Stella D'Oro Would Like A Word
The internet has gone too far.
I saw this tweet last night, nodded to myself, and opened a fresh new draft on this here website.
Because no like are you out of your fuckass mind??
Now listen, this tray of technicolor delights is not THEE staple with any side of my exceptionally Italian family (Giancaspros, DeRogatises, Fontanas, Cuozzos if you want to count it out and confirm that I’m not one of these low-vowel Italians running my mouth for nought). We have exceptional bakers: my cousin Kim makes the greatest chocolate chip cookie1 I have ever known. I would turn down holding Chris Evans in my mouth to hold one of those cookies between my lips. My Aunt Rina makes a verdant little Christmas tree cookie that will make you tempted to roll up to a 6pm Saturday night mass. We do not solely rely on a tray (or let’s be realistic, my grandparents would apparently “look at each other and get pregnant” according to my grandmother, said to my small shocked face, like 14 trays) of these at any christening, confirmation, successful wisdom tooth extraction, cake-and-coffee for a cousin who is not hitting a milestone but just turning 37. But they are there. They are there because, like mail fraud, murder, and not paying for this newsletter you just don’t do it. The cellophane-tented, ribbon-wrapped cookies WILL have their spot at the table. And that spot is the center. There is no written text on the matter but, to me, you grant the elder at the table the right to decree when it is time to open the cookies, and the person who has the nail file on hand to sever the striated ribbon will have good luck and a large tax return for that year.
I will get granular, as granular as the brown sugar baked into these succulent desserts, on a few of the true winners of this plate of wonders.
Let’s start with the almond crescent cookie:
These small gentlemen will make you look like you left a Wall Street finance bro’s party2 and rubbed your face on every flat surface on the way out, but god they’re worth it.
The fabulous Nut Horn:
I am actually allergic to these because many of them are made with hazelnut and guess who eats them anyway? I DO. And you can’t stop me!!!! (But you can keep a Benadryl handy, and I thank you for that.)
If you have the luxury of finding a chocolate chip coconut cookie bar in your party platter, literally fight your aunt or 13-year-old cousin to the death to secure it.
These little guys aren’t for me, but they are queer icons, and it is homophobic to insist that they “suck” so bad, per the person who wrote that damn tweet. Oh why, because all gay people suck dick?? Erasure and hatred have no platform here. Thank you.
These will usually come in a tin of their own, being so honeyed and so small, but I once ate so many struffoli in one sitting that I had to make myself throw up in the unfinished basement toilet at my friend Tom Cospito’s house. You’re picturing me as a small pigtailed tot, or perhaps with an Aéropostale monkey t-shirt and braces. This is kind of you because I was 26 literal years old.
I can never eat them again because I taste vomit when I smell them let alone see the,, but I miss them. I have once or twice hummed a little Adele to them as I passed the tray to the person next to me, taking none for my own.
In the upper right corner I see the dignified swell of a delicious sprinkle cookie: a vanilla base, with rainbow sprinkles festooning its starshape crests. It should, when done by a woman of valor, look like this:
The ones in this photo do not have enough sprinkles. So I can say, hmm, perhaps the person who curled their hand back to elicit this slap in the face to my people had a suboptimally sprinkled cookie. Maybe.
But I feel that they ate the cookie in bad faith. They slandered the cookie in bad faith. They disparaged the cookie in bad faith. The word cookie no longer looks like a word.
Now, sprinkle cookies are controversial: in fact, they sparked a blood feud on The Real Housewives of New Jersey that is still roiling 11 seasons later.
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And I can honor an *Italian* having the opinion that one Italo should not err on the side of presenting a medigan3 cookie to another. But that ain’t me, babe. I enlisted in Team Zia Meliss the second Teresa threw those cookies in the garbage.
For the record, there are several types of sprinkle cookies this Twitter hater may have conflated for the sublime Sprinkle. Such as knots. Knots are a cookie that has not one ounce of fucking flavor, they are like those Cake Boss cakes that are all PVC piping and red dye 4 and fondant that tastes like a ream of Staples printer paper, BUT: when your grandmother whips out a tin of these pale little sluts in a Tupperware lined with a paper towel, that’s AMORE. AMORE!!!
There are also these bitches, who to me are not a sprinkle cookie but a fudge cookie ADORNED with sprinkles. And they are, to the palette, ADOR(N)ABLE.
The fudge is not what I would really call fudge. It is fudge in that a grape candy is grape-candy-flavored but does not taste like any grape you have ever had. (Though, as we all know, Monsanto is working on that.) But it is a chocolatey paste the flavor of you eavesdropping on a conversation chocolate is having in another room and that is good enough for me, a woman who will have just, for example, eaten enough chicken francaise and eggplant rollateen to fell a WWE superstar. Italians are Doctor Whovian Time Lords in a way, but that we have second stomachs and regenerate by naming 17 fucking people in the family Anthony and aging like molasses, which sometimes might find its way into one of our stellar little cookies.
After the first stomach is full, you need something sweet. That is the law. So the fudge is fine.
And listen. I can get not riding for the ones with jellies and jams4, I CAN, if you’ve ever accidentally eaten a *Mary-Kate and Ashley on the red carpet voice* PRUNE hamantaschen I can understand the hesitancy of biting into the tacky red dew betwixt a jam cookie. But you’re telling me you see a Stella D’Oro cookie with the chocolate fudge thumbprint and your mouth doesn’t water? YOU POSTURE FROM A THRONE OF DECEITS!!!
I leave this in your hands now. Will you, an Italian, stand and fight (yes, you will, because we’re all very good at that)? Will you rise as a compatriot to defend our honor? If not, remember that wise poem I never remember who wrote: first they came for the Italians and you said nothing, then they came for…I don’t know, ABBA and the other Swedish scions of pop music5, then they came for whatever the fuck your cultural thing is, and there was no one left to fight by your side because you were an ashy bitch who wouldn’t stand up for a cookie that never did a goddamn thing to you.
Or will you LET OUR PRISTINE HERITAGE BE ERASED? (I know, I know, this sounds like some email from Trump, which unfortunately is a man a lot of us Italians vote for, not my ass though!!! Fuck that whole orange man and the white women who vote for him!!)
Mussolini funeral for you I’m not sorry!!!!!6
Love you bombalines,
TG
So much so that she sells them!
Because they do coke. Keep up.
A non-Italian white person, like when someone is “German/Scotch/Irish,” that kind of thing.
You will pry my ability to stream Robyn from my cold (they’re always cold, I have poor circulation) dead fingers.
I’m kidding. I can not state enough that I have no malice towards the person who made the tweet and in fact, if you’re reading this, I would happily take you for Italian cookies anytime to prove my points above. Thank for for prompting this writing exercise!!
Am I about to start throwing hands over delightful little cookies that remind me of my childhood? Yes, yes I am.
This whole read is a DELIGHT.
Grazie to the max