Fig Cookies - “cuccidedde”

by James Abruzzo

Growing up in a Sicilian American family, a working-class amalgam of factory workers, seamstresses, clothes pressers, machine operators, some high school educated, and some not, my world was mostly inward-looking among a close circle. My family, and their friends, emigrated from a province of Sicily called Trapani; my immediate family is from three of those towns: Alcamo and Gibellina and Sambuca. Each city was established long enough ago so that their names were originally Arabic, cities whose customs could still be found in the architecture, history, language, and yes, the food of the Middle East and North Africa. Gibellina means little hill in Arabic, Sambuca was Zabut and Alcamo, according to some history books, named after the Emir Al-Kamouk.

My relatives and their countrymen came by steamship, steerage class, and when they arrived in NY, many eventually settled in a place that may have seemed like home. Canarsie, an area of Brooklyn, was just rural and poor enough and was close enough to the sea that these islanders could be reminded, by the smell of the salt in the air, of their homeland. Named for the Native Americans who were original inhabitants, Canarsie was geographically isolated and contained. An estuary, bordered on the east and west by marsh and streams emptying into Jamaica Bay, the fixed southern natural border. Train tracks belted in Canarsie's northern side, with only periodic trestled underpasses providing the only way in and out of town.

Rich estuarial soil and temperate seaside climate were perfect conditions for growing tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and zucchini, including the elongated green squash, referred to as baseball squash or Sicilian serpents. Another memory of their homeland. And though the winter temperatures slipped below freezing, many Sicilians in Canarsie cultivated fig trees. One could always identify a Sicilian household in Canarsie: the garden trellises, the cement covered front yard with a statue of Mary in a stylized aqua blue grotto, and the tar paper covered fig-trees, mysteriously standing like so many ebonized monoliths in winter. The Alcamese in Canarsie, perhaps to be sure that they didn't forget their traditions, built a church and named it Our Lady of Miracles, the same name as the parish church in Alcamo. And from that church in Alcamo was gifted their statue of the Virgin Mary. And as permanently, the gravestones in Canarsie began to resemble those in Alcamo; in each cemetery, one can see many of my relatives' names: Rocca or Larocca, Giordano, Maninna, Amoscato, Gerbino, Mule' and others from the region.

My maternal grandmother, Maria Amoscato, married Vincenzo (Jimmy) Rocca when she was 13 years old. Jimmy, a recent Alcamo émigré, built his house "down the back" in Canarsie, at that time a rural patch of dirt roads and uneven topography. The Abruzzo's lived nearby, and the two families, long before my parents were married, socialized and celebrated holidays together. A few years after World War II ended, Stella Rocca and Sam Abruzzo, a POW, married.

My early days were surrounded by family. I lived in the same house as my father's mother and father and sister, three blocks from my other grandparents. By the time I was three, my family had moved into my mother's eldest sister's house, Katie Mannina - married to Sebastiano (Benny), who was himself born in Alcamo. By age 10, my parents bought a house that my father's brother Nino (Antonino) owned, next door to his sister Rosalie, who had married Joe Aglialoro (aglia l'oro or "golden garlic" in Italian).

But this story of the Christmas cookies happened when I lived upstairs from my Aunt Katie. The semi-detached house was across the street from a vast undeveloped once-forested area where, as a boy, I could sometimes find arrowheads and other artifacts of the long-gone Canarsie Native Americans. My immigrant family, displaced because of poverty and lack of opportunity, were now living in the fertile land of another civilization, displaced under much more harsh circumstances.

Each early December, not too long after the crush of Thanksgiving desserts faded from memory, my mother and father, and sometimes she and her sisters, would begin baking desserts for Christmas. There were sesame seed cookies called Biscotti di Regina (finger-sized butter cookies rolled in sesame seeds which we called gigilleni cookies for the Sicilian word for sesame); Struffoli, tiny golden globes of dough, fried, covered in honey and sprinkles and formed into pyramids like miniature stacked cannonballs; and cuccidedde ("coo-chi-dead-day"), a baked plain cookie stuffed with a fig mixture, shaped into rings and crescents, and sometimes fanciful sea creatures.

Baking cuccidedde (sometimes called cudderedde or buccelati, depending on where in Trapani one hails from) required a team. And so, the sisters, or, as I remember clearly, once when I was four, my mother and her friend Julia Cristello (nee Giacolone) would gather at Julia's mother's house. Together they shelled and chopped the hazelnuts and walnuts and orange skins, soaked the dried figs and the raisins, and added the cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves, the honey and the dried candied fruit, to make the filling. They then encased pieces of the filling with dough, brushing the top with egg white, and added colorful sprinkles. These logs were cut into bite-sized pieces or curled into rings and baked. They were eaten dunked in coffee or wine, and for some reason, would last, fresh-tasting throughout the season.

I remember one day in Mrs. Giacalone's house, when left alone while the women were baking, I began exploring. Opening a drawer in her dining room, I came upon a six-inch-long, already baked plump cuccidedda in the shape of a sea horse, resting on top of white linen. I had never before seen a sea horse, not even a picture of one, and that image has remained with me today, some 65 years hence.

When we think of southern Italian cooking, we picture bubbly red tomato sauce, slowly simmering pieces of pig's feet, and thin beef rolled around a breadcrumb mixture (bracciole), served with pasta. When I visit my cousins Maria and Gaetano Larocca in Alcamo these days, the tastes and smells of Sunday dinner are the same as when I was a boy in Canarsie. But what of the raisins and the cinnamon, the cloves and the honey?

At the toe of Italy, Sicily, visible from Africa, a short voyage from Greece and Albania, and too strategically located and rich with abundance for the Greeks, Romans, Normans, and Spanish to ignore, was conquered, and influenced, continuously from prehistoric times by a steady stream of cultures. A casual stroll through downtown Palermo will quickly reveal the Arab, Greek, Jewish, and Norman influences.

Before the turn of the first millennium, the Arabs established an outpost and brought their culture to an area in Sicily that is now Trapani. They brought their agriculture and architecture and their translations of Greek and Roman classics and treatises on mathematics and science. And they brought their food. They planted eggplant and wheat, and orange, lemon, and fig trees, and spice bushes. The through-line from the Arabs - who were evicted from Sicily, along with the Jews, before 1500 - to cuccidedde may be blurry but is direct. Even the cookie's crescent shape, I argue, is directly from my Arabic ancestors.

And so, this Christmas time, with hope for the ending of the terrible pandemic, for a more open embrace to different cultures, to remember that we are all part of the same humanity, and for the promise of a return to a better past, I offer this story and pictures of my cuccidedde, my homemade Christmas cookies. And my own baked version of the sea horse, an image that I've held in my mind for all of these years.