Ravioli on the Bed - Dr. Ed Iannuccilli
Monday, January 03, 2022
Doug sent over a marvelous, familiar-looking dessert one evening. They were morsels of pastry that disappeared like a Houdini performance. Not too sweet, their flavors were simple and delicious.
“What are they, Doug?” Maisy pulled on her leash, but not enough to keep him from stopping his early morning walk to chat. With widened eyes, he was eager to talk about his treats.
“We called them Cold Doughs, but they are Roczki Cookies (Kolacky). My mother used condensed milk in her recipe, but I use sour cream. I make them with a tender, yeasted dough filled with a simple, lemony, groundnut filling, and rolled up into a cigar shape. It’s funny; she made tons of them at one sitting. Initially, every Kolacky was tidy, but it was time-consuming. As she lumbered along, the Kolacky began to lose their perfect shapes. Then she kinda cobbled them together, but cobbled or not, they still carried their flavors. Who could resist?”
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST“They remind me in a way of my mother’s ravioli. Did your mother put the Kolacky on the bed? Mine put her ravioli there.” He chuckled.
My mother’s ricotta-stuffed ravioli was not dessert. They were a substantial, main-meal offering of huge ravioli that we called “sliders” for the simple reason that they slid down so effortlessly. She started early in the morning rolling out the dough into thin sheets, moving quickly, never allowing the dough to dry.
She made the filling and then placed it neatly in the squares. She draped another thin sheet of dough over the filling, and then gently rolled them with a rolling pin to remove any air bubbles. She used a ravioli cutter to create the perforated edges, gently pulled them apart, dusted the surfaces with cornmeal, and covered them with a towel to keep them moist. Then she did something that I saw the Italians do often.
She loaded the ravioli on a large platter, and back and forth she went to the bedroom, skillfully placing each in perfect order on the tablecloth on the bed. They were there for a reason, but I never knew why. Maybe just to park before they were dropped, one by one, in the boiling water. Before that, her guests, children and grandchildren, peeked at her beauties in that bedroom. “Wow!”
Our family sat eagerly at the table when she presented them; a heap of abundance that looked impenetrable, but not so. Down they slid . . . so soft, so palatable, with a tangy, sweet sauce, err, gravy, which was married to them perfectly. At one point, in a traditional contest, our children counted how many they could eat. I thought, “These kids will explode.” Not so.
There was no one winner as we all won.
One Sunday, our wives stood by to watch, hoping to glean the mystery of the sliders, to one day make them as Mom did. But my mother had the recipe in her head and was unable to translate it. When she passed, so too did the sliders.
Dr. Ed Iannuccilli is the author of three popular memoirs, “Growing up Italian; Grandfather’s Fig Tree and Other Stories”, “What Ever Happened to Sunday Dinner” and “My Story Continues: From Neighborhood to Junior High.” Learn more HERE.
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