Don't fuhget the fuhgotz!

I'm trying something new, or rather, something old, for Thanksgiving this year. In addition to my annual whole-berry cranberry sauce, I decided on a whim that I would try to replicate my grandmother's . . . well, her what exactly? If I said focaccia, you'd know what I was talking about, but it wouldn't feel right. We never said "focaccia" in our family.

It was this item that first introduced me to the idea that our family's linguistic heritage was something of an Americanized - maybe "Brooklynized" would be putting it better - non-standard Italian dialect. I was probably in middle school - young enough that I had to write an "About Me" assignment at the beginning of the year, but old enough to know that the word I was typing was decidedly not what I was trying to say.

My favorite food is my grandma's faggots

Well, that can't be right.

My favorite food is my grandma's fagots

That looks way too close to the other one.

"Mom, how do you spell [fuhgotz]?

Her answer, in essence, was that "fuhgotz" was not a real word, that we were just saying "focaccia" wrong. She spelled "focaccia" for me, and I found myself writing in an essay that my favorite food was this thing I'd never heard of before. I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

My grandmother was an excellent cook, and the foods she made are part of her substantial legacy. Fuhgotz were on the table just about every Sunday. (To me, focaccia will always be something you get at a fancy restaurant, not the food I grew up with). They have rarely made an appearance since she passed away, though. Though everyone has recipes for her biscuits, her pizza dolce, her sauce, fuhgotz seem not quite as prominent on our menus these days. Whenever they were forgotten in the oven in the rush of getting dinner for a huge family on the table, my grandfather would say, "You fuhgot the fuhgotz!" I hope we don't.

I asked my mom for the recipe, and she was able to give me a brief outline. It was similar to what I remembered from the time Grandma had shown me herself, years ago, though I hadn't written anything down and so would have forgotten the onions. Mom said she wasn't sure, though: "You'd have to ask Aunt Cathy. She's the only one who really knows the recipe. I just do the biscuits."

I have literally no clue how my first attempt at fuhgotz will turn out. (In retrospect, maybe the first attempt should have been one I tried out at home, not my contribution to Thanksgiving dinner. Oh well.) But this exercise has me thinking. About how fuhgotz is more of a real word to me than focaccia will ever be, even if it doesn't appear in any dictionary. And about the fractionating of legacies. How Grandma crocheted, made biscuits, made fuhgotz, belonged to the Rosary Society. How I crochet. Mom makes biscuits. Aunt Cathy makes fuhgotz. Aunt Sue belongs to the Rosary Society. Grandma could do all of those things, but while we all have treasured memories of these and many more facets of Grandma's life and personality, it seems like we are each the keepers of only some small fraction of her legacy.

On grief and cookies

On July 26, 2013 my grandmother, Laura Lanzillotto Gatto, died. It was the Feast of St. Anne. It was not unexpected, but was nonetheless devastating. My mom later told me that when she called to tell me, I "couldn't form a complete sentence." I'm not sure I was trying to. What is there to say?

Instead, I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time. When I hung up the phone with my mother, I walked to the kitchen and took 1 1/2 sticks of butter out of the fridge to soften. Not until they were on the counter did I call my husband, or start to cry. It may have been the first time I ever remembered to take the butter out to soften.

My grandmother's most famous recipe, the food she was best known for, were her biscuits. (That's bis-coots, accent on the second syllable. The vowel sound is closer to that in look than in loot.) Both the name and the recipe are derived from biscotti, but we never called them that, and they are, truly, a completely different cookie.

I'm fairly certain that I got my first job out of grad school due to my education, experience, relevant skill set, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that the interviewer had once had Grandma's biscuits at a bake sale.

No one has ever been able to replicate Grandma's biscuits exactly, despite sustained efforts. We've been trying for years. She didn't bake from a recipe, so every recipe she wrote down was slightly different from the last, and you always had to cross your fingers and hope that this index card was going to be the index card that got everything right. Grandma was known to look at a biscuit recipe in her own handwriting and ask, incredulous, "Where did you get this? I never would have told you to put [so much butter, so little butter, so much flour, etc.]!" My cousin has come really close to replicating Grandma's biscuits, and I had a couple of good batches in high school that got everyone's hopes up before my luck wore off. My husband irritated me by coming closer with his biscuits than I ever do with mine, despite the fact that we work from the same recipe card and I share Grandma's genes. My mom's are good, but they're not the same. 

I had not planned to bake that Friday, of course. I had the day off, but was hoping to research at the NYC Municipal Archives. My major worry was that I couldn't find my research notebook. What ended up mattering, instead, was that I didn't have enough sugar or flour, but I'd already begun creaming enough butter to make a full batch. So I improvised. I put in as much sugar as I had in the pantry, and stopped there. I substituted whole wheat flour for what was missing of the white. This was not an effort to replicate Grandma's cookies. This was a desperate attempt, a clawing at the air, to capture whatever I could of her essence, her routine, her personality, her legacy. My biscuits tasted fine, but they were nothing like Grandma's.

