’s pistachio pudding, and Mom’s city chicken—because Pellegrinos know how to cook, and food is of the utmost importance in relation to November/December.

There are also the seasonal treats around the later calendar months that are very important—the pumpkin-flavored cookies, cakes, and pies, the gingerbread lattes. I’m basic when it comes to this stuff; I will happily stock the cupboard with anything I can find with a pumpkin on the packaging. And there’s nothing I love more than getting that first PSL of the season; the smell of warm cinnamon and pumpkin mixed with hot espresso and topped with decadent whipped cream is everything. I also love the minty sweetness of a peppermint mocha, the luscious shards of candy cane floating atop the warm coffee. I really think there’s something magical about a holiday coffee, cozying up in a luscious cable-knit sweater and gripping an extra-large mug that says Candy Cane Wishes & Mistletoe Kisses on it.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but You’ve Got Mail is my favorite movie, and it always seemed so aspirational to me, the way Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan would go to Starbucks and get their coffees. I don’t often treat myself in the warmer months, but come fall and winter, I find my nearest coffee shop and pretend I’m Kathleen Kelly on the streets of Nora Ephron’s New York City. I carry a book with me and sip on my overpriced coffee. I get to, for $5.95, live the fantasy I had when I watched that movie in 1999, escaping the current world as I dream walk through my rom-com mirage. My current dream is that perhaps one of you out there reading this right now is on a subway with a hot drink in one hand and my book in another, with a scarf wrapped around your neck and the perfect winter coat (which isn’t something current but a worn-in jacket that has lived through a few years of cold fronts). I hope you feel like Tom or Meg and this book is your Pride and Prejudice. I may not have the skillful prose of Jane Austen, but I hope my words assist in the You’ve Got Mail fantasy.

Seasonal treats are also very superstitious for my Italian family. Sauerkraut on New Year’s for good luck, grilled oranges covered in olive oil for fortune, a sip of holy water for peace, and a bite of anise for goodwill. I hated the anise, but Grandma Rose was adamant that I have at least a small nibble so my year ahead didn’t go to shit. Come to think of it, I have skipped the anise every year after she passed, and life has been downhill ever since, so I’ll be heading to the grocery store this December to pick some up. Did we all collectively forget to eat the anise these past few years? Is that what’s been going on?

I live in California now while my family is all back in Ohio, and the hardest part of my move is missing the good food I grew up eating. Very early on in my West Coast living, I started to collect all my mom’s recipes, calling her, FaceTiming in, and trying to get measurements for dishes she’s spent her lifetime eyeballing without an exact science. I’d ask how much flour go in her dumplings, and she’d say, “A couple of handfuls.” The amount of cayenne pepper in her chili is “a few heavy pinches,” and she only knows how to make her cherry squares in large batches, so the first time I made them, I had enough to feed my entire apartment building. A few heavy pinches could mean a couple of teaspoons or four cups! These made-up measurements are not universal, so it’s hard to tell exactly how much to use. The only way to get her recipes was to make sure she called me whenever she was making one of my faves, so I’d have to stop everything at 2:00 p.m. my time and follow along over the phone, asking her to put her pinches and handfuls into spoons and cups before mixing them into the bowl.

After years of this process, I was finally able to put together a makeshift cookbook of my childhood favorites, something I hope to publish one of these days. Most are very Midwest comfort foods, the kinds of dishes that are incredibly delectable and anything but healthy. We’re talking bars and squares, cakes poked with Jell-O, and bakes filled with cheeses and bread crumbs. In my twenties, I looked down on these dishes in favor of wheatgrass and kale, but now I appreciate the amount of love that gets poured into these meals. It’s comfort food for a reason, because they’re soups and stews, salads with anything but lettuce, and powdered sugar–topped desserts that make you feel good when you eat them. They may not help you live longer, but who wants to be alive at a hundred and ten without ever enjoying the fine cuisine of a Midwestern?

All that’s to say I take food very seriously and come from a long bloodline of people who do the same. One of the most important items of the season is Linda Pellegrino’s baked ham. The brown-sugar glaze drips off the skin, and the meat is topped with juicy pineapple slices that adorn the pig via wooden toothpicks. The ham is cut into quarter-inch pieces and served alongside homemade lasagna. The meat tastes heavenly when mixed with a bit of Mom’s pasta sauce—a rich, tomato-flavored concoction that’s slow cooked with Italian herbs and simmered with homemade meatballs and sausage. Delizioso! Mom usually orders the spiral ham and glazes it herself, timing everything perfectly so it finishes just as the guests are arriving.

Last Christmas, my dad oversaw picking up the ham, and it didn’t go according to plan. All hell broke loose.

“Gary, did you pick up my ham at Mazzulo’s?”

“No, I will,” Dad replied.

“You were supposed to pick it up yesterday. I need to baste it.”

