HAPPY ST PATRICK'S DAY (& ST JOSEPH'S DAY)

It's March 17th, St. Patrick's Day, which means you should be wearing green and preparing for St. Joseph's Day. There are only two more days so you'd better get started! A good place to start is with traditional St. Joseph's Day Zeppoli. Here's a recipe.

Don't worry if you're not Italian--you can pretend for one day. If you've never heard of St. Joseph's Day, here are my posts from the past two years. Click here: St Joseph's Day

Buona Festa d'San Giuseppe! (And Happy St. Patrick's Day!)

HAPPY ST. JOSEPH'S DAY

You know about St. Patrick's Day, but do you know about St. Joseph's Day?

This feast day is as important to Italians as St. Paddy's is to the Irish. In Italy, and in neighborhoods with a population of Italian Americans, people celebrate the patron saint of Sicily. There won't be any green beer, but there are special pastas, fish, sweets, baked breads, and fava beans. Some Italian Catholics will prepare a St. Joseph's table, or Tavole di San Giuseppe, and provide a feast spread that is open to all. Special groups such as orphans, the elderly and the homeless are invited to attend. This is a day to remember the poor, so there will be no meat, and instead of cheese breadcrumbs are sprinkled over pasta. These traditions go back to the middle ages, when much of Sicily was wiped out by a famine. It is said that the humble fava bean helped them survive, and to this day favas will be included in the feast of St. Joseph.

zeppole

And of course zeppole. Don't forget the zeppole. A zeppola (plural zeppole, in southern dialects zeppoli) or St. Joseph's Day cake, also called sfinge and in Rome Bigne di San Giuseppe, is a delicious little fried pastry. They sell them on the streets of Rome, Naples, and Sicily. Sometimes they're filled with crema or custard. (Read about them here)

Italians in New Orleans celebrate St. Joseph's Day:


Like the Irish and St. Patrick's Day, this is a day for Italians to take pride in their culture and heritage. Even if you're not Italian, have something Italian today. Have a slice of pizza (invented in Naples) or some pasta (invented by the Romans) with a nice glass of chianti, or have a caffe latte (you guessed it) or maybe an ice cream (gelato was first created by the Sicilian-born Procopio dei Coltelli back to the 16th century). Won't you join me?

The Holy Trinity: Italian bread, Italian wine, and some extra virgin olive oil.

Oh, and use a fork. Knives go back to prehistoric times, but Catherine di Medici brought the first fork to France in 1533 when she married the future King Henry II. The French were slow to warm to the idea. She also influenced their cooking to a great degree by bringing a sophisticated palate and cuisine from Italy.

An Englishman named Thomas Coryate brought the first forks back to England after seeing them in Italy during his travels in 1608. The English ridiculed the forks as effeminate and unnecessary, and explained that they had two good hands to eat with. Gradually, they came around.

Finally, on a lighter note, everyone's favorite Italian American, Paulie Walnuts, comments on the Italian contribution to world cuisine. Ethnic pride? Fuggedaboudit.

HAPPY ST. JOSEPH'S DAY!

Everyone in America is familiar with St. Patrick's Day -- two days ago everyone was an amateur Irishman drinking green beer -- but if you're Italian you know the big day is St. Joseph's Day, March 19th. The Feast of St. Joseph is celebrated in Italy and in Italian neighborhoods throughout the United States. The picture above comes from the St. Joseph's Day celebration in Spain. Statues are carried through the streets, and people open their homes to provide food and drink for everyone who shows up. It's a great idea! C'entanni! In Sicily, St. Joseph is regarded as the Patron Saint, and in many Italian-American communities thanks are given to St. Joseph ("San Giuseppe") for preventing a famine in Sicily during the Middle Ages. Giving food to the needy is a St. Joseph's Day custom. In some communities it is traditional to wear red clothing and eat a Sicilian pastry known as Zeppole on St. Joseph's Day.

BE ITALIAN

Saint Joseph's Day, March 19, celebrates the patron saint of Sicily. Everybody knows St. Patrick with his green beer and shamrocks, but in Italian neighborhoods today is the Feast of St. Joseph. I don't blame you for not knowing, since St. Joseph didn't have a huge advertising budget. Besides, Sicilians tend to keep things on the down-low. If you're lucky enough to be near an Italian neighborhood, you might find a St. Joseph's Day altar where people place offerings of flowers, candles, fruit, vino, fava beans, cakes, breads, cookies and zeppole--a delicious Sicilian pastry. Today, you might eat pasta con le sarde topped with breadcrumbs as a reminder of the less fortunate who can't afford to eat cheese. (Some say the breadcrumbs resemble sawdust from St. Joseph's floor, since St. Joseph was a carpenter, but these traditions go back centuries and nobody really knows.) Ask the oldtimers sitting outside sipping grappa, and they'll tell you today we celebrate all things Italian from the Renaissance to Sophia Loren. They say that Americans are oblivious to their own culture, and certainly don't recognize the myriad cultural contributions of the Italians, even as they sip their espresso and eat their pizza. That might be true. With the exception of recent arrivals, most Americans assimilated a long time ago and lost connection to their own "Old Country" ways. Simply put, they joined the mainstream. That's fine, but kind of boring. We think it's good to remember where we came from--to be full-fledged Americans but also celebrate the victories and struggles of our ancestors and appreciate our past. In the meantime, I'll let you in on something: What's the secret to enjoying life? Be Italian. If you can't do that, you can be an honorary Italian today. This clip from the Broadway play "Nine," explains how.

