Author Archives: John Cutrone

Mar 23 2016
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Purim

Graggers & Hamantaschen

Purim

Here comes a fun holiday in the Jewish calendar: the setting sun on this 23rd of March brings Purim, a springtime holiday celebrated with costumes and lots of noise and special pastries made in the shape of a hat. The pastries are called hamantaschen, named for the triangular hat of a rather evil chap named Haman. The abundance of noise comes in the form of boos and hisses and the twirling of special noisemakers called graggers whenever Haman’s name is spoken on Purim, and it all goes back to an event that took place in ancient Persia as recorded in the Book of Esther. Haman, the royal vizier to the king, plotted to kill all the Jews in the empire, but his plot was discovered and foiled by Queen Esther and her father, Mordecai. On each Purim, the story of these events is told in the reading of the Megillah, and each time the name Haman is spoken, the congregation boos and hisses and twirls graggers to drown it out.

It’s also a day of fanciful costumes. Just like at Halloween, there are traditional Purim costumes––the main characters of the story are the most traditional of Purim costumes. But it’s also not uncommon to see all sorts of costumes on Purim, and the image above is taken from a book about Purim by David Wander. It’s a one-of-a-kind painted artists’ book in the Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University, and in it, the costumes range from Esther and Haman to Teletubbies and Power Rangers. It all looks like great fun, if you ask me.

As for the hamantaschen, they are meant to evoke the hat of Haman, but certainly they are tastier than any hat. They are triangles of sweet dough filled with poppyseed or prune fillings, traditionally, but you might find other fillings, too. Another Purim tradition is to bestow gifts of food… and you can bet your bottom dollar that hamantaschen will be part of those gifts. That was how I first learnt of Purim… thanks to a gift of hamantaschen bestowed upon me one Purim by my friends Georges and Judith. Georges is gone now, but I’ll remember him probably every Purim because of that gift. And Judith is someone I often see on Wednesdays. How lucky for me that Purim begins this year on a Wednesday evening: I’ll get to wish her a happy Purim… and if I’m lucky, she may even bring me a hamantaschen. I hope it’s poppyseed.

Locals! Come see Seth and me tonight at Social House in Downtown Lake Worth! We won’t exactly be celebrating Purim, but we will be celebrating local community and art. It’s the Fine Art edition of Social House’s ongoing Maker Meet events, and we’re excited to be there featured with other fine local artists. 6 to 9 PM at Social House, 512 Lucerne Avenue in beautiful Downtown Lake Worth. If you do come by, be sure to say hello and let me know you’re a Convivio Book of Days reader.

 

Mar 20 2016
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Equinox, Holy Week, Palm Sunday

Balance

The Waterfall

By the time you read this, spring will have made its arrival by the almanac: the equinox––vernal here in the Northern Hemisphere, autumnal in the Southern––came and went at 12:30 in the morning (Eastern Daylight Time) this 20th day of March. In traditional reckoning of time we are at spring’s height, its midpoint, and now are on the downhill ride toward summer. But no matter how you reckon your time, what is clear in all cases is this: balance. Day and night now are just about equal in length no matter where we are on the planet, and there is something about that balance that is wonderful (as in full of wonder): no matter what concerns we have in our lives, be they major or minor, the celestial clockwork continues. If a vast planet of oceans and mountains can achieve balance, it gives us hope that we can, too.

It is, as well today, Palm Sunday, setting the events of Holy Week in motion. We enter into the highest days of the Christian calendar. I have said this before in the Convivio Book of Days: Palm Sunday has never been a favorite day of mine. The Mass is really long, the congregation gets to read but it’s almost always lackluster and halfhearted, and I never know if I should feel mourning or celebration. Father Seamus likes to say that attendance goes up whenever they give something away at church, even if it is just a couple of palms, even in this chlorophyll-laden land where we see palm trees every time we open our eyes.

One of the more charming traditions for the day is the fashioning of crosses out of those palms. Some can be very elaborate: my mom’s cousin’s husband could turn a single palm frond into a cross with two flowers bursting out of its center. A lesser known tradition would have us eat figs on Palm Sunday, which comes out of the story of Christ’s cursing of the fig tree, which occurred soon after he arrived in Jerusalem:

In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once. (Matthew 21: 18-19)

And even this irritates me about Palm Sunday. This story sounds like something Teenager Jesus might have done. Why curse a fig tree for having no fruit? Be that as it may, some people make sure to eat figs on Palm Sunday just because of this verse and a similar one in Mark. They’ll be eating dried figs, for sure, because it’s not fig season. You’d think Jesus would have known that, too.

