More Short Stories.

On the western outskirts of Crockett, on the bluffs overlooking the Carquinez strait, there’s a small unincorporated neighborhood called Valona. These days, this community isn’t that different from any of the others that stretch along this northern edge of Contra Costa County, but things used to be a lot different.

If you were in Valona a century ago, you might have felt more like you were in a traditional Italian village than a Bay Area suburb. You would’ve seen kids stomping grapes to make wine during harvest season and families making salami from scratch to hang in their cellars. And you definitely would’ve heard people speaking Italian, which was more common than hearing English around these parts. But one thing hasn’t changed – looking down from Valona back then, and now, you’d see a giant brick factory, flanked by huge silos and loading docks. That is the C&H Sugar Factory, and in a lot of ways, that factory is the reason why Valona and the entire town of Crockett exists.

Today’s episode is a journey into the history of Valona and Crockett, and our guide is Barbara Pangi Denton, the author of a new book called “Sweet Success: How Industry, Immigrants, and Working Women Shaped a Town.” Listen now to hear Barbara discuss her deep Italian roots, the downfall of Crockett’s “golden age,” and the importance of community cookbooks.

Don’t forget to follow the East Bay Yesterday Substack for updates on events, boat tours, exhibits, and other local history news: substack.com/@eastbayyesterday For photos and links related to this episode, visit: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/crockett-became-italy/.

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Most of us have experienced a particular taste or smell that suddenly takes us back to a time, place, or person from our past. The aroma of a favorite family cake I recently baked did just that. I bit into a generous, tasty slice and closed my eyes, savoring the cake’s sweet, vanilla taste and contrasting textures. There were two layers, each topped with crunchy chopped roasted walnuts mixed with aromatic cinnamon and sugar, and a creamy vanilla custard was sandwiched between each layer. All at once, I imagined I was eight years old, sitting under the pergola, ‘patio trellis’ in my parents’ backyard. Reminiscing, I envisioned my large Italian-American family, four grandparents, four uncles, five aunts, and numerous first cousins seated at a long rectangular table. The table was set with mismatched plates and old, worn cutlery atop a festive oilcloth that had seen better days. Part of the oilcloth’s pattern was missing, and in places, the cloth was worn through to its woven backing material. Telltale fold lines revealed the countless times the tablecloth had been used and folded over the years. The center of the table was filled with pitchers of water, Kool-Aid with ice, and bottles of wine. The ice was a nod to my family’s new life in California--ice would not have been served in Italy. Conversations were loud; everyone talked at once, and the air was filled with laughter. A summer barbecue. How I treasure this memory! Checking the date of the recipe proved that I was off by a year. I wasn’t eight years old, but nine. Our memories are evocative, if not precise.

In his book The Secret Recipes, New York City pastry chef Dominique Ansel, a recent French immigrant, suggests that time is an ingredient common to all recipes. It takes time to make a recipe, but more than that, a dish can “transport us to another time by making a connection that transcends the present.” 1 The dish becomes a time machine, and we become time travelers. This is true for the favored baked confections that my family enjoyed.

Castagnaccio, pane sciocco, and biscotti were among my dad’s favorite baked goods, and my mother baked them repeatedly over the years to satisfy his cravings. Dad emigrated to the United States in 1931 from Capannori, Province of Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. He arrived in Crockett, California, on February 14, Valentine’s Day. These pastries and bread were his sacred foods, evoking a sense of nostalgia and longing for his past. Eating them transported him back to his home in Italy, his idyllic young life there, and his large extended family, which he, painfully, had to leave behind. Although these dishes comforted my dad by helping soothe his homesickness, they weren’t my favorites, nor could they take me back with him to Italy. His colorful stories would have to suffice for that.

Castagnaccio is a peasant pastry, a type of torta, or ‘tart,’ from Italy’s cucina povera, the traditional Italian cooking of the rural poor. At my dad’s home, his mother, my nonna, ‘grandmother’ Giuseppina, made castagnaccio using only water, chestnut flour, and olive oil. As her family was impoverished, these were the only ingredients available. My mother dutifully made castagnaccio the traditional way with these simple ingredients. But to me, the torta tasted like dirt! I recall my mother placing a single, tiny sprig of rosemary at the center of the torta, a traditional decoration for this dish. Did she do so because rosemary signifies love and remembrance? It is said that in ancient Rome, students carried bouquets of rosemary, hoping its scent would improve their recall and, therefore, their studies. In my family, rosemary is traditionally placed in the graves of loved ones.

