Cannolo

We are what we eat, literally.

As a kid, I consumed my culture in sugars and fats, in sauces and pastry.. These foods were passed on to me by old hands, hands that carried stories and blood from another time and place. Sun spotted. Arthritic from the cold, bitter weather of Western New York- weather they, and me, would never get used to. All those hands are gone now. I’m the only one who still makes cannoli. I am the only one trying to remember these stories. 

I shifted my backpack across my back. It was heavy and pressed into my spine, indented my shoulders. I pulled my luggage behind me across the airport’s uneven tiled floor and walked toward the car rental kiosk, the pack twisting off and landing on its side. I cursed, yanking it back up.

I moved through the sticky, unconditioned air, after spending three days in the city of Catania getting around by foot. I bussed here to pick up the rental car I’d have for the next three weeks, that I would drive around on the least traveled, least paved, least safe roads on this island. I was there to visit the  forgotten places that almost all my grandparents, and those before them, called home.

The walls of the airport were covered in old tourist posters, framed in plastic. Photos of the temples of Agrigento, and Siracusa, two major world archaeological sites. There were photos of cathedrals and beaches and of course, Etna. The volcano. 

Less than an hour north of here sits the massive Etna -  the largest volcano in Europe. She is known as Mongibello -  a beautiful mountain. I have heard others call her Beautiful Mother. Her name Etna comes from the Greek Goddess Aetna, which means “I burn”. When I learned this, it landed in my body, made so much sense.  I have never met a Sicilian — including myself— that didn’t burn, that didn’t have that burning feeling in their hearts, in their throats, that didn’t let that burn simmer, but always let it explode. She was indeed our mother, we come from her. We who burn. 

She is the largest active volcano in Europe. She is a mound of wonder, snow, mystery. She stands over the island, rounded top, solid, demanding honor, to be seen. And you know that up there, in her,  she is also a gaping open hole to the underworld, an entrance to what lived within, and under. She is the portal to the womb and the heart of the island. She is how we all enter.  Etna stands  closest to the coast, in the North Eastern era, so she and water can be together.  She sputters smoke and gas on the regular. 

From this spot, before this airport was an airport, did people look up at the Volcano from working their orchards or vineyards or wheat fields in awe, and fear, and reverence- in worship of the towering and sleeping dragon that hovered over them. Did they kiss the soil under this foundation, knowing it was made so fertile with volcanic ash? I wondered if they ever planted a fava seed right here. For the future, for their great great grandchildren to be ok, to be happy, to be safe from the volcano. . I wonder how the volcano became a part of them. Were they made of lava and ash? Did they erupt?

When my grandparents lived here until the mid-1900s, and for at least five generations back, which is what we were able to dig up in old archives and records. There were animals to transport you, donkeys, mules, horses. The first railroad was inaugurated the year my grandmother was born.  Steamships were available though, to take you away from here and help you live your dreams on streets of gold. To be safe from things that would try to lure them away from this landThese dreams of course, were false. But I was made, conceived, born, writing these words out, because of them.

I walked by food stands in the airport, what we Americans would call a food court. One stand was particularly crowded, surrounded by a swarm of people. Everyone was eating cannoli.  

I pushed my way up to the front. I’d learned that pushing your way through lines was appropriate here. There was nothing rude about it.  

I felt bodies pushing behind me, pressing me into bodies in front of me, into a woven hodgepodge of languages–Italian, Italian dialects, German, French, African dialects. The crowd shifted. I found myself belly to the counter, eye-to-eye with a young man wearing a white apron. This cannoli maker had dark curly hair. Dark eyes. Long lashes. Long nose. Wide smile. Full lips. A hand rolled cigarette tucked behind each of his ears. He felt familiar to me. Everyone here felt familiar to me. Like they were my long lost family. I felt like I belonged to them. But I doubt they were thinking that; to them, I was probably just blondie, an Americana.

“Un cannoli, por favor” I asked in my Spanish and not Italian. 

“Cannolo!” He corrected me. “Un Euro!”  

Cannolo is one. Cannoli is plural. I’d been saying it wrong my whole life. I’d been hearing it wrong my whole life.  

He took an empty cannolo shell out and filled it with the ricotta cream, right there in front of me. Let me tell you something – if you ever order a cannolo and it’s been pre-filled, send it back. 

He dipped both ends in small bits of crushed green pistachio and then dusted it with a light layer of powdered sugar. 

“Cannolo per la bella donna.” He smiled. He winked. He was flirting. This did not make me special to him. This is the way it was here, at least how I think it works – I can only sense as an outsider. People flirt– young, old, ugly, beautiful, married, single— they flirt as a language, as a way of being. It’s a sign of being alive, of being together. Of noticing and acknowledging desire. Butt this early point in my trip, I ​think​ I’m special to him. I smile back and take out two Euro. I pull two perfectly gold coins from my ridiculously uncool travel wallet that’s hanging around my neck, holding everything of importance: every cent, my passport, photos of my daughters, my rental car receipt, small bits of dried ground placenta that I would eventually bring to a mountain top and sprinkle on the soil 

I stack the coins on the counter.  

