L'Italo-Americano

24 www.italoamericano.com L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2013 Seattle resident engineers a holiday tradition EMILY WADE WILL Each holiday season, a Seattlearea man spends hours and hours over a hot stove in gratitude to his Italian ancestors and to preserve a family tradition. It's not as though he'd otherwise sit and twiddle his thumbs. As an aerospace engineering and product integration manager for a Fortune 50 company, and a doctoral degree candidate to boot, Gary Crutchfield's activity plate overflows. But when the calendar flips to December and his online order of 5 pounds of anise seeds arrives on the doorstep, Crutchfield, of Lynnwood, dusts off his heirloom pizzelle iron. He replenishes his pantry of flour, sugar and eggs, plugs in the mixer, and sets about to create, one by one, a mountain of pizzelle, cookies resembling snowflakes in their lacy appearance and melt-in-the-mouth heavenliness. Pipers pipe, drummers drum and lords leap but Crutchfield spends December evenings cranking out some 270 dozen pizzelle—that's 3,200 cookies— to box and mail to relatives around the country and to deliver to Puget Sound-area friends. In a typical evening, he'll spend several hours and turn out two or more batches of 6.5 dozen treats—oops! make that 6.6 dozen—apiece. This year marks the 22nd year of Crutchfield's marathon bakeoffs, begun when he inherited the family's pizzelle iron in 1992. "It would be a shame to let this time-honored family tradition get lost in our increasingly fast- paced lives," Crutchfield writes on his website, pizzelle.net, devoted to all things pizzelle. (A former roommate christened him "Pizzelle Man" after witnessing sion timing, Crutchfield gradually whittled that down to somewhere between 40 and 50 seconds. (Traditionally, cooks said a "Hail Mary" to time the baking utes, depending on the kitchen's ambient temperature. Then it takes between an hour and two minutes and an hour and five minutes to bake 70 to 85 cookies, Gary Crutchfield pizzell'ing. Photo courtesy of Gary Crutchfield the December ritual.) As a small concession to his own hectic life, however, the 51year-old has refined the operation. It took his aunt Helen 2.5 minutes to bake one pizzella. With experimentation and preci- of one side, flipped the iron and said an "Our Father" on the other.) "A single batch takes a total 12 to 13 minutes to measure, mix and portion. While doing this, I preheat the iron for 7 to 8 min- depending on their size." Crutchfield says. "The thickness of the plates, the thermal transfer coefficient of the cast iron and the BTUs you're cooking at, all these factors contribute to how long you need to cook each cookie," Crutchfield adds, in terminology that may have mystified Aunt Helen. When petite 4' 11" Aunt Helen no longer possessed the strength to heft the 9.5-pound pizzelle iron, Crutchfield asked if he might inherit it. His great-grandfather Annibale Mancini, an immigrant from Italy's central Abruzzo region, had hand-forged the iron in his Brooklyn home in 1920. (The Italian ferro for "iron" gives rise to another Italian term for the cookies—ferratelle.) With the iron in his care, Crutchfield wanted to put it into action for his extended family's enjoyment. His yearly gifts represent, as he puts it, "my way to pay respect to what the family matriarchs did for us while we were growing up." Traditionally, pizzelle irons, handed down through generations, were commonly embossed with a family emblem or memorable dates. Crutchfield's greatgrandfather engraved his surname in the center of one plate and "1920," the year he manufactured it, on the opposite. Although the majority of pizzelle irons are round, Crutchfield's forebear chose a rectangular shape. The iron's two cast-iron plates connect at a pivot, where two handles are attached. Clamping the handles squeezes the dough between the paddles. Traditionally, handles were long enough to allow the baker to safely move the iron in and out of an open fire. Two villages—Cocullo and Salle—of the mountainous Abruzzo region lay claim to the cookie's origin. However, food historian Lynne Olver, in the "Food Timeline" website, says that while crisp waffle-type cookies have ancient roots, many cultures embraced them, including Dutch, French and Norwegian, in addition to Italians. "Pizzelles and their fancy European cousins were very popular in the Middle Ages and played significant roles in the Christian calendar," Olver writes. Pizzelle recipes produce either batter or dough, and Crutchfield's iron handles the dough variety. "The iron I use has a forceful clamping action— about 25 pounds of force 19 inches up from the pivot—and it definitely puts a squeeze on the dough," Crutchfield explained. Batter recipes are better suited to smaller irons with weaker clamping mechanisms, he says. Crutchfield's recipe remains a family secret, but he divulges that he flavors his with aniseed and anise extract. "The anise is not overpowering, nor are the pizzelle too sweet," he says. Crutchfield's pizzelle start out "firm to crunchy" but become chewy as they sit. They can be re-crisped by heating in an oven. It's the 93-year-old iron that provides the product's "character," he says. Crutchfield said his mother remembers seeing her mother and her Italian women friends sitting in the garden to nibble pizzelle with their favorite liqueurs. Crutchfield likes his with coffee, although he's a nondunker. "My relatives would say they look forward to their pizzelle package as much or more than anything else for the holiday season," Crutchfield relates. The relatives can expect their deliveries for at least another seven years, until 2020, when Crutchfield may retire his tradition. "I figure when the iron reaches its hundredth anniversary and I've made them for 28 years, I'll be up there with Aunt Helen in the annals of pizzelle-making." That's a record any Italian American can be proud of. Emily Wade Will is a freelance feature writer living in Lancaster County, Pa. Her maternal grandparents were born in Catanzaro, Calabria

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