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Italian-Americans

24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes on Sale Now!

The latest New England Historical Society book about history, food and recipes is now available on Amazon. 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes: From Ancient Rome to the Great Migration.

But why is the New England Historical Society publishing a cookbook about Italian cookie history? Because when 4 million Italians came to America between 1880 and 1924, many of them came to New England. They settled in every New England state and city, and they started restaurants and bakeries and pasticcerie with foods from home.

Each chapter in this ebook tells a story about the people who made and ate Italian Christmas cookies, and then it gives directions for making each kind in a modern American kitchen. (Click here to buy the book.)

Helping cooks celebrate centuries-old traditions with Italian Christmas cookies

Italian Christmas cookies are more than just cookies. They express the culture, cuisine and history of Italy. Biscotti belong to the stories of Roman legionnaires who ate them on the march to Britain and of immigrants who took them on ocean liners to Providence’s Federal Hill. Cucidati belong to tales of cloistered nuns in medieval Sicily and of the 20^th-century fishing fleet in Massachusetts Bay.

Cook like a Neapolitan Pasticceria — in your own kitchen

In this book you will get step-by-step instructions on how to make 24 different Italian Christmas cookies in a modern American kitchen.

You can choose from a vast variety of ingredients and techniques. Figs, lemons, chocolate, wheat, almonds, pistachios. Stirred nougat, twice-baked biscotti, deep-fried struffoli. There are cookies both gluten-free and dairy-free, the way they’ve been made for centuries.

Each recipe comes with a story about the Italian people. You’ll read about Italians who came to New England before, during and after the Great Migration. You’ll learn some of the history of Christmas and the different regional celebrations that evolved in Italy over the centuries. You’ll find out which Italian Christmas cookies don’t come from the old country – and which famous Americans have ancestors who did.

And you’ll also find Americanized versions – like biscotti with cranberries and butter cookies with jimmies.

If you prefer a print version, it will be coming soon.

About the authors

This book is written by two award-winning journalists, Dan and Leslie Landrigan. As authors of the New England Historical Society website, they’ve written thousands of stories about New England history over the past decade. They’ve had two books published, Bar Harbor Babylon and New England’s Hidden Past, which you can buy online or in electronic form.

Dan and Leslie have written two other e-books about historic foods: 21 Historic Thanksgiving Foods and 29 Historic Apple Recipes: Cooks’ Favorites from 1650 to 1960, both available from Amazon.

Love history?

Then you probably want to join the New England Historical Society community by signing up for our e-newsletter, which comes out once a week. Click here to sign up.

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Yogi Berra Hits His Way Through New England (Under a Fake Name)

Yogi Berra might never have starred for the New York Yankees had he not talked his way onto the Navy team based at the Groton submarine base in 1945.

Yogi Berra in his unflattering uniform

He had to beg the manager to let him try out. He was a short, squat, awkward gunner’s mate who’d seen action on D-Day. Now, as World War II wound down, he’d returned to the States and longed to play baseball.

“If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’,” he said. “I didn’t like to work.”

Yogi Berra

The base’s ball club was run by James Gleeson, a former Major League outfielder nicknamed “Gee-Gee.” Gleeson didn’t think Berra looked anything like a ballplayer. “So I’m ugly,” Yogi later said. “I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

Gleeson didn’t believe Yogi was the property of the New York Yankees, either.

James “Gee-Gee” Gleeson

Yogi finally convinced him, and he went on to become a Hall of Famer and a beloved cultural figure. His unwittingly witty comments were known as Yogi-isms. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded,” was one of his many classic lines. So was, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Yogi tried to distance himself from his Yogi-isms. “I never said most of the things I said,” he said.

Lawrence Peter Berra

Berra was born Lawrence Peter Berra on May 12, 1925 in St. Louis to a family of Italian immigrants. He dropped out of school after eighth grade because all he wanted to do was to play baseball.

“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets,” he said.

