Library’s Month-Long WOW Celebration

Is Offering A Wealth Of Italian Programs

By Shannon Hicks

Although the number of pizzerias in town may speak differently to outsiders, Newtown is not a very Italian-based town. Families of many backgrounds live here, with no one nationality standing out.

To offer Newtown residents a taste of Italy beyond our local restaurants’ offerings, C.H. Booth Library has joined The Connecticut Center for the Book at Hartford Public Library, along with public libraries across the state, for the 6th Annual World of Words: A Celebration of Connecticut’s Literary and Cultural Roots. A month-long program, World of Words (WOW) encourages libraries to teach readers of all ages about their own literary and cultural roots while exploring similarities and differences of other cultures through exhibitions, author events, films and videos, hands-on workshops, storytelling, lectures, book discussions, games, literary readings (called “Telling Passages”), music and dance programs, and culinary offerings.

Newtown’s library has scheduled a month of free public events celebrating all things Italian. The first events were held last weekend, with readers of all ages having an opportunity to celebrate Italy. A food and wine event opened the month’s activities on Friday, a puppet show was offered Saturday afternoon, an opening reception for a photography exhibit was held Sunday afternoon, and “Leonardo’s Mona Lisa,” a slide lecture exploring one of history’s most famous paintings, was held on April 6.

The two kickoff events offered opportunities for library patrons of all ages to begin learning about Italy.

Claire Criscuolo and Steve Small presented a delicious program, “A Taste of Italy” on Friday in the library’s Knoepke Meeting Room. Fifty adults spent a few hours with the owner of Claire’s Corner Copia, a New Haven eatery that has been at the corner of College and Chapel streets since 1975, and Mr Small, a local wine expert and a manager with Mid State Distributors.

While Mrs Criscuolo made the final preparations for the evening’s first dish, a white bean and artichoke bruschetta, Mr Small introduced his first wine for the evening’s tastings.

Riva della Chiesa Prosecco Frizzanti is a sparking wine that is unusual in that its hand-tied cork needs to be opened with a corkscrew; most sparkling wines have corks that pop off by hand. The wine, from northern Italy’s Prosecco region, in the foothills of the Alps, was delicious. It is a slightly sweet wine with a hint of fruitiness.

The Frizzanti is a “delightful wine,” said Mr Small, “that can be enjoyed any time of the day.” Italians, he said, call it a breakfast wine. It would be a good alternative for champagne for mimosas.

Mrs Criscuolo opened her food portion with a lesson that would continue all evening: Cooking is about taste and is from the heart, not necessarily a written recipe. There were no recipe handouts on Friday, in fact.

While mixing a can of cannoli beans, sea salt by the spoonful, the juice of a fresh-squeezed lemon and artichokes she had cooked up earlier in the day, Mrs Criscuolo talked about cooking versus baking.

“I still believe the very best way to cook is with your senses,” Mrs Criscuolo said. “Baking is a formula. You need a strict ratio of fat to salt to sugar to whatever.

“But cooking is from the heart. Use what you like,” she urged. The author of a number of cookbooks, Mrs Criscuolo shared the story of one woman who contacted her a number of years ago after reading a recipe that called for halved walnuts. The woman was afraid to try the recipe before hearing from Mrs Criscuolo about whether it would be all right to instead use crushed walnuts.

“Cooking should be about what you like to eat. It should be about what tastes good to you,” she said. “More people have gotten into cooking in recent years, and cooking has gotten much more relaxed. I’m so thankful for that.”

Crushed walnuts were fine, therefore, Mrs Criscuolo told the woman who had written to her.

The bruscetta recipe offered a simple combination of ingredients that were pureed for a few minutes, tasted a few times by the cook, and then served on crustini — small pieces of bread that had been toasted.

Next up was asparagus and fried eggs, a delicious combination that would be well suited for any time of day. Again, it was a simple combination of ingredients — asparagus, eggs, olive oil, shallots and garlic — that were combined by look and feel rather than by measured cups, cooked and taste-tested by the cook while she talked about the ingredients.

While the asparagus and egg dish was cooking, Mrs Criscuolo also spoke about soy meats, which her restaurant uses. She passed around samples of soy bacon so that attendees could see, smell, and touch the soy products that can take the place of meats in may dishes while still providing, Mrs Criscuolo pointed out, the proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals everyone needs in their diet.

In introducing his second wine, Canaletto Pinot Grigio, Mr Small said he thought it would be a good complement for the dish, but admitted with a laugh that it may have been the first time he had ever matched wine with eggs.

Also from northern Italy, where most Pinot Grigio comes from, the Canaletto is fermented and aged in stainless steel, which means it does not pick up the oak flavors of many Chardonnays (which are usually fermented in barrels).

For her third recipe, Mrs Criscuolo offered another versatile, quick and easy dish: marinara sauce. Her main ingredients were extra virgin olive oil, onions and garlic, sea salt and of course, tomatoes.

“Start with the best tomatoes,” she said, “and you almost can’t go wrong.” She suggested San Marzano tomatoes, which are grown in the Angri region of Italy. “That’s the home of the best plum tomatoes in the world,” she said.