GUNS AND CANNOLI

These delicious dessert pastries are cannoli and they are probably the best known Italian pastry, but the thing is, they're not Italian. They're Sicilian. If you think Italian and Sicilian are one and the same, think again. Sicily has it's own unique culture--and part of that melange is certainly Italian, but parts of it are also Greek, Arabic, African and French--not to mention a few Vandals and Visigoths who showed up around dinnertime. The Mafia--and yes, it exists--is also Sicilian, NOT Italian. The Sopranos--everybody's favorite Mafia family--are not really Mafia, and they're not Sicilian, they're Neapolitan. No big deal, right?

For thousands of years, the area that now comprises Italy was a collection of regions--each with its own food, customs and dialect. The unification of Italy (il Risorgimento, or The Resurgence ) only began in 1815 with the Congress of Vienna (and the end of Napoleonic rule) and became complete around 1871 with the Franco-Prussian War (some parts still didn't join until World War I). For a country--the land and the people--that goes back thousands of years this unification is relatively recent history, and people cling to regional differences to this day. The alpini from the Dolomites are practically German--and many speak it up north--and have little in common with the Venetian shopowner, the Tuscan vintner, the sophisticated Roman, the Calabrese farmer, the Sicilian fisherman. It's kind of confusing.

Even to "Italians."

Americans of Italian descent often don't know what to believe, or what is even Italian. After first and second generation ancestors struggled to assimilate, some of the later generations sought their long-abandoned ethnicity with a vengeance. Mainstream, non-hyphenated Americans could drink a cappucino and eat calamari, and they didn't seem to have this identity crisis, but people who still remembered Grandpa speaking broken English or Grandma making gnocchi di semolina wanted to reconnect with that rich and nearly abandoned heritage. They looked up from the cultural trenches to find popular stereotypes of Jersey Shore loudmouths and their suburban neighbors, The Sopranos, whacking their rivals and figured, hey, that's kind of cool. After all, Italians are entertaining. The folks that brought you opera and the Renaissance know how to please a crowd, but what's the underlying message here? Are these folks any worse than the average Americans idiots on sit-coms? The range may be narrower, certainly, but are these portrayals harmful? Maybe the TV Italians are simply acting out the repressed Ids of uptight puritanical American viewers. For the average non-ethnic American viewer, this amped-up, operatic display of passion and violence and loyalty to the family--yes, the family--might be entertaining. I've got cousins who love Jersey Shore (which is basically Italian American minstrelsy) and The Sopranos (a good show, though hardly filled with role models) and they wouldn't know a "gabagool" if it bit them on the ass. This is part of their "Italian-ness." They're Americans, of course, and maybe, in their way of thinking, they're learning about their cultural roots by watching Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi and Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino strut and fret their hour upon the stage.


Maybe these shows are popular simply because lust and violence are always popular, and it shouldn't seem so weird if people in Nebraska get vicarious thrills watching the trials and tribulations of Tony Soprano. I honestly don't know. For me, keeping my cultural background alive isn't a hostile act directed at homogenized America so much as a journey of self-discovery--however corny that may sound--and as I write this I'm cooking a big pot of marinara sauce (please don't pronounce it "Mary-Nayra" if you can help it) from a recipe my Mom gave me that she got from her folks, which they got from their folks, and so on, going back along a line of ancestors as present as tribal totems to an aborigine, and I'm paying my respects. Why lose all that?

These are important questions, especially now, as xenophobia is sweeping the land. Tea Party types fear foreigners won't pledge allegiance to their new home--but should they erase all trace of their old countries? Should they jettison ancestors somewhere in the Middle Passage? Should they develop cultural amnesia and assimilate completely and irreversibly? I hope not.

Which brings us back to cannoli. My father makes cannoli by hand--does yours? I didn't think so. No matter. You can make it yourself. Here is a recipe (click HERE). Make them for St. Joseph's Day, March 19th. Or if you live near an Italian grocery you can pick up a box and bring it home. Just remember not to leave it at the scene of the crime.