Bitter Almonds
Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
At the age of eleven, the daughter of a Sicilian sharecropper, Maria Grammatico, entered the San Carlo Institute in the mountaintop town of Erice, an orphanage run by nuns who were famous throughout Sicily for their almond pastries, but who were less adept at dealing with young girls. After ten years of hard work and harsh discipline, Maria emerged with the secrets of the nuns’ pastries hidden inside her head.
This is the story of her carefree country childhood—her Dickensian life in the orphanage with no heat, no running water, and only wood-burning ovens—and her triumphs as an entrepreneur and a world-famous pastry chef.
Bitter Almonds includes 46 of the recipes that she ‘stole’ from the nuns, committed to writing for the first time in these pages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bitter almonds lend depth of flavor to the buttery cookie doughs prepared by nuns in the south of Italy. And the bittersweet recollections of Grammatico, a renowned pastry cook and shopkeeper in Erice, Sicily, lend depth to this slender volume of Italian recipes. As researched by Mary Taylor Simeti, author of several books on Sicily, the reminiscences of hardships endured during Grammatico's girlhood, spent as an orphan in a Sicilian cloister, give poignancy to the uncomplicated, sweet pastries that make up her life's work now. Americans accustomed to rich excesses and scads of chocolate in their desserts may not find much to excite them here. But those who savor fine pastry and Italian artistry in marzipan and baking will apreciate the enormous effort necessary to translate Grammatico's recipes for use in our kitchens. Recent voyagers to the south of Italy may find themselves feeling slightly homesick for the simpler meals-and simpler lifestyle-evoked by Grammatico.
