Italian Hours: Struffoli in New Haven

Published by Thursday, December 14, 2017 Permalink 2

Long Lost: The Archeology of an Italian-American Family and its Struffoli

by Jocelyn Ruggiero

I’m flipping through a thirty-year-old community cookbook by the Saint Ann Society of St. Michael’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut, when a recipe for struffoli, the Italian pastry, catches my eye. Crispy on the outside and cakey on the inside, these marble-sized balls of dough are first deeply fried in vegetable oil, then drenched in warm honey laced with tangerine peels. Every year at Christmas time, they are served piled high in a mountain of sticky goodness. And for me, struffoli are inextricably tied to my great Aunt Chris.

I tasted her struffoli just once, when I was very young. I sit on a green and gold velvet couch in the living room of another great aunt, from another side of my family. I place the struffoli in my mouth in bunches. They are sweet and syrupy. I know, because my father told me, that my Aunt Chris made them, and that they are special.

struffoli Italian Neopolitan Christmas fritters

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