A Holiday of Home (and Homecoming) and Hospitality

St. Joseph’s Day fast approaches!

St. Joseph’s Day, on March 19, honors the foster father of Jesus. As the St. Joseph's Day Home Page explains, this is a large, popular holiday in Italy, especially in Sicily, but it is also celebrated here in the United States in Italo-American neighborhoods with parades and other festivals. New Orleans has a St. Joseph’s Day parade almost concurrently with their St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Some neighborhoods in New York City hold elaborate St. Joseph's Day get-togethers.

This Hallmark site explains a little more about St. Joseph’s Day.

Most of the articles mention as part of the celebration something called a St. Joseph’s Table, a tiered arrangement holding breads and other special items, especially used in Italy. I must confess that I’ve never seen one of these beautiful arrangements. The church I went to as a child, St. Mary’s, was the old-fashioned Italian church (as opposed to St. Ann’s, next door, the “Irish church”) and may have had these when I was very small; they followed the old ways until well into the 1960s. But after Vatican II and the English Mass rather than the Latin, these old customs were done away with, except for the Procession at the annual feast in July. I remember that St. Mary’s used to do a wonderful grotto-type nativity arrangement when I was very small, similar to the putz scenes used in German communities at Christmastime, with a mountain with various figures coming and going, miniature trees (as on model railroads), other flora and fauna, and the Holy Family in the center in a shallow cave, with shepherds and other figures around them. It’s possible they also had a St. Joseph’s Table back then. I think it’s sad that these old customs have been allowed to fade, since it is part of my heritage.

St. Patrick’s celebrations are usually thick with liquor; the Italian tradition for St. Joseph’s Day is to eat…”Mangia, mangia!” is the mantra of the day. Bread, fava beans, and frittate all have a place in the menu, but the food that most Rhode Islanders know best for St. Joseph’s Day is the zeppole. There are several different versions of zeppole, including a fried version a little like round doughboys (fried dough, elephant ears, whatever else they’re called around the country), but the most well-known version is pictured here on RI Roads St. Joseph’s Day page. This traditional zeppole has a cream-puff type shell filled with thick, flavorful yellow cream and topped with a ring of white cream with a maraschino cherry for trim. In the past the shell was fried, but now many of the bakeries bake them instead, to save a bit on the calories (although the cream is decadent enough!).

You can see by this recipe that they are extremely work-intensive, but the bakeries in Rhode Island (and I’m sure in NYC) turn them out by the thousands at this time of year. (In fact several RI bakeries now make them year-round because of customer demand). I noticed that the Providence Journal has an article this year telling people the best places to go for zeppole.

Italiansrus.com contains some links to other recipes for St. Joseph’s Day.

Another St. Joseph’s Day event is the annual return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano Mission in California. These little birds make an amazing 15,000 mile round-trip migration every year, arriving at San Juan Capistrano on or around March 19.

(If you're in the Atlanta area, I believe the 48th Street Market in Dunwoody—off Mount Vernon Road—has zeppoles for St. Joseph’s Day; this is also a wonderful Italian deli which serves some other Italian pastries like sfogliatelles. Unfortunately they're not baked there, so you miss the authentic taste of an Italian bakery, but it's good for a sample at least.)