After his best friend Joe Garagiola signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for a $500 bonus, Yogi Berra decided he had to have a $500 bonus too. The Yankees gave him one, along with $90 a month to play for their Norfolk, Va., minor league team, the Tars.

As a Tar in 1943, Yogi Berra hit seven home runs and 56 RBIs – including 23 in one double header. At the end of the season Berra enlisted in the Navy. He became a gunner’s mate and saw action on D-Day aboard a rocket boat, a 36-foot landing craft that sprayed rockets on the beach before the troops landed. Berra spent 10 days on the boat before he finally returned to his ship.

About the invasion, he said, ‘we were closer than the hitter is to the Green Monster at Fenway Park.’ At 18, he didn’t think anything could kill him.

I didn’t know enough to be scared. I had my head up over the side of the boat all the time, looking around like it was the Fourth of July in Forest Park and after the fireworks we were going to go over and get some hot dog and cokes.

New England Baseball (Not the Red Sox)

Before he was mustered out, Yogi Berra was stationed at the submarine base at Groton, Conn., where he finally convinced James Gleeson to let him play.

New England was a good place to hone one’s baseball skills as World War II wound down. Thousands of young men who played baseball, some in the Major Leagues, were stationed at military installations throughout the region. They could play for service teams like the Groton Raiders. Or they could play for for teams in the New England League like the Nashua Dodgers and the Pawtucket Slaters. They could even play for both. The League didn’t allow players signed with professional teams to play semi-pro games as ringers, and the military discouraged the practice. But on the semipro teams they could make $50 a game – half a month’s pay. So the professionals played under assumed names on their days off.

As a Yankee in 1953

Yogi Berra played under an assumed name for the Cranston Chiefs (later the Providence Grays) of the New England League.

His record is murky, as local sportswriters protected the identity of the players. “The New England is a league of aliases and fictitious names. No scribe desires to prevent any young man from earning a dollar by using his right name,” the Lynn Evening Item wrote.

Cusano?

The Italian-American Writer blog shared a memory of Yogi Berra as a Chiefs player:

At Cranston Stadium, for example, a guy named Cusano kept hitting home runs for the Cranston Chiefs and few people knew that his real name was Yogi Berra, a top Yankee prospect.
The city updated the field and raised the fence 30 ft because one day Berra… uhhh Cusano… hit a ball 500 feet off the roof of the Cranston Bible Chapel in centerfield.

The real Crash Davis (Kevin Costner played the fictional Crash Davis in Bull Durham)

Crash Davis had played professional ball for the Philadelphia Athletics before being drafted by the Navy. As the war wound down, he managed the Lawrence Millionaires of the New England League.

I remember one game when we were playing in Providence, Rhode Island, and all those players were using assumed names. Jimmy Gleeson, who had been with the Cubs and the Reds, was playing in the league and first base was open so I elected to walk him. I didn’t know that little guy that was hitting next but I knew Gleeson. That short little guy looked about 18 or 19 years old, and it turned out he hit a home run with the bases loaded. His real name was Lawrence ‘Yogi’ Berra.

The Legend of Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra in 1956

On June 25, 1945, the Yogi Berra legend was born. The New York Giants, returning from a series with the Boston Braves, played against the Groton team. Berra went 3-for-4. One of his hits came off a wild pitch. Giants manager Mel Ott decided he had to have the odd little catcher. He offered the Yankees $50,000 for Berra. Yankees general manager Larry MacPhail refused without knowing who Yogi Berra was – but decided to find out.

MacPhail summoned Berra to New York for an interview. Yogi walked in wearing the sailor’s outfit so unflattering to his short, squat physique. “You want to see me, Mister?” he said to MacPhail. MacPhail was stunned. He later recollected that Yogi ‘looked like the bottom man on an unemployed acrobatic team.’

But Yogi managed to convince MacPhail he was a professional ball player — by asking who he should see about his expenses for the trip.

MacPhail promoted him to the Newark Bears, just one rung down from the New York Yankees, for the 1946 season.

