Keeping the feast by Paula Butturini

Author:Paula Butturini [Paula Butturini]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie
ISBN: 9781594488979
Published: 2010-02-18T08:00:00+00:00

12

Pizza

Most Friday evenings of my childhood, my mother and I performed the same ritual, driving across town to her parents’ tiny apartment to pick up a week’s worth of meat and eggs. The meat came from Gabriel’s Meat Market, run by Cousin Paul’s paternal grandparents; the eggs from the chicken and goat farm in nearby Easton, run by my mother’s cousin Josephine and her husband, Bob, the only Connecticut Yankee in our extended family.

I loved going to that apartment for many reasons, in part because my grandfather Tony might be wearing his policeman’s uniform, eating early so that he could go to work as a special cop at one of Bridgeport’s many movie houses. He would always put down his fork to say “Hi, doll” and give me a bear hug. A strong but plump man with bulging biceps, he gave hugs that felt like pillows, different from the hugs I usually received from my father, who was affectionate but bony. I also loved visiting there because my mother’s parents were easygoing and cheerful, and there was nothing they liked more than to shower treats upon their grandchildren. Every week we each got a quarter, to be put into our savings account, and later, when their weekly donation doubled, we got to keep the second quarter to spend as we liked.

My mother and I always left their apartment loaded down with goodies: the meat and eggs my mother had ordered the night before; a tin or two of Jennie’s homemade spritz; the Swedish butter cookies that somehow had ended up in her repertoire of baked goods; a tin of her peanut butter cookies, still bearing the marks of the tines of her fork. Sometimes, in season, we walked out with a dozen of her fresh blueberry muffins. Other weeks it might have been an entire pan of brownies wrapped in foil, or half an apple pie, or her sour cream coffee cake—which I still make—topped and filled with walnuts, cinnamon, and sugar. In the summer, Jennie always threw in extra produce from their miniature garden, a couple of tomatoes or green peppers.

But the best thing about going to their place on a Friday night was the possibility that Jennie might have made a traditional pizza for supper. All sorts of pizza used to appear on their table, perhaps because my mother’s family came from Naples, the cradle of Italian pizza. I could take or leave the actual pizza, a flat, round pie slathered in tomato and cheese, but I couldn’t resist her way of using up her leftover pizza dough to make pizza fritta. The minute we walked through the door, she would slip cherry-sized knobs of dough into a kettle of bubbling oil, where they would sizzle, puff up, and turn golden. When she lifted them out of the fryer, she would douse them with granulated sugar, which didn’t melt but clung in crystals to the dough balls’ hot surface. The sweet crunch of sugar played against the slightly salty softness of hot, fried dough, and my mother and I could never get enough of them.

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