It wasn’t a pizza, and it wasn’t a calzone.
The top crust was crispy and golden, sparkling with salt. The filling was hot Italian sausage, sautéed mushrooms, caramelized onions, some dark spinach, a little red sauce. The cheese was whole-milk mozzarella and some Pecorino Romano. The bottom crust was gnarly, full of bubbles, the color of Brazil nuts and cocoa.
It was scactiattia — or at least, that’s how I could have sworn it was spelled; I knew, at least, that it was pronounced ska-CHA-tuh. And I also knew that without it I would never have graduated from college.
I got my bachelor’s at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., a town then largely populated by immigrants from a single Italian town — Melilli, Sicily. In the 1970s, the town had lots of little Mom-and-Pop groceries, each one featuring Italian dishes both spectacular and humble. There were sausage grinders from Marino’s. There were pies at Giovanni’s, hot with pepperoni and mushrooms.
And then there was D & S, next to the old Grand Union supermarket. It had pizza and pasta and grinders too. But the jewel in the crown was the “scactiattia.” My favorite was stuffed with sausage, mushrooms and spinach, although the true Melilli classic, as I understand, was broccoli and potato.
I had never tasted anything like it.
And I never would again — or so I thought. After graduation, I’d try to order it whenever I was in an Italian restaurant, but mostly I just got confused looks from the waiter. You mean a calzone?
I kept looking. As the years went by, it became a quest for me, like searching for the ark of the covenant or the Holy Grail.
I searched in cookbooks for it. I searched the internet for it. Nothing.
Some food and drink evokes a particular time in your life. The taste of a pint of Beamish, when I lived in Cork, Ireland. The scrapple my mother cooked on Christmas mornings in Philadelphia. The falafel salad, with both red and white sauce, from a halal cart during my days in Morningside Heights. Each of these tastes speaks to a moment in personal history. The most precious of them return me in an instant to a time of joy — and of safety.
I’ve thought a lot about those meals, and those times, these past seven weeks in isolation with my family. The five of us tend to scatter to our corners during the day, trying to get our work done — Zooming, researching, teaching — and then we assemble in the early evening for a drink by the fire. (It’s still too cold in Maine to spend much time outside.) After that, we have supper.
Sometimes our sheltering-in-place reminds me of a long cross-country car trip. On a good day, we are all glad to be together, safe and warm. On other days, we strain not to annoy one another. There are times when one — or all — of us is on the edge of tears, and all we can do is try to tread carefully.
When I was a Wesleyan student, I sometimes appeared at Sunday morning Mass so hung over I could barely stand. But I remember one sermon given by the campus priest, who pitched his own theory about the Eucharist. We pause when we break bread and drink wine, the priest explained, to remember that we love one another and the life we have been given. This is true in times of joy as well as times of sorrow. When you are eating a Marino’s grinder, he said, you are celebrating the gift of life.
When you are drinking a bottle of Haffenreffer, he said, you are celebrating the gift of life.
When you order a pizza for the hall, he said, you are celebrating the gift of life.
I’m not sure he’s right about the Haffenreffers — also known as “Green Death” — but I liked the idea. (I also liked the rebus puzzles on the undersides of the caps.)
Not long ago I was mournfully recalling my lost “scactiattias” with an old friend, Richard Russo, who is not only a gifted novelist but a great chef as well. I told him how I’d loved it. “But my scactiattia days,” I said with a sigh, “are gone.”
My friend looked at me with pity. “Can I ask you how you were spelling it?” He shook his head sadly. “Boylan,” he said. “As usual, all your suffering has been for no reason.”
That was how I learned that it’s not “scactiattia” — it’s scacciata. And that there are many great recipes for it online. In no time at all I was staring at dozens of them on my phone. True, many of them are in Italian, but I got the idea. Suddenly, this thing I thought I had lost forever was restored to me.
There was sausage in my future.
That’s how I came to make scacciata during Holy Week this year. On Friday we had Passover Seder, and on Easter we had lamb and ham. But the day between these dates was Scacciata Saturday. And it was fantastic.
I’m aware that I’m not an essential worker right now, that my life is being sustained by grocery store clerks and farmers and doctors and truck drivers and so many others, and that the story of how I rediscovered a lost Sicilian pie doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there have been 960,916 cases of the coronavirus confirmed in the country; 49,170 Americans have died.
I’m trying to channel my fury and my fear by baking. And I am hoping that someday my family will recall the taste of scacciata the same way I remember the taste of my mother’s scrapple: something to eat, yes. But also as a kind of time machine.
As death swirls all around us, I am trying to protect the ones I love, in the only way I know how. With flour, and with sausages, and with cheese.