Grammatico, Maria 1941-

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GRAMMATICO, Maria 1941-

PERSONAL:

Born December, 1941, in Erice, Sicily, Italy.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Erice, Sicily, Italy. Office—Pasticceria Grammatico, Via Vittorio Emanuele 14, 91016 Erice, Italy. Agent—c/o Author Mail, William Morrow and Co., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Confectioner and author. Founder and proprietor of Pasticceria Grammatico, Erice, Sicily, Italy.

WRITINGS:

(With Mary Taylor Simeti) Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood, photographs by Mark Ferri, illustrations by Maria Vica Costarelli, W. Morrow (New York, NY), 1994.

SIDELIGHTS:

Maria Grammatico is a Sicilian confectioner who has gained fame for her almond pastries. Her life story, as related in Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood, "reads like the rough draft of a novella by someone like Alice Munro," according to Los Angeles Times contributor Michelle Huneven. Born on the rugged and isolated west coast of Sicily in 1940, Grammatico grew up in a poor farming family. When her father died of a heart attack in 1952, and with three other mouths to feed and a fourth on the way, Maria's mother sent her and her younger sister to San Carlo, the local orphanage run by Franciscan nuns. There, they fell into a harsh regime. Their pregnant mother was not allowed to see them for a year, until she had given birth, for the nuns did not want the young girls to see a pregnant woman. The children of the orphanage helped in the single enterprise of this cloistered orphanage: the production of almond pastries.

For ten years, Grammatico shelled and ground almonds and helped with the mixing and baking of the cookies, biscuits, and cream tarts that the nuns sold through the iron gate of San Carlo. Then, believing she was called to a religious life, Grammatico entered a Carmelite convent, but the life was not for her. She suffered a nervous breakdown and, at the age of twenty-two, was sent home. Recovering, she had to do something to earn a living. There had been scant education in the orphanage; the one thing she did know was how to make marzipan and other delicacies. Though the nuns forbade taking any of their recipes to the outside world, Grammatico remembered how to make a rich variety of such delicacies. Starting out with a crude wood-burning oven, a rolling pin, and a manual nut grinder, Grammatico opened up a confectionery shop in Erice, Sicily, that grew over the years to two successful shops that attracted tourists from around the world.

In the early 1990s, Grammatico shared her life story as well as numerous recipes with American writer Mary Taylor Simeti, who taped the woman's tale. Published in 1994, Bitter Almonds provides "vivid recollections of a vanished culture and way of life," according to a Kirkus Reviews critic. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly likewise praised these "bittersweet recollections … [that] lend depth to this slender volume of Italian recipes." Writing in the Boston Globe, Sheryl Julian felt that the book "will keep you … enthralled." Julian further noted that Bitter Almonds is "an important book, not only because Grammatico's story is fascinating, but also for the thoughtfulness and care that Simeti took in bringing her subject to the page." Nancy McKeon of the Washington Post noted that Grammatico's tale is related "with a savvy story-teller's instinct for the details that will seem most exotic." The recipes in the book range from traditional cannoli to anise biscuits, Genoa cakes, and marzipan. The Kirkus Reviews critic concluded that Grammatico's book is an "eloquent celebration of food and a woman who learned the hard way how to prepare it."