You Cannoli Die Once (26 page)

¹
/
₂
teaspoon vanilla extract

¹
/
₈
cup dark chocolate, shaved

1 ounce chocolate liqueur

¹
/
₂
cup heavy cream

Drain the ricotta well. Combine the ricotta, powdered sugar, and vanilla extract. Add the shaved chocolate and chocolate liqueur. Whip the heavy cream to stiff peaks, then fold into the mixture. Chill the filling for about 30 minutes before piping into cooled cannoli shells. Sprinkle additional chocolate or powdered sugar on top, if you like.

TIPS
:

1. Eve loves the double chocolate effect of the shaved dark chocolate (“Is there any other kind?”) and chocolate liqueur in this recipe, but you can substitute Frangelico, a hazelnut liqueur from northern Italy, if you want to go nuts.

2. Don’t preassemble your cannoli because the shells will get soggy. Instead, fill the shells close to the serving time, and refrigerate.

3. Use a regular pot for deep frying the shells. Deep fryers (without settings) get too hot and pop the shells apart.

4. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can use a Ziploc® bag by snipping off a corner!

Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next delicious Italian Restaurant mystery from Shelley Costa

The Ziti That Never Sleeps

Available from Pocket Books January 2014

1

At 9:41 p.m. on June 16th, I uttered those fateful words: “How bad can it be?” If you didn’t tumble out of your crib just yesterday, you know that the universe hears those words as a challenge. So it sends you a hurricane or a tax audit or a new man who still lives with his mother. Even so, I didn’t see it coming.

As the head chef at Miracolo Italian Restaurant, I had just been plating an order of
vitello alla bolognese
when our best server, Paulette Coniglio, one of those sturdy middle-aged women with a wedge cut and expensive highlights, handed me a violet envelope. Someone had left it on the table, stuck between the salt cellar and the ornamental bamboo.

I took the envelope and gave it a look. Navy blue calligraphy on card stock. Back flap sealed with a round blob of navy blue wax, embossed with the letter B. Addressed to Chef Maria Pia Angelotