(Cassateddi di Ceci)
Makes about 3 dozen
PASTRY
675 g/1½ lb flour
75 g/3 oz sugar
Pinch of salt
125 ml/4 fl oz white wine (approximately)
125 g/4 oz lard
FILLING
225 g/8 oz chickpeas, cooked without salt, puréed
75 g/3 oz honey chopped
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
50 g/2 oz plain chocolate pieces
50 g/2 oz sugar
25 g/2 oz pine nuts, toasted and chopped
25 g/1 oz almonds, toasted and
50 g/2 oz diced zuccata or candied citron
Vegetable oil for frying
Cinnamon
Sugar
Sift together the flour, sugar, and salt onto a marble or wooden surface. Make a well, and add the wine slowly, using just as much as it takes to keep the dough together. Cut the lard into small pieces and knead it piece by piece into the dough. Knead for at least 15 minutes, working the dough out into a long strip and then folding it back on itself so as to incorporate as much air as possible, until you have a very smooth and elastic dough that is shiny but not greasy to the touch. Cover the dough and let it stand for at least 1 hour.
Mix together all the ingredients for the filling, and blend well.
Roll out the dough to a very thin sheet, and cut out 7.5 cm/3 inch circles. On each circle place a scant tablespoon of filling. Fold the circle over into a half-moon and, moistening the edges with a little water, seal them carefully.
Fry the turnovers in abundant and very hot (about 190C/375F) vegetable oil (at least 7.5 cm/3 inches deep) until they are delicately browned. Drain on paper towels and serve while still warm, sprinkled with ground cinnamon and caster sugar, or granulated sugar that has been ground to a fine texture in a mortar.
Note: Some people prefer to make cassateddi dough using 5 tablespoons of white wine and 5 tablespoons of vino cotto, and eliminating the sugar.
At Làscari we were given bread with our meal as well as legumes; it was special bread only in that, as ritual required, it had been baked at home. At the altars over which San Giuseppe presides “in person,” bread assumes much greater significance. One of the more common loaves is the ring-shaped cucciddatu. In the past the cucciddati that were baked for San Giuseppe were enormous, weighing as much as twenty-five pounds and requiring that some of the bricks around the oven door be removed before they could be put in to bake. The saints would carry the cucciddati home at the end of the ceremony, slung over their shoulders like coils of rope. But today the poor are no longer so poor as to welcome twenty-five pounds of stale bread, and the cucciddati have shrunken noticeably.
In the towns west of Palermo the altars themselves, spectacularly decorated with intricate forms of bread, become the centre of attention: the women of these towns work together for weeks to prepare the altars, in a marathon of collective creativity in which they obviously and rightfully take great pride. In Salemi, a small town in the Belice Valley, the altar is placed within a most extraordinary bower, constructed of poles covered with myrtle branches, decorated with oranges and lemons, and hung with hundreds of little breads, each one lovingly fashioned into a flower, a beast, a saint; roses, daisies, and fava beans in their pods; butterflies, birds, and fish; even Saint Joseph himself, the bread of his monk’s habit coloured dark brown by cocoa added to the dough.
The amount of bread baked varies according to the possibilities of the family: a modest altar would require 135-185 kg/350-400 lb of durum-wheat flour, and more than a week’s work on the part of eight or ten women, but a really fancy altar could employ as much as 400 kg/900 lb of flour.
The bread dough is prepared with a criscenti, the same way as normal bread, except that the amount of water is slightly reduced. The dough must be kneaded, with the help of one’s feet when the quantities are big enough, just as Dio comanda, so that it has a very fine grain and no large bubbles, which would distort the shapes. It is then shaped into the basic forms and “put to bed” under tablecloths and woollen blankets.
After this single rising, the details—the flower petals and tiny birds, the decorative cuts and curlicues—are added, the surface is brushed with egg beaten up with a few drops of lemon juice, and the bread is ready to be put in the oven to bake.
Once they have finished with the bread, the women set to cooking the banquet. One family told me with understandable pride that they had prepared sixty-two different dishes. Of each of these the children representing the Holy Family would eat barely a mouthful, and they would distribute the rest to the people who came to see the altar.
Unlike in Salemi, in Alcamo there is no bread on the canopy itself, which in older and simpler times was contrived out of the best fringed silk bedspread. Nowadays it is possible to rent an entire stage set with receding arches, angels clinging to rococo columns, and a banner reading,“Long Live Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
Here the bread is fashioned into about twenty large forms, each with precise symbolic significance, and into a series of smaller, merely decorative pieces, all of which are displayed on a seven-tiered reredos behind the altar. At the top is the monstrance with the Host, an angel bearing a candlestick on either side. On the second step stands the “Name of Mary,” an elaborate M decorated with flowers and angels, which is flanked by branches heavy with fruit and flowers. The third level belongs to the eagle, insignia of Alcamo, a noble beast sitting at Mary’s feet. Below him there is a bower of roses through which Saint Joseph leads the Christ Child, and then the Calata degli angeli (the “Descent of the Angels”), a tower of roses surmounted by a cross, with three angels descending on each side. (The preparations and the symbolism were explained to me by an elderly woman in Alcamo who had been a great specialist in the preparation of Saint Joseph’s bread. Inspecting with critical eye the photographs I had brought with me, she remarked that she herself used to get eight angels onto her calata.)
The tradition of preparing the Saint Joseph’s altar appears to enjoy great vitality and an encouraging ability to incorporate modern elements. The fresh pineapples decorating the altars, the Coca-Cola served to the saints along with the wine, and the pop hits that alternate with Sicilian tarantellas on the record player or the hired accordion are innovations that may be anathema to the purists, but to the ethnologically open-minded they spell good health.
The tenacity of this tradition in the face of all the distractions offered by the advent of consumerism in Sicily bears witness to how profoundly significant it is to the people here, significant in ways of which they are only dimly aware, but which speak of centuries of bitter experience. The altar of Saint Joseph is most commonly read as a rite in propitiation of the saint for the new harvest, and the banquet as an orgy in which the last remnants of the old harvest are consumed just before the new crop of fava beans ripens and the new wheat quickens into seed, an overabundance of eating to invoke a commensurate generosity on the part of the saint.
Yet the banquet of Saint Joseph also ritualises famine relief. It comes during Lent, a period of liturgical fasting that coincides with and gives religious significance to the fasting imposed by nature, the period when the provisions of the summer are exhausted, and when, in years past,
crowds of poor people, hungry and undernourished, who wandered through the countryside in search of food, gave a disquieting and threatening air to the agrarian and to the human landscape…. Saint Joseph’s Day, which falls in the middle of Lent, was the festivity in which the search for and the offering of food could take place in a ritualised, controlled and regulated form.
V. Teti,“Carni e maccarruni assai,”1985
I belong to that very small percentage of humanity that has the great good fortune never to have known real hunger. Had I continued to live in America, I might still consider bread as one more element in the category of foods that are delicious yet potentially dangerous and not really necessary, like chocolate or jam or gravy. Sicily has taught me otherwise.
He never asked, it’s true, but I gave him a loaf of bread which I had taken out of the oven not an hour before, and I put oil and salt and oregano on it, and he sniffed the air and the smell of the bread, and said,“Bless the Lord!”
Elio Vittorini, Conversazioni in Sicilia, 1941