Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood - Maria Grammatico - Hardcover - 1st ed

Bitter Almonds is a remarkable memoir, a tribute to Sicilian food and culture, and the record of an historic and vanishing craft. At the heart of the book are forty-six recipes of unique Sicilian specialities, written down for the first time. In the early 1950s, Maria Grammatico and her sister were sent by their impoverished mother to the San Carlo, a cloistered orphanage in Erice, an ancient hill town on the western coast of Sicily. It was a Dickensian existence -- beating sugar mixtures for six hours at a time, rising before dawn to prime the ovens, and surviving on an unrelenting diet of vegetable gruel. But it was here that Maria learned to make the beautifully handcrafted pastries that were sold to customers from behind a grille in the convent wall. Book jacket.Grammatico, Maria is the author of 'Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood - Maria Grammatico - Hardcover - 1st ed' with ISBN 9780688124496 and ISBN 0688124496.