“You love this! Trust me!” He handed me the cannolo wrapped in white parchment. And then he took the coins. Held them up to his mouth, kissed them, and said “grazie grazie!”.  

Because I had been doing it for the last three days, I made a note to stop tipping 100% to every beautiful man who served me sublime food with fiery eyes.  

I stepped aside with the cannolo in my hand and stood with the others on the sidelines.We were all in a pause of the rushing back-and-forth of the airport. We’d slowed down to ingest this food of the gods. To let it consume us. To take us over. To be fed by something not only without us, but within us. We held the pastry like a sacred testament, a scroll of proof that we belong in that moment together, traveling, saluting pleasure, the joy of eating, of food, of this island. We brought the tube shape shells to our lips and bit into the deep fried shells, .not  too thick, like many of the shells I’ve found in the States. It was thin, but sturdy. Crisp. Buttery. A perfect container, a cylinder for the hefty amount of ricotta inside. Ricotta in Sicily tasted nothing like Ricotta in the U.S. I could taste the grass, the taste of being a child rolling on the ground in the spring when the grass was potent. Grass was what sheep ate and then became part of their milk. And I could taste below the grass, a sweet flavor of manured soil lingering at the end, ripe with longing and potential.  The filling was just barely sweet, tinted with  honey. Wheat, milk, honey– in three ingredients I was savoring the history of this place - animist and Arabic. . 

The wheat of the pastry has been both a spiritual tradition and agricultural business for thousands and maybe even tens of thousands of years. Wheat – the sacred grain to Demeter and Ceres and to countless forgotten chthonic goddesses and moon cults before them –  was worshiped and bundled, slept under, prayed over. Wheat was life, was fertility, was hunger. Was the devotion to the land. When wheat became part of the agricultural industry, when the wheat goddess and moon cults were buried along with their temples by the Catholic Church, this grain became sustenance in another way: for its export value. Everyone around Europe loves a good antica wheat from the navel of Sicily. Everyone loves bread. Pastry. Pasta. Our guts want wheat, have become wheat. 

Ricotta’s origin is so old it’s impossible to trace. As a staple peasant food, its name literally means “to re-cook”. After the milk has been separated to make food, the whey is reused to make more. Most tend to think  that ricotta came to the rest of the world by way of Sicily, but it’s  more likely to have migrated there with the Arabs from the fertile crescent – the birthplace of cheese ​and​ human civilization. When the Arabs came to conquer the southern part of the island and rule it as a Muslim state, this re-cooked cheese came with it, became a source of nourishment for a vast population of poor folk on the island. 

Sicily was part of Magia Grecia at one time – Greece was the land’s original colonizer, which meant the indigenous people and the land of Sicily became Greece and Grecian in all ways and to say that is to also say Greece was also Sicily in all ways— there was an interchange of culture to a degree that duality was blurred. Honey, which was a sacred gift from the earth, a sweet intoxicant, a medicine for the skin, an offering of all kinds— was gathered in the ancient ​H​yblaean Mountains of the southeast corner of the Island, the part closest to proper Greece. Honey was used to saturate the temple ground and rubbed on bodies– bathed in, made love in, mixed with psychedelics plants in ingested in ceremony – all in veneration to the goddess Aphrodite, who was the indigenous goddess Hybla before the Greeks took over and renamed deities. Honey was used to ensure health, fertility, passion, sex. Honey held the spirit of god in plants and it delivered those gods of plants into the gut of the body. To satisfy the goddess, to feed her well with Earthly nectar. And now it’s a special, but regularly used sweetener in Sicilian pastries, although sugar, coming from the Arabs is used as well, but sparingly. Honey is the original sweet.

The  crushed pistachio decorating this canolo’s ends was another gift from the Arabs to the island, but it’s almost as if the nuts were meant to grow on the volcanic soil of the foothills, famous all over the world for their salty, meaty, and particularly Sicilian taste. 

The canolo had whispers of citrus, too – lemon, orange. I suspected fine grinds mixed in with the ricotta. A floral, rose water splash. Small flecks of shaved chocolate – so little you might not notice it, but enough to add a bitter base, a dark shadow to the sweet. 

I dropped the handle of my luggage. It bounced off the hard floor. I glanced at the man who gave me this pastry, then took a break off to the side, leaning against his food stand, smoking up an open vent in a tight white t-shirt topped with a once white apron. He saw me, gave me a nod and a half a smile, looked me up and down. I bit in again, crunched gently into the softness. He knew that I’d been willing to pay double for this feeling. Next time, I’d pay triple. I’d tip my way into poverty. He knew what my life was missing; To be fed in this way, with this kind of flavor, intention. 

