Food and Women ... Italian Style
Our city's Italian festival is coming up this weekend. It always makes me think of my grandmother more than I usually do. The reason is that someone usually makes ham pie, just like Grandma used to make. It's just ham and eggs in a pie crust that's a little thicker than a fruit pie crust. My Grandma always made it in the week following Easter. It was always my favorite part of the holiday. You could have the chocolate bunnies and hard boiled eggs. Just give me the ham pie.
There is one thing that makes me angry during the festival, though. It's the use of the word "wands" when referring to a pastry-like food. They're strips of fried dough kind of crunchy on the inside and a little soft on the inside. When they're done, you dust them with powdered sugar. Yummy! (They're not at all like fried dough ... or elephant ears as they're known in some parts of the country.) In my large, extended family (my brother, sister and I and all our cousins, on both sides of the family, are FBI .. full-blooded Irish and Italian.) we call these Curly-Qs because my Grandma, and many other people who make them, twist them before deep frying them. Other people simply call them "ribbon pastries." But there is a small faction calling them "wands." Despite the fact that they look like wands, this pisses off al lot of people. Why? There is no "w" in the Italian alphabet! No one in my family can figure out why people, especially Italians, started calling them wands. Last year, I learned that one of the organizers of our Italian festival, and her family, are frustrated by this as well. In a way, I was comforted by knowing my family isn't alone in this. This organizer has been trying to get people to stop calling them wands, but it's not working. The wand faction is very stubborn.
Every year during the festival when I see the sign for "wands," I want to rip it down, tear it to shreds and scream "There is no 'W' in Italian!" But I don't because I don't want to have a bunch of older Italian ladies mad at me. Trust me, you do not want any older Italina lady mad at you. It's not pretty. Not pretty at all.
4 comments:
what a lovely sense of humor...and love of food. i can REALLY relate! We have a lot of things in common...music, art. looking forward to reading more of your adventures!
You're right! They should keep with the culture, so I'll keep fighting the good fight.
And, they do still taste good no matter what they're called.
OK, I understand the griping about the wands (and I didn't know that there's no "w" in Italian -- but I'm getting hung up on the ham pie. Holy crap, that sounds amazing. Reminds me a bit of a now-out-of-business pizza place where I went to school (Athens, Ohio). They had a buggy Uptown that sold slices starting at lunchtime. If you want non-traditional comfort food, you'd order a slice of the Twice-Baked Potato Pie, a deep-dish pizza with mashed potatoes, onions, garlic and cheese. Food coma, anyone?
I could live on mashed potatoes, onions, garlic and cheese. That sounds awesome!
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