Baking may have been an irrational response to my grandmother's death, but I was not unique in crying into my cookie dough. The night after my grandmother died, my cousin - the cousin who comes so close with her biscuits - began baking.  She made multiple batches, each one tweaked slightly. She had taste testers. She took notes. She was determined to get them right. She came a lot closer than I did.

And yet, my grandmother had told me where her recipe came from. She took her mother's recipe, and her mother-in-law's recipe, and changed them to suit her taste. She removed the lard from one, substituting butter so they would be healthier. She eliminated the yeast, preferring the rise she got from baking powder. In some sense, I think that the pursuit of the perfect biscuit is the pursuit of a fiction, something that doesn't exist - or that, at the very least, is a moving target. Even Grandma's were not necessarily the same from one batch to another. She'd improvise if she ran out of ingredients. She sometimes added cinnamon. Grandma didn't inherit a finished, perfected biscuit recipe, so why should we expect her to leave us one? Maybe the tweaking, the changing, the improvising is as much a part of the legacy as the taste of the perfect cookie.

But even knowing that didn't make it any easier when, on the night after the funeral, I waited until everyone else had gone to bed, took from my mom's cookie jar what I knew would be my very last of Grandma's biscuits, and savored it through my tears.

How would Great-Grandma bake?

There are a couple of genealogy or history related books on my list of things to read while I'm unemployed/a housewife (Annals of the Famine in Ireland; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), but what I've recently started reading instead is Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is a fascinating, enlightening, eye-opening book, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're open to taking a long, hard look at what you eat and where it comes from. Of course, I do think the author probably has his biases, as we all do. I recently watched his movie The Botany of Desire, where he rails against monoculture. He certainly makes good points, but to attribute the Irish Potato Famine strictly to the fact that growing a single variety of potato left the crop more open to disease with not one single mention of a single political, economic, social, or religious factor? Yes it's a movie about biology, but the Potato Famine wasn't a strictly biological tragedy, and can't honestly be presented as one. If he's committed similar omissions elsewhere, though, they haven't been in areas where I'm knowledgable enough to pick up on them. With that in mind, and if you want to know where your food comes from, I'm enjoying The Omnivore's Dilemma so far.

Now, one of the most exciting wedding presents we got was a bread machine, and I'd already started using it to bake bread recreationally. I'd have nice, thick, slices of homemade bread during the day as snacks, or a slice for breakfast, or as a side with dinner. But we were still buying loaves of sliced bread to make sandwiches. It was almost as if we thought of the fresh, homemade bread as some sort of novel new extra, not "real" bread like the stuff in the plastic bag from the shelf in the store. Thanks to this book, I made the somewhat radical decision not to pick up any bread when I went grocery shopping yesterday, despite the fact that we had no store-bought bread at home. (When I told Ben that I would make him a sandwich on homemade bread for lunch today, he responded "I'm going to have to get rid of that book!")

I also have recipes for baking bread the old-fashioned way, in the oven, and I'm thinking of trying out a sourdough starter, too. But what I'd really like to do is bake bread the old-fashioned way. The recipes I find on the internet can't be the same as the recipes my great-grandmothers would have learned a century or more ago. (Is cottage cheese really a standard bread ingredient? Or, more to the point, was cottage historically a standard bread ingredient?) The bread recipe that Grandma Molly learned from Mary Gillan Quinn, or the recipe that Nana learned from Julia Toner Mulvaney? That would be a recipe I'd love to try. The 19th century was no nostalgic era of good nutrition and food purity (see: swill milk) - but I'd still be really interested in baking the bread my great-grandmother baked. (When I add milk, it'll be milk that complies with FDA regulations, after all.)

I used the Fulton History website to search old newspapers for bread recipes. As it turns out, bread recipes did not often appear in late 19th century newspapers. (If everyone knows how to bake bread, why print the recipe? When was the last time your local paper printed a step-by-step guide to sending an e-mail?) They often appeared in mid-20th century papers, but I'm not really interested in bread recipes from the 50s, when everyone was eating Wonderbread, anyway. There were only a couple of recipes I came across that met my criteria, and I may try them all - if I can figure them out!

Elmira NY Morning Telegram, 1898

Geneva NY Gazette, 1879

Interesting - a recipe for potato bread, I guess. Not sure whether I'll try this one. I also can't tell how much flour Miss Davidson added. (Is it really more important to tell us where the flour was milled than to tell us how much of it to use?)

Hudson NY Evening Register, 1886

Syracuse NY Evening Herald, 1895

Can anyone help me with this - what is "sweet milk"? I'd like to try my hand at some of these, but some of the terminology is a little difficult to penetrate.