The Yankees

On Sept. 22, 1946, Yogi Berra was called up to the Yankees. As a Yankee he would appear in 14 World Series and on 18 All Star teams, and he would win the American League’s Most Valuable Player honor three times. In 1972, he was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

On a night the Yankees chose to honor him, he expressed his appreciation: “I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.”

James Gleeson in 1964 became Yankees’ manager Yogi Berra’s first base coach.

Yogi Berra died on Sept. 22, 2015, at the age of 90. His advice to mourners: “You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”

With thanks to The New England League: A Baseball History, 1885-1949 By Charlie Bevis and Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee By Allen Barra. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Newark Bears By buba69 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/buba69/1297630664/sizes/o/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31323851.

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Images of New England Observing Memorial Day in WWII

New England observed Memorial Day during World War II with special solemnity. For many, the memory of fallen heroes was fresh, raw and intense.

The Roosevelt administration sent photographers into the field to record how Americans honored their war dead. They worked for the Office of War Information, and would go on to lead illustrious careers.

How Ashland, Maine Observed Memorial Day

Rural Aroostook County lost 239 young men in World War II, either missing in action, killed in action or killed in the line of duty.

Many of the young men from tiny Ashland, Maine, in the county were drafted, and so Memorial Day took on a somber significance.

Legionnaires and Boy Scouts

The town, a farming community, had fewer than 1,000 residents, so the ceremonies featured hardly any young men.

John Collier took these photos of the ceremonies in Ashland in 1943 for the Office of War Information. After the war, he became an anthropologist and an early leader in the fields of visual anthropology and applied anthropology.

In Ashland, Collier noticed all boys and young men marched in the Memorial Day parade. Almost none watched from the audience.

The parade about to begin

Below, a Congregational minister offered a prayer for divine guidance through the years of war.

Prayers

Though only a small farming center with a population under 1000, Ashland had a good band with lots of purple trim and gold braid for the Memorial Day ceremony.

Keeping the beat

A bugler sounded Taps during the ceremonies.

Honoring their sacrifice

Gloucester, Mass., on May 31, 1943

Gordon Parks took these photos showing how Gloucester, Mass., observed Memorial Day in 1943. Parks, then 30, was working for the Office of War Information. He would later become well known for his photo essays of the civil rights movement for Life magazine — and for directing the 1971 film Shaft.

He also composed music and wrote fiction and poetry. His best known work is The Learning Tree, an autobiographical novel about a poor young African American growing up in segregated rural Kansas during the late 1920s and early 1930s. He received 20 honorary doctorates before he died in 2006 at the age of 93.

Here he captures one of the speakers at the Gloucester Memorial Day ceremony.

Solemn words

Gloucester, a fishing community, also held memorial services for fishermen lost at sea. Here relatives of fishermen wait their turn to toss flowers into the water.

Waiting their turn.

A Legionnaire played Taps during the Gloucester ceremony.

Again

When the parade ended, the ROTC band took a rest.

Southington, Conn., 1942

These Memorial Day photos of Southington, Conn., were taken by Fenno Jacobs during World War II for the Office of War Information. Jacobs, born in Waltham, Mass., was a rebellious child who didn’t get past the eighth grade. He joined the Merchant Marine, then took up photography. By the time the OWI hired him he had worked for Time, Life and National Geographic.

Jacobs belonged to a team of photographers who spent the month in Southington, Conn., taking pictures of residents at work and at leisure. The photos were compiled into a booklet designed to show friends and enemies in Europe the traditions and values of typical American families. Military planes dropped thousands of copies over Europe during the German occupation.

The photo below shows the parade marching past the Southington Town Hall on Memorial Day in 1942.

The flag at half-staff

Southington had a large number of residents with German, Polish and Italian ancestry. Their immigrant ancestors came to work in the mills during the 19th century.

A nicely decorated bicycle on the left

The Catholic congregation gathered in the St. Thomas cemetery for an outdoor Mass.

Remembering those who have passed

After World War II, Southington became a bedroom community and the population grew to over 42,000 people.

After the parade

Photos courtesy Library of Congress. This story was updated in 2022.

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