And with Palm Sunday’s close, we begin to clean. Just as we “made our house fair as we are able” during Advent, these next few days are days of making our house fair as we are able for the coming feast of Easter. By Wednesday night, the moon will be full and all should be done, and all distractions set aside, for the mysteries of Easter begin with Holy Thursday: one of my favorite nights of the year, a night rich with ceremony and ending in pilgrimage and peaceful contemplation, and I am of the mind that my disdain for Palm Sunday is more than made up for by my love for Maundy Thursday. And there it is, perhaps: that balance, manifested, as we stand here on a planet midway now between longest night and longest day.

Image: “The Waterfall” by Anton Romako. Painting, late 19th century. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Mar 19 2016
5 Comments
St. Joseph's Day

Tonight Zeppole

455_-_Siracusa_-_Cartello_in_una_pasticceria-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall'Orto_-_15-Oct-2008

And so the Finns had St. Urho’s Day this past week and the Irish had St. Patrick’s Day. But today it is St. Joseph’s Day, and here we come to a very important day to my people. For us Italians, the feast of San Giuseppe centers around food (imagine that?!) and in particular one pastry: zeppole. Any good Italian bakery worth its salt (or perhaps sugar) will be selling these pastries, which traditionally make their appearance only at this time of year, today. In the more popular bakeries, you might find rolling racks full of trays of them behind the counter; they’ll be making so many of them, they won’t possibly fit them all inside the display case.

Zeppole are pastries of fried dough, generous in size, each typically something you could fit into two open hands. They are filled with custard and often include a few cherries on top. There are also sfinci, related to zeppole, but filled with sweetened ricotta cream, perhaps with a few small chocolate chips, very much like a cannoli filling. Variations of these sweets, in name and in shape and ingredients, exist throughout Italy for the feast of San Giuseppe, but it is in the South, from where my family hails, that they are best known. Both sfinci and zeppole are pastries with histories that go back many centuries, with names that come out of the Arabic influence on the region. How far back do they go? The ancient Romans made fried pastries each year on the 17th of March in honor of Bacchus, and it is thought that the zeppole and sfinci we make today are direct descendants of those long ago sweets of springtime.

It may be Lent, but St. Joseph’s Day provides a day to step away from that otherwise somber restraint to enjoy rich and festive pastries. Even the Church offers a special dispensation to allow for corned beef and cabbage when St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday, so I am here granting you dispensation allowing you to have a zeppole for San Giuseppe, even if you have given up sweets for Lent. It is, after all, but one day a year. For my people, these pastries are perhaps the highlight of March. You have an entire nation behind you.

As for Seth and me, we will be heading to Joseph’s Market in nearby Palm Beach Gardens. It will, most likely, be absolutely crazy there today, but that’s part of the appeal. We Italians are quite fond of name days, and on the Feast of San Giuseppe, everyone named Joseph or Joe or Josephine or any variant thereof celebrates his or her name day. Even Joseph’s Market. If it’s anything like last year, the aroma of sausages and peppers will be wafting through the store, and there will be someone belting out Neopolitan songs to live musical accompaniment, and maybe a few Frank Sinatra songs and Dean Martin songs for good measure, and people will carry on conversations at times from one end of a store aisle to another, for this is how my people communicate best, by shouting, even if we are just asking how much something costs or paying someone a compliment. And if we are not shouting, we will talk and gesture. Even I––a quiet man who does not carry on conversations across spaces greater than three or four feet––cannot seem to help from gesturing. The hands speak louder than the tongue sometimes. Imagine, a small store filled with hundreds of these people. And the great bulk of them at the bakery counter, ordering zeppole by the dozen. It is the polar opposite of visiting the Finnish bakery for cardamom-scented pulla on St. Urho’s Day.

But these are my people and I love them and the zeppole of San Giuseppe are what make March worthwhile. March, the month that Garrison Keillor once described as “the month God created to show people who do not drink what a hangover feels like.” A good zeppole can make your March worthwhile.

 

Zeppole e Sfinci

Images: Zeppole and sfinci, above. The zeppole are more popular; the sfinci at this bakery are identified by green candied cherries. Top: “Stasera Zeppole” translates to “Tonight Zeppole.” The photograph of a baker’s storefront window was taken by Giovanni Dall’Orto in Syracuse, Sicily.

 

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