When Lucy King of Parkton was a little girl, she spent a lot of time at the East Baltimore rowhouse of her Italian grandparents, the Campagnolis of Kenwood Avenue near St. Elizabeth Church and Patterson Park.
Lucy was named for her grandmother — Lucia, who let the youngster hang around the kitchen as she cooked. Lucy’s grandfather, Luigi, took her for walks in the park to look for “magic rocks” that would turn to gold if she would be a good girl and take a nap.
» Makes approximately six dozen cookies
6 eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 1/2 cups sifted flour
4 teaspoons baking power
1/2 teaspoon extract of anise, available at most gourmet Italian markets
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup vegetable oil
Powdered sugar
» Beat eggs and sugar. Add oil, cooled butter, anise extract and vanilla. Add flour and baking powder to egg mixtures and mix well. Drop one teaspoon of batter on each grid pattern on your electric pizzelle iron. Lucy King uses a Prego Pizzelle Baker from Villa Ware Classic Italian Kitchenware. Close lid to iron and bake for approximately 30 seconds. Especially devout pizzelle bakers sometimes say a Hail Mary in lieu of 30 seconds. Remove with fork and place on counter top to cool. Dust each cookie with powdered sugar.
Luigi seemed to know just which ones were magic, and when Lucy woke up from her nap, there they were by her bedside — the very same rocks, somehow turned to gold as she slept.
A generation removed from those memories, with teenage children of her own and a job as a pharmacist at Mercy Medical, Lucy looks back across the decades with warmth and wonder on those long weekends and summer vacations on Kenwood Avenue.
But it’s the kitchen that retains the magic for her, not a grandfather’s sweet little trick with gold spray paint. And this time of year, it’s the cookies her grandmother made — thin, anise-flavored waffles called pizzelle — that bring those memories back the strongest.
“My grandmother made them the old-fashioned way with a heavy metal iron, squeezing the dough and flipping over the iron before dumping them one by one into a tray,” said King, making a batch at home with a newfangled electric “iron” this Christmas holiday.
“My grandfather would put a few sips of chianti in juice glasses, and we would dip pieces of the cookies into the wine. They made biscotti too, but pizzelles are my favorite — a light wafer, not too sweet, not too heavy.”
After Lucy’s grandmother died, her mother — Antoinette — continued making pizzelles, but just a couple of dozen or so for the immediate family. It was her Aunt Anita who really went to town.
“From Thanksgiving right up to Christmas Eve, all Aunt Anita did was making pizzelles,” said Lucy.
It is Aunt Anita, who died last year at age 87 on Thanksgiving Day, who Lucy emulates by making hundreds of the cookies each year to give away in tins and cardboard boxes and plastic ware topped with a bow.
“When I make up a batch to give to my kids’ teachers,” said Lucy, “I put a little note in the box explaining what they are.”
