Skip to main content

Strufoli in Los Angeles


Every year, there it was: the pyramid of dough balls, piled high and drizzled with honey, sprinkled (I think) with colored nonpareils.  Strufoli.  The traditional Italian holiday dessert rose from the middle of the refreshments table at the R's annual New Year's Eve party.  Each year we lived in Los Angeles (in the early 1980s), we looked forward to the invitation; we always made sure to attend.  The R's had a daughter my age, and we went to the same school.  I spent a lot of time at their house, slept over pretty often, and could usually count on at least three things around their dinner table: pasta, hand gestures, and a no-holds-barred argument worthy of any Sicilian family.  The R's were a slice of Brooklyn in L.A.  The party was a costume party, and we'd dress up.  One year, a "family heritage year," my father wandered around in moonshine attire (mind you, these were Reagan years; the Clintons had yet to turn "hillbilly" into DC vogue); my mom dressed like a Greek sailor and clicked her komboloi (worry beads), and me... well, I looked like a complete idiot dressed as some poor antebellum relation of Scarlett O'Hara.  I was in those preteen years, and my friend and I would sneak into the kitchen, snag some champagne, rush back to her pink-ruffled room (I think the bedding was pink; ruffled, I'm quite certain), and crank call boys from our class.  OK, maybe the crank calling was on a different night.  I don't remember what we said.  We made fools of ourselves, to be sure, yet thought we were clever.  At the party, we'd wait for the countdown, rattle our noisemakers, hug, and attack the strufoli.  Made by the family's matriarch (my friend's live-in grandmother, the Old World equivalent of a nanny back in the day), the honey balls were sticky and sweet, and we couldn't stop eating them.  I have long since lost contact with my friend and her family, but I will always remember the way--at New Year's, but pretty much year-round--they made me feel like part of the "famiglia"!
Labels:

Comments

Maria Verivaki said…
hi allison
strufoli? you know in greek we call them loukoumades
i promise i'll make them this month some time and write a story about them (after my neck pain eases - it's been killing me since mid-December)!
January 1, 2009 at 12:55 PM
watersidemom said…
My mother-in-law makes these every Christmas. They're delicious and decadent, but worth it! Kids always love them, of course. Who can resist honey balls?? Happy New Year!
January 5, 2009 at 12:46 AM
Anonymous said…
My grandmother and Mom would make a version of this when we first came here using those pop fridge canisters. They'd cut them into 1/4s or 1/2s and fry them up and sugar them. I loved them-probably not as sweet as the real sweet yeast dough versions, but still good! I guess if you want them badly enough, you can cheat like that.
January 16, 2009 at 12:22 AM

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tap Root Manuscript

Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...
7 comments
Read more

Keith Jarrett, Carnegie Hall

It was only last night, but already it rates among my most powerful memories—one I know will reverberate down time's lonely corridors, enduring where the daily slush of logistical life (thankfully) does not. Yesterday contained plenty of logistical craziness, but by 8:00 PM I was seated in the last row of the dress circle at Carnegie Hall next to my father, looking down on a stage empty but for a single piano, a bench, and a collection of microphones wired for the live recording of Keith Jarrett's solo improvisational performance. I have always loved these charged moments of anticipation before a performance, and I expected this concert to be something special—that much more so because the tickets came through a friend of a very dear friend in California, a last-minute opportunity to be seized, and because a love of Keith Jarrett was transmitted to me by my father, and this was a great way to thank him for bringing awareness of this man's music into my life. But this is all...
12 comments
Read more

S.A.R.T.

It's late at night, and you're alone in your apartment, tired but on high alert, unable to sleep. In the dark, you pray. Despite the fact that at this time in your life you would never describe yourself as a "religious" person, it is definitely a true prayer, not the bargaining offer of an exchange ( I'll reform, if only . . . ); you are not the one in need. You are the one whose job it is to help those in crisis, and although you signed up for this gig, you wish desperately that your job didn't exist, wasn't needed—not tonight, not anytime. Not while you are the volunteer on call, committed to driving at whatever hour of the night to whatever hospital emergency room phones in a case of sexual assault. Given that a possible career in criminal law was what brought me to St. Louis, it's easy to see how I found my way to S.A.R.T., the city's Sexual Assault Response Team. The program was (still is) based out of the Metro St. Louis Y.W.C.A. For voluntee...
6 comments
Read more