“I just want to show my granddaughter how to make pittuli, ok?” my mother said. “I want to be with Julia [the granddaughter], my daughter [me], my sisters [Carmela and Crair] and that’s it. When the men are around it’s too difficult.”

My cousin Paul was allowed to stay, because he lives there. We were at my aunt Crair’s house to make our favorite food of high summer, pittuli, as they are called in the dialect of my mother’s hometown in Calabria. Squash blossoms, fried in batter. 

“Paul,” my mother said. “Go to the basement and get the eggs.” 

Crair had harvested loads of squash blossoms from her backyard garden, and it was high time to turn them into pittuli, as they would wilt within days. The backyard of her house in Long Island is all either driveway, where my cousin Danny used to repair muscle cars, or garden. Even at 85, she tends to beans, figs, tomatoes, squash, and zucchini.

“Organic,” she grumbled. “I’m always organic.” She puts up bedsheets to keep the birds off her plants, and jerry-rigs structures for vines to climb. 

“Julia,” my mother said to my Manhattan-born niece, “this what your mother and your aunts [me again] ate all the time. During the winter, we would just make them with batter, no flowers.” 

“OK,” said Julia, gamely pulling the stamens out of bright golden flowers. 

“Now we wash them,” Crair said.

“No, don’t wash them!” my mother yelled. ”Saranno troppo busu.”  Too wet, in dialect.

“Ma sono luordu!” They’re dirty, Crair said.

“They’re earthy,” my mother said.

The batter for dirty flowers is made as follows:

2 teacups of flour [but don’t put the flour away yet]

1 spoon of baking powder 

A glass of water or so 

Some salt

Some grated cheese 

2 eggs

“Paul, get another egg from the basement,” Crair said.

3 eggs 

Combine, and continue to add flour until it has the consistency of pancake batter.

“No, more flour,” Crair said. “It has to stick.”

[Until it has a consistency a little thicker than pancake batter]

We set up an electric frying pan out on the back porch, so the house wouldn’t fill with the smell of cooking oil, and readied aluminum tins and paper towels. My mother manned the fryer, dredging the flowers in batter, and dropping them in the hot oil. As the pittuli got crisp, she set them on the paper towels to dry. Carmela showed up late, as she had an appointment at Hair Machine. 

“Paul,” my mother called, “can you get some more paper towels?”

Julia sprinkled the hot flowers with salt, and they were done. We ate them for lunch with green salad, tomatoes, and bread. 

“Now take them home,” Crair said. “Everybody take some. I don’t want them.”

“I’m going to take five for your father. Give me five.” My mother wrapped them in foil. “That’s it, I don’t want any more.”

“Don’t give them to me,” Carmela said.

Another year would pass before I could eat them again, so I took the pittuli home. Out of the toaster oven, they would be almost as good as they were in the hours after the flowers had come from the vine.

“The toaster oven is almost like the final step,” my mother said. “When you heat them up, and they get nice and brown, that is when they are really at their best.”

“I’ll clean up,” Carmela said, to atone for her lateness. 

“OK,” my mother said. “But don’t eat too many more because we have to have sfogliatelle and cold coffee later in the driveway.”

The fryer was washed and put away again until Christmas, and struffoli season.