More than a project…
Exploring our connection and culture through food.
My father and I began baking mostaccioli cookies together more than a decade ago. My father was born in 1946 in Arasi, a small village in Reggio di Calabria - on the very southern tip of Italy across from Sicily. It’s a small hill town whose current population is 250. He climbed trees, had goats, and farmed, and immigrated to the United States in 1961, settling in Chicago where I was eventually born.
A few years before my father’s cancer diagnosis in 2014, we began trying to recreate the Mostaccioli from his youth - and we haven’t gotten the recipe right yet. I hope that through this website and the associated Facebook page, we can crowdsource recipes from my dad’s home village or similar regions to find the lost Mostaccioli recipe. My dad doesn’t think people will give out precious family recipes, but I’m hopeful that people will help me give this gift of memory, home, nostalgia, and love.
All collected recipes will be posted and tested on this website. I will share my father’s feedback when we bake them together.
My father and I
Frank Marrari
Retired Machinist
Frank Marrari was born in Calabria, Italy, in 1946 and immigrated to the United States in 1961 at age 15. Within a year of his arrival to the U.S., barely speaking any English, his father died of a heart attack. He and his older brother began working to support their mother and younger brother. Marrari worked in machine shops until he secured a job with Nabisco/Kraft, where he worked for over 35 years. He concurrently owned a Machine Shop with his brothers, where he worked a full-time shift before heading to a second full-time shift job at Nabisco/Kraft. Marrari did this daily, sometimes allowing himself a half-day off on Sundays.
The first time he tried Mostaccioli cookies since his immigration to the U.S. was around 2008, after his daughter brought a couple back from a trip to Italy. Since around 2010, Marrari has been baking Mostaccioli Calabresi cookies with his daughter in order to try to perfect the recipe from his region. They have not yet been able to get it right.
Enzina Marrari
Artist and Folklorist
Enzina Marrari was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, as a first-generation Italian American, to Frank and Connie Marrari. She is an artist and folklorist currently living in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, where she is pursuing her PhD in Folklore.
Marrai began “In Search of Mostaccioli” as a class project and dissertation exploration, but it has become much more. Marrari has found that making Mostaccioli together is a way she connects with her father through the ritual act of baking, and together, they create new memories filled with love, joy, and experimentation.
Marrari aims to source as many recipes as possible to find the right combination of flour, honey, Musto (and whatever we are missing), and the appropriate preparation method so she can gift her father the cookies from his youth.