Today, castagnaccio is made with chestnut flour, pine nuts, walnuts, raisins, and rosemary, which makes it much more palatable. When I eat castagnaccio, I can’t board my dad’s time machine because time machines are peculiarly singular and carry only one passenger at a time. Dad’s time machine transported him back to his humble, dark, damp, two-story, three-bedroom home in Capannori. The house was built in 1848 of unreinforced masonry. Sadly, the house was torn down to make way for one of Benito Mussolini’s road projects. Another of Mussolini’s projects also required moving the town’s cemetery; thus, my paternal great-grandparents’ remains are now buried in a common mass grave. 

Dad’s house lacked a bathroom (there was an outhouse), indoor plumbing, and electricity. Although the house wasn’t physically comfortable, it was filled with love, warmth, and Tuscan traditions. The large kitchen, occupying half of the first floor’s square footage, was the heart of the home. The dominant feature of the kitchen was a massive walk-in cooking fireplace with built-in benches. Everyone huddled around the enormous fireplace in the winter to keep warm while my bisnonna, ‘great grandmother’ Luisa, and her daughter, my nonna Giuseppina, cooked. More importantly, it was where my bisnonno, ‘great-grandfather’Fausto, told stories and kept my family’s oral history alive. Perhaps it was where my dad learned the importance of storytelling and being a narratore, ‘storyteller’. 

Pane sciocco, or ‘unsalted bread,’ also known as pane toscano, ‘Tuscan bread,’ has a unique, flat flavor as it’s made without salt. It is also made with only flour and water, and fermented lievito madre, ‘natural bread starter.’ Some historians believe that, since salt was heavily taxed in Florence, it necessarily forced impoverished bakers to omit this expensive ingredient from their bread. Others believe salt was omitted to enhance the flavor of salty prosciutto, ‘dry-cured ham’, and rich meat sauces common to Tuscan cuisine. Whatever the reason, pane sciocco takes getting used to. Eating it on its own is not worth the calories, from my perspective. It is pale because salt colors the crust; it is tasteless, and the texture is dry and dense. Prepare a traditional Tuscan appetizer, fettunta, a piece of fresh bread doused with peppery, green, fresh, extra-virgin olive oil, like the kind my cousin Raffaella presses at her frantoio ‘olive press’ in Botticino Biecina, Lucca, and it works. Break off a small piece and use it as a scarpetta, ‘little shoe’, to clean the last traces of tasty, complex pasta sauce from one’s plate (I’ve always wondered why this little piece of bread is called a little shoe, and I still don’t know). Using a scarpetta to clean one’s plate may be frowned upon in the United States, but it’s a huge compliment to a chef in Italy.

Dad’s father, Alessandro, my nonno, ‘grandfather’, was a baker in the Italian army on the Hungarian front during World War I. I will never know whether he baked in the trenches, how he created a makeshift oven, or how he safely collected his fuel source on the battlefield if he did. When he returned from the war in 1918 and before leaving for America in 1921, he worked as a baker for Mr. Bianchi in a small shop on Via Romana in Capannori.

In California, nonno regularly made pane sciocco in the Spark oven in his basement kitchen in Crockett. Almost every Italian home in Valona had a second kitchen in the basement to keep the “good” kitchen upstairs clean. Lacking air conditioning, the family would cook and sometimes eat in the basement during the summer. Nonno carefully lined his old Spark’s oven racks with terracotta tiles to replicate the outdoor oven in Italy. He taught my mother to bake pane sciocco, and she dutifully made it for my father. The recipe was so precious that I found a copy of it in my dad’s papers after he passed away. It was written in pencil in Dad’s handwriting on the back of an old bill envelope. When I found it, I could picture my father sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table, writing the recipe in English as my nonno explained how to make it in Italian. I haven’t made pane sciocco since my parents’ passing, but I recently ate it in a trattoria, a small restaurant, in Lucca. Still somewhat shocked by its taste and texture, I boarded my time machine, which took me back to my nonno and his Valona basement, and to my mother, who dutifully baked this bread to please my dad.

