Easter Time,present and past

Yesterday, we drove through the Hoosick Street area of Troy to get to Schaghticoke where Jean and Bill now live. Our purpose was to deliver Bucellate, a traditional Easter bread that members of our family have made for the past one hundred years or so. The recipe changes with time. It came from my Italian grandmother who measured everything in handfuls, and pinches, and small amount, or a little bit, un poco. My mother sat at a table in her mother-in-law's kitchen and wrote down the recipe as it was being made.

Mom became the expert and we became addicted to the process and the tradition. We saw lots of eggs, flour, sugar, yeast ending up in a huge amount of batter that mom pounded and kneaded and tossed in our faces as we lined up along the edge of the kitchen table where she worked. The eggs were blown out, and the intact shells were colored to add to the array of hard boiled Easter eggs. The bread was distributed to relatives and friends, and lots of it was eaten by us.

Mary and Jean still make the bread using the time honored recipe, with a few tweaks. I, on the other hand, make the bread using a recipe that I found in a bread book. As I was growing up, I could not figure out how to spell the name of the bread. It always came out as "oogellah". None of my Italian studies permitted me see this combination of letters. Did it start with an "o" or a "u", or both. One Sunday afternoon, when Mom and Dad were visiting us at our home in Austerlitz, NY, we were showing off our new bread book. Dad leapt from his chair as were were riffling through the pages and cried out "Buccelad!", and there it was. The mysteries were solved: how to spell it and how to make it!

Driving up Hoosick Street further jogged my memory. When we were little, probably up to age ten or so, often on Sunday afternoon, Dad, George and I would walk from our house on River Street to Grandma Palladino's house on Sixteenth Street. It was up a hill, over a railroad bridge, past Clay Mountain, and a few more blocks to the house. We were always welcomed there. A pot of sauce was always on the stove. Dad's brothers and sisters were around. They always offered us ginger ale that tickled our nose, and they made much of us. But one thing about those visits that sticks in my mind was the way we dressed, always in our best, always handsomely, and at Easter time, we wore Fedora hats with a feather. We were so cool!

Happy Easter!