The marinara sauce was prepared with two variations, as an Amatriciana (with soy bacon) and as Bolognese (with porcini mushrooms and pepperoncini peppers among its ingredients). Both were mixed with pasta and served.

“There are no hard and fast rules about what pasta goes with what sauce,” Mrs Criscuolo pointed out. “Again, it’s all about what you like.”

She also urged attendees not to worry about presenting dishes of pasta with the sauce only on the top of the pasta.

“Toss the pasta with your sauce,” she said. “Don’t try to serve pasta like you see is on the covers of food magazines, stark white pasta with a circle of sauce in the center. Worry more about getting the flavor of your sauce throughout the dish, not a magazine presentation.”

Mr Small coupled the pasta dish with another Canaletto wine, this one the vineyard’s Primitivo, a red. The wine is from Italy’s southernmost region (“the boot heel”), Apulia, where zinfandel is an abundant grape. The Primitivo, therefore, is slightly similar flavorwise to a zinfandel, but it is from a genetically different grape.

For dessert Mr Small had selected a sweet lemon dessert wine, or liqueur, called Limoncello. Made with the skins of lemons, this was another wine from northern Italy.

The Limoncello was served with Anisette dunking cookies. Booth Library children’s librarian Lana Meloni had baked the cookies following one of Mrs Criscuolo’s recipes.

WOW For Children

On Saturday afternoon nearly three dozen children showed up for the first performance of Pinocchio: a puppet show presented by the girls in Junior Girl Scout Troop 809. With parents sitting in chairs around the walls of the library’s lower meeting room, many children opted to sit on the floor as close to the stage as they could.

As the tale of the wooden puppet who desperately wants to be a real little boy unfolded, there were plenty of gasps and lots of giggles. Even most parents had smiles for the efforts of the Girl Scouts.

The girls had decided to present Pinocchio because it is set in Italy. When they were first contacted by the library about participating in the World of Words celebration, they decided they wanted to do something that would be familiar to most audiences. They narrowed their choice to a puppet show or a play, some of the girls explained after last weekend’s show.

The Scouts initially tried to have one girl handle each puppet’s voice and movement, but discovered during rehearsals that it was a difficult task.

“We decided to have two people for each puppet, one for the voice and one for the puppet itself,” Sara Risko explained after the show. “It was really hard to focus on the words and the emotions of the puppet.”

Saturday’s performance was followed by a sing-along of “I’ve Got No Strings,” a song from the Disney movie version of Pinocchio. The Girl Scouts then invited all of the children to take a look at the puppets that were used in the show while meeting the girls who had brought them to life.

Work on Pinocchio: a puppet show began back in October. The girls were able to borrow a puppet show stage from the library, but they created all of the backdrops and many of their puppets. The backdrops were beautiful — long reams of paper had been used to create more than a dozen scenes including an Italian village, the sea and a whale, Geppetto’s workshop, mountains, and more. It was obvious that a lot of time had gone into drawing and then coloring each of the scenes.

The Scouts also had active roles in writing the script, making and distributing fliers for the performances, finding props, and learning the music they led for the sing-along.

The girls’ involvement in WOW is part of their work towards a Bronze Award, the highest honor for Junior Girl Scouts. The award, according to Troop 809 co-leader Denise Rodriguez, requires at least 15 hours to complete a service project and uses Scouts’ leadership skills and commitment to the community. While working on Pinocchio the girls also earned a Leadership badge and Sign of the Rainbow badge.

The members of Troop 809, all sixth graders at Reed Intermediate School, are Christina Ciamarra, Michelle Davies, Nicole Escoda, Kaylynn Glassman, Kristina Hansen, Jennifer Perez, Erica Raymond, Sara Risko, Alyssa Rodriguez, Chelsea Sabia, Emily Schriever, Maggie Sullivan, Amanda Sweat, and Lyndi Szabo. Their co-leaders are Pam Meister and Denise Rodriguez.

A second performance of Pinocchio: a puppet show is planned for April 17.

More WOW Programs

Newtown’s WOW events will continue this month with “Booked for Lunch,” a  discussion concerning Grazia Deledda’s Reeds in the Wind on Monday, April 12, at 1 pm; a screening of Cinema Paradisio, an Italian movie with subtitles, on Friday, April 16, at 7; the second presentation of Pinocchio: a puppet show on Saturday, April 17, at 1:30; and an author program featuring Luciana Contin and about her novel Chances and Choices: The Girl from Trieste, on Tuesday, April 20, at 7:30 pm.

There will be a screening of the 1953 Gregory Peck-Audrey Hepburn film Roman Holiday on Friday, April 23, at 7 pm; a movie-pizza party to feature The Lizzie Maguire Movie on Thursday, April 22, from 1 to 3 pm; a book discussion for readers in grades 5-8 on Wednesday, April 28, at 4:30, about Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord; and a discussion of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose on Thursday, April 29, at 7:30 pm.

All programs are free, but advance registration may be required for some. Contact Booth Library, 426-4533, for additional information.