There are many types and flavors of Italian biscotti, which translates to ‘cookies’ in English. Italian cookies can be divided into two categories: once-baked and twice-baked. Once-baked biscotti include favorites such as Amaretti, a bittersweet cookie typically made with almond flour, sugar, egg whites, vanilla, and almond extracts; Ricciarelli, the traditional soft and chewy almond cookies from Siena; and Ladyfingers, sponge cake-like cookies used to make Tiramisu. In our Valona Italian neighborhood in Crockett, the word biscotti could only refer to one thing--those cookies whose dough was shaped into a log, baked, cooled slightly, and then cut on the diagonal and baked a second time. Confusing, I know. The resulting cookie was crescent-shaped and hard as a rock. The cookie was meant to be hard, making it resilient and transportable, especially in lunch bags and boxes. They were softened by dipping them into a beverage, and were at their best when dunked in red wine, or Vin Santo, meaning ‘holy wine’. Vin Santo is a traditional Tuscan dessert wine characterized by its intense flavors. In the absence of Vin Santo, a cup of hot coffee or tea is a suitable alternative. As children, we dunked our biscotti in milk. My grandparents ate biscotti for breakfast with a caffellatte, ‘milk coffee’, and occasionally fortified it with a raw egg. I was happy when they ate their raw egg in their coffee because watching them tap a tiny hole at each end of an egg with a spoon and then suck its contents straight from the shell was fascinating and a little disgusting. It wasn’t pleasant to watch. My uncle Medoro, who lived to be over one hundred years old, preferred his biscotti once-baked because he said his century-old teeth weren’t made for hard biscotti made by baking the cookies twice.

Growing up, I preferred my mother’s chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin cookies to Italian biscotti because they were sweeter, tastier, and American. However, biscotti, the twice-baked variety, were always available. The adults all enjoyed them. Dad often told us how his mother used to bake biscotti in Italy. Every Monday in Capannori, the neighborhood women baked their bread in a communal bread oven. The women and a few elderly men who could no longer work the fields gathered around the oven, making it a social event. They took turns collecting wood, lighting the outdoor bread oven, tending the fire, and baking. The effort lasted all day. The women brought their loaf-shaped dough and waited to bake their loaves, each in turn as room in the oven became available. The bread was meant to last the whole week and was never wasted. As the week progressed and the bread became hard and stale, it was grated into breadcrumbs or cubed and tossed with olive oil and vinegar in a wild lettuce salad; the lettuce was foraged in the nearby fields.

At the end of the day, when the bread baking was finished and the oven was cooling, women brought simple tortas and biscotti to the oven to be baked. Recipes weren’t written down, nor did they use precise measurements. Simple cakes and biscotti were made from memory using whatever ingredients were available. When I attended university and visited home, my grandparents, who lived next door, always sent me back to Berkeley with a few dollars, a jar of my nonno’s pasta sauce, and my nonna’s biscotti. Nonna packed the biscotti in a tin she had likely saved from a panettone, a sweet, spiced round brioche loaf with raisins and candied fruit, which is traditionally eaten during the Christmas season. While the gesture was dear and greatly appreciated, the biscotti were the source of many jokes by my non-Italian roommates. They often mused that we could carry the biscotti and hurl them as weapons at our would-be assailants if we were accosted on the way home from Doe Library at midnight.

Though shocking and bittersweet, this teasing made me see and truly taste my nonna’s biscotti for the first time. Until then, knowing the sacrifices my family had made on my behalf and with a keen sense of guilt, I couldn’t be honest with myself or others about how the biscotti actually tasted. They were just what I was used to. But, they were pale, hard as a rock, tasted like rancid oil and nuts, and smelled like mothballs. No wonder I didn’t enjoy eating them; perhaps being away from home allowed me to be honest about my feelings towards them. My nonna had stored the biscotti in the extra bedroom closet, which reeked of mothballs. I realized why they were so hard when I watched my nonna make biscotti. She made them from memory and kneaded them on her wooden pasta board just as she would have done if she were making bread or pasta. Why did she knead them? Was it more straightforward to mix the biscotti this way because of her lack of convenient baking tools or time-saving appliances? The more flour she added, the harder they became, and the more she worked them, the stronger the gluten, yielding a dense texture. Perhaps taste and texture were not the success criteria for her biscotti. Traditional to cucina povera, filling her family’s stomachs and keeping hunger at bay was most likely her measure of success.

After I got married and began collecting modern biscotti recipes, the twice-baked varieties, I realized that biscotti could and should taste much better than those my nonna used to bake. Traveling throughout Italy, from the north to the south and the island of Sicily, has allowed me to savor many delicious cookies and enjoy seeing them beautifully displayed in the windows of pasticcerie ‘bakery shops’. Collecting old Crockett community cookbooks has given me a better understanding of what the women of my mother’s generation were baking. Now, I can understand the joy these women felt when they offered their recipes as an act of friendship, pride, and self-expression.

More than fifty years since my nonna’s death and after the passing of my mother’s generation, it’s time to bake, share, and enjoy these long-forgotten recipes so that a vital part of Crockett’s Italian American heritage and culture is not forgotten.

1 Ansel, Dominique, The Secret Recipes, (New York, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2014), p. 15.

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