Dad knew not to argue, so he hopped in his car and headed to what he thought was Mazzulo’s. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do much of the grocery shopping, so when he googled the market, his phone took him to downtown Cleveland, almost an hour away, where there was a similarly named store.

After arriving, Dad braved the crowded aisles and waited in line at the deli until the butcher was able to assist. The butcher found no record of a Pellegrino ham order. Dad dialed home.

“Lin, they don’t have a ham under our name,” he said, clearly at the end of his rope after driving so far for a ham.

Mom put Dad on speaker so her hands were free to prep her charcuterie board.

“What’s taking you so long? It’s six o’clock! My company will be here at eight!”

“It took me an hour to get here!”

“Mazzulo’s is right down the street, Gar!”

“I’m in downtown Cleveland.”

“What are you doin’ in downtown Cleveland? My ham is at Mazzulo’s!”

“I’m at Mazzulo’s!”

As my dad’s temper flared, I heard a voice in the background. “Sir, this is Constantino’s.”

He’d gone to the wrong place.

“Gary! I said Mazzulo’s! Not Constantino’s! Your father never listens—” Mom said to me while still on with Dad.

“Where’s Mazzulo’s?” he asked.

“You better hurry. They close at six, and it’s already five after.”

“If they closed five minutes ago and I’m an hour away, how do you expect me to get there on time?”

“I don’t have time for math problems, Gar! Just get my ham!”

“Let me ask Constantino’s if they have any fucking ham left.”

The butcher was now helping someone else, so Dad waited impatiently while Mom sat on the edge of her seat, hoping they had a spare roast beast.

“Well, do they have any fucking ham, Gar?”

“Do you have any fucking ham here?” Dad asked the butcher at not-Mazzulo’s, cutting the line by raising his voice in hope of an answer.

“Sir, it’s not your turn,” another customer shouted back.

“No, it’s Christmas Eve. We’re all out.”

“Fuck,” Dad replied, angrier than ever.

You know those tubes of crescent rolls that pop open? You slowly start to peel the paper off them, then twist and BAM! The dough comes oozing out so quickly. That’s how my mom is on holidays. When tensions get so high, she pops. Almost every other year, she’s the one losing it, the person threatening to cancel Christmas and leave the family high and dry, but when Dad is also losing it, Mom goes to the opposite end of the spectrum and instead does something that never fails to make my dad even angrier…she laughs at him. It’s truly my favorite thing in the entire world. Dad is going nuts, swearing, stomping around like a child who needs a cigarette, his blood pressure at an all-time high, which is how he was that evening in the Italian market. When he gets like that, my mom starts to chuckle at him, unable to control her church giggles, spreading the joy to her sons, so then we all laugh at Dad, who’s in the middle of a temper tantrum. The laughter makes him angrier, which makes Mom laugh even harder. This time was no different: she struggled to catch her breath, endorphins flowing through her body for the first time all season, finally enjoying the sweet release of giggling at her husband’s uncontrollable anger.

My boyfriend watches all those murder mystery shows and true crime docs about the wives who snap and kill their husbands, and talking heads try to figure out what happened in those last moments before a murder, and I always picture my parents fighting: Mom in a guttural laughing fit, tears flowing and her stomach hurting from crouching over when tensions are at their most high. If only one of those spouses who did the killing got the church giggles instead of murdering their significant other…

Alas, Mom still wanted her entrée, so she stopped her smiles momentarily to ask her hubby to stop somewhere else for the main dish.

“Gar, can you stop by the Giant Eagle? They’re a bigger store, so they might have a ham. Now, it’s Giant Eagle in Solon, Ohio, not Giant Eagle in Michigan. Don’t drive to Michigan,” she said, unable to get out the word Michigan without bursting back into laughter.

I stood beside her, holding my own stomach as I laughed my head off, knowing that my father has almost no patience and would surely not take Mom’s joke in stride.

Silence.

“Gar, did you hear me? I don’t want you goin’ to the airport to fly somewhere else for a holiday ham—” she said, laughing harder than ever.

“Get your own fucking ham!” he said as he hung up.

We didn’t have any roast pig that year, but we did laugh as we verbally roasted Dad. He got home an hour later, and as he entered the house, Mom attempted to apologize, but he couldn’t make out the “sorry” over the howling. When she was finally able to curb the chuckling, she reached for his hand.

“Sorry we laughed. We thought you knew where Mazzulo’s was.”

As she finished her sentence, she remembered how far he drove and how all of it was for naught. It caused the laughter to return as she gently held his hand.

“We don’t need any fucking ham,” Dad said before heading into the basement and putting on the only thing that calms him down in a state of rage…a nature documentary.

Dad was right. Food is something that brings us all together, whether we’re eating around a dinner table or laughing at our loved ones for driving an hour away to (not) get it. Eating it is great, but the best part is the tradition of gathering, cooking, or baking with the ones we love—and breaking bread while telling the story of Dad losing his temper at a faraway grocery chain because of the fucking holiday ham.