As I travel around the Cape looking for local food stories, I’m often surprised by what I hear. The other day, I met John Carafoli—a world renowned food stylist—known for the artful way he sets up food spreads for events and photographers. I expected to talk about his career. Instead he told me about growing up in Sagamore Village in the 1950s.
At the time, the village was very Italian—his grandparents were part of a wave of Italian immigrants who settled there in the late 18- and early 19-hundreds. They came here to find work—many Italian immigrants helped dig the Cape Cod canal—and every family brought its own traditional foods and recipes.
“The way I got to know all about this food is, at the age of eleven or twelve my mother died,” Carafoli told me. “In order to keep myself occupied, I would go to all the women in the neighborhood and see them cooking. They each had their own yards, and they had pigs in the back yard, they had grape vines, they did all the things that they did in their homeland. And I would come home and try to make those recipes for my father and my aunt and my brother. And I got to know all the women, and I have all their recipes.”
These recipes have become a lifelong project for Carafoli—they’ve taken him to back to Italy to trace particular pastas and breads, and back to his grandparents’ city of Bologna to learn about their language and culture. He says the recipes he learned as a child are a bridge that connects him to both his Italian heritage and the Sagamore Village of his past.
“This is brassadella,” Carafoli said, showing me a cake. “I was taught this by a 95-year-old woman in Sagamore—Mafalda Maiolini—they call her Muffy—and it’s a very simple coffee cake. You make two rolls, and the first roll you put on a baking sheet. You pokes holes in it, or you make a little trough around it. You put the second roll on top and bake it with egg wash and a little sugar on top.”
Maiolini also taught Carafoli to make a black Italian jam called Savor. It’s done with the dead ripe fruit at the end of the season—just about any kind of fruit.
“Everything you could think of,” Carafoli said. “Apples, pears, peaches, plums… They use it in a sweet raviolis, which are about 6 inches by 2 or 3 inches across, in a dough that’s made with complete liquor. They put that Savor in the middle of it, and then fold it and deep fry it, and then put sugar on it—not powdered sugar. Just granulated sugar.”
It's a dessert typical, he says, of the Emilia Romagna area—and of Sagamore.
Carafoli also remembers the Italian women of Sagamore Village foraging for bolete mushrooms, and the men growing their own grapes for wine. There was a downtown market called Louis’ that carried all the imported staples, and a bakery that sold special loaves of curved bread called horn bread. In the winter, he says, there was always a lot of pasta and squash.
“Squash ravioli, squash tortelloni,” Carafoli said. “I make a lasagna with it. Instead of the regular filling for the lasagna, I put the squash in with a little nutmeg in it butter and Parmesan cheese.”
I asked him if he felt there was still much sense of Italian heritage left in Sagamore.
“Oh, it’s totally gone,” he replied. “I mean it’s very interesting because even at all these wakes—these people are going—what comes up is the food, and it’s the memories that these people had about the foods, and it’s just sort of—you just sort of watch it disappear.”
For his part, John Carafoli is doing everything he can to hold on to the memories. He writes a quarterly column in Edible Cape Cod about cooking locally with his Italian recipes, and he’s hoping one day to write a book about the Italian community in Sagamore.
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RECIPE FOR SAVOR
This is a time-consuming jam at first glance, but most of the work is in the simmering. If you can set aside two 6-hour chunks over two days to be around, you've done the hard part. This jam is traditionally made in the fall, with any leftover fruit from the harvest. Carafoli has planted his own orchard of pears, apples, figs, apricots, and peaches, and he's hoping to make savor from his own fruit next year.
6 large ripe pears
6 large ripe apples
6 large ripe peaches
1 pound Italian prune-plums or other plums
1 pound seedless red grapes
12 ounces fresh cranberries
12 pitted prunes
12 ounces pitted dried apricots
12 ounces dark raisins
zest of 2 oranges, removed in strips and minced
1 bottle red wine or saba
1 quart red grape juice
1 quart cranberry juice
1 cup cooked peeled chestnuts
Peel and core pears and apples; peel and pit peaches and plums. Cut into coarse 1-inch dice, and place in a nonreactive (like stainless steel) heavy-bottomed 8-quart pot. Add grapes, cranberries, prunes, apricots, raisins, and orange zest. Add wine or saba, grape juice, and cranberry juice and mix well.
Place pot over high heat and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce heat to its lowest possible setting, and simmer, uncovered, for 6 hours. Remove from heat and allow to sit, loosely covered, at room temperature overnight. (Sugar and acid in mixture will keep it from spoiling.)
The next day, uncover the pot and again bring to a boil. Reduce heat to lowest possible setting, and simmer for 6 more hours. Toward the end of cooking, stir frequently to prevent scorching.
Remove pot from heat; mixture will be very dark and thick. Place chestnuts in a food processor and process to make a mealy puree. Stir into cooked mixture. While mixture is still hot, pour into sterile jars and seal according to manufacturers' directions. Savor may also be covered and refrigerated for up to 4 months, or frozen in a tightly sealed container for up to 6 months.
Yield: 11 pints
