Sunday in Boston With Gnocchi

In my pale blue, cotton flannel pajamas and cotton socks, I could ice skate the polished hardwood floors, around the sides of the oriental rugs. It was very early, but I didn’t pay attention to clocks. I only remember that my grandmother’s large third floor flat on a bluff overlooking a frozen Mystic River in Somerville, Massachusetts was quiet, with winter sun slanting under pulled shades and between drapes, and it seemed magical.

I could skate my stocking feet along the side of the runner down the hall past the bedrooms of my mother and aunt Nina, her elder sister who really ran the family, not my grandmother.

But my grandmother – Nonna Rosa, we called her – had been out of bed already for hours. The hallway led to bathrooms on one side, and past sliding double doors that opened into a dining room, that was closed at the moment. At the far end of the long hallway, was a swinging door that led into Nonna’s large, generous kitchen.

I could see the light under the door and I knew Nonna was up and already cooking for the big Sunday, Alessandrini family dinner, with which I was already familiar…I pushed the swinging door open and walked through to see my Nonna chopping onions on a big wooden block. She looked up at me and beamed, and greeted me in Italian. I answered in Italian, which somehow, I could speak, but don’t remember how.

Today, I remember this as in a dream in which one suddenly speaks in a foreign tongue he’d never heard before…I didn’t speak Italian to my parents, only English. It was as if my fluency in Italian was a secret I shared only with my grandmother, who spoke, actually, in the playful, modulated dialect of her native Rome…

She put the chopped onions into a large, black, cast iron skillet atop the stove and sautéed it in olive oil. I wandered out onto a glassed in sun porch that led off from the kitchen and looked out onto the towering, green-painted iron of the Mystic River bridge with ships passing underneath looking like toys,

A hinged storm window opened onto a small section of roof that covered the downstairs sun deck…the small area was littered with crusts of stale, white Italian bread. The work of my Nonna who loved feeding the blackbirds and sparrows to endured the winter here each year.

I found more bread on a table and threw it out the window to help in the feeding. “Poveracci, poor things, had hava tough time all-a winter,” she would say in her broken English and tossed them pieces of bread. The birds would show up almost immediately.

I was too young to realize that her affinity with wintering birds stemmed form more than a few hard cold winters she’d endured working at a Boston shoe factory supporting four kids, during the just-past, Great Depression, lucking to have any job at all. Things were better now – a little.

As i remember everyone saying, "There's a war on." I wasn't sure what that really meant except that it was something all the adult took very seriously with grim, sometimes frightened, often scared looks on their faces. It also meant a couple of uncles now were gone away and showed up on holidays wearing khaki uniforms with brass buttons and some medals.

Mostly it meant one of my uncles who was in the service, gave me a toy "Flying Tiger" tiny fighter plane with a snarly pointy toothed face painted on its nose, giving it a comic ferocity. It became my favorite toy and i “flew” it everywhere, by holding it up and making propeller noises with my mouth…The little plan was there where I’d left it the day before, on a window sill.

I picked it up and flew it along the windows, silhouetted in early morning sun as it began to rise, I put it in diving mode, swooping along the linoleum and strafed my grandmother’s fuzzy slippers.

Then, buzzing with my pursed lips, I climbed to high altitude along he side of the stove. It was a gigantic cooking stove with one half in black cast iron with a furnace to burn wood or coal, a flat top with flat round tops that could be lifted off with a special long-handled tool that fitted a slot in the round stove top unit, to reveal flames leaving inside…A wide, metal smoke stack ran from the back of the stove up through the ceiling. The other half was a more conventional gas stove with four burners and an oven.

The experience hangs dreamlike and vivid, preserved perfectly in my consciousness from scores of years past. The stove, the quiet of the kitchen the delicious smells of herbs, fresh garlic, sauted garlic and onions blending and filling the warm kitchen as the slanting morning sunlight brightened, fullfiling the promise the coming Sunday celebration.

It seemed a ritual that had come down to us thorugh the ages, from grandmas past and would always be held. Yet I didn't know that our many-course, feast that would be served, 2 p.m. to a dozen or so family members and friends, laughing, exchanging stories, teasing and enjoying music of their own making represented an era coming to a close as this close-knit, extended family with grow more and more affluent in the coming postwar period and spread out into suburbs and across the continent, thinning their connections accordingly.

My grandmother now was rolling out dough on a large table…stopping every few moments to check things on the stove. Instead of flattening out the dough as she usually did to make noodles, she rolled the dough lengthwise into long cylindrical tubes.

Then she cut the tubes into fat, little, equal, inch-long pieces. These were to be her fabled gnocchi. My job was to make a dent in each doughy gnocchi. This produced a little indentation as the gnocchi. When the gnocchi were dried, cooked and served, these little indentations would catch sauce and ground meat of the ragout sauce, along with the grated Parmesan cheese that would be sprinkled on each dish as it is served.

I remember making those dents as one of the happiest times of my life. Maybe my five-year-old finger wasn’t exactly sanitized, but the gnocchi would be boiled anyway. And they were plump, sweet, delightful when she served them covered with the robust, aromatic tomato sauce she sautéed and simmered for hours with pork, and beef and that tasted like you thought you'd dreamed it, and that I've tried to duplicate for decades and still only approached. Then sprinkle well with freshly grated Reggiano Parmiggiano cheese -- something you could never buy in anything but well-aged golden wedges sliced from the wheel by an Italian deli clerk in those days.