I did nothing — moment after moment — but eat my cannolo. Taking in this strange and beautiful act. It grounded me. I settled in, down. I landed here.  I no longer feared the undriveable roads, I understood my want for safety came from a fear that would never feed me.  I was made of whatever this cannolo was made of, my body was remembering what it meant to be here, from here, and that was everything to me. 

I ate cannoli my entire childhood without knowing what it really was, what it meant, what history was infused within it. I am probably not alone in this. I am a part of a generation of forgetting. Our elder thought forgetting was in our best interest.  Forgetting allowed us to be American and White, forgetting our deep story of ingredients, of who we are and what we are made of—

“with bigotry and reluctant acceptance and forced to make a choice; to release their connection to their culture or to be classified as uncivilized. Which meant releasing their foods, their rituals, their storytelling, their verbal traditions, and their responsibilities to their descendents to keep them alive. Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners — particularly Sicilians — were an “uncivilized” and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people. They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea” — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like “white n*gger” and “n*gger wop”…… After a mass lynching of Sicilians in New Orleans, the Italian government was enraged and eventually after cut ties and the need for political alignment with Italy, President Harrison made a Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 which opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in “Whom We Shall Welcome,” they rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage. The mythologizing, carried out over many decades, granted Italian-Americans “a formative role in the nation-building narrative.” From the NYT article, How Italians Became White, by Brett Staples, October 2019

At this point, we got rid of a lot of things. And we got thrown Columbus as some kind of booby prize, but they kept the cannoli. They didn’t forget the cannoli. Cannoli was almost the national symbol of what we did not leave behind.

 As a kid, I assumed we ate it because it was sweet. Because it tasted good. I never imagined the cannoli had their own history, too. That it’s history was a part of our remembering. 

There were only some relatives in the new country, in Jamestown, who were very good at making cannoli. So good they became the official cannoli makers. This was often how roles were given in my family, my large and extended family made of community members and fellow immigrants. What did you make the best? What was your dough like, was it of butter and flake? How spongey are your honey balls? How spicey was your sauce and yet still remains a vibration of sweet? What you did best-- that became your honor, your place, your belonging. It wasn’t always old women. Old men were part of it all. Once they were given the duty, they always brought their food forward with pride, and always, always, it got better each time they made it. No matter how old, how senile they got. It became their fame, their purpose, their offering.  Revered for, honored for. And as thanks, we all ate it with continual praises and molto buonos. 

In the Catholic church, every month has holy days, and in old school and old country style, they were all celebrated. When I was a kid we observed almost every one of them -- or at least the ones that honored the Italian-based saints. We’d go to mass and gather afterwards in the basement of the church and the old nonnas and zias would work to a saturated sweat, wet under their sagging breasts, beads on their foreheads. All morning they made all the food, including, but certainly not limited to, trays of cannoli shells that they would fill for you upon request (remember -- only eat a cannolo if it’s filled to order. Otherwise, send it back.  

I didn’t realize until I was much older and out of the house, craving the baked goods that my mother would pack in care packages —  that not all kids were given holy days and trays of sweets like I was. They were getting boxed cookies or Twinkies or Duncan Hines brownies. I was getting handmade ancient delicacies spiked with old country magic and crafted by elders who never limited your portion size. At these holy festivities, they just gave you more and more and then got mad at you when you wanted them to stop. And if we ate too much and got a stomach ache, they gave us a shot of amaro -- an after dinner bitter cordial that soothed digestion. I didn’t realize how hard I tried to keep alive what they missed so much about their home; this island, this land, the food. They poured all their prayers in the food.  

After mass, the kids would gather in the basements below the feasts and get high off all the sweet treats. We’d  run around hyper and sneak upstairs into the church. We’d play behind the altar. We’d ring the bells and sneak gulps of the wine, passing the chalice around shouting “salute!’ We’d light offertory candles under the Blessed Mother and steal the communion hosts from the tabernacle, sucking them until they became gluttonous goo on our tongues. We’d get bored or just finally crash and need more sugar, or we’d get scared when we heard the creepy priest coming back up from the basement. We’d fly back down the back stairs heading straight to the grandmas who’d resupply us with cannoli or sfinge or biscotti or cucidati. And we’d keep eating and eating until our parents would finally drag us home in smoke filled Cadillacs with sky blue velvet seats. My father would refuse to crack the windows to let the smoke out because it was always too cold.

And then there I was, 43, the age my mother was when she birthed me, in arid Sicily, the first one in an entire generation that had stepped back on this land. I was in a crowded airport, eating a piece of my childhood. My history. That skipped one beat and in that beat changed everything we knew about ourselves, or what we were told we were. 

This cannoli was delicious. The most interesting and layered flavors I had ever tasted. 

Whatever this food is made of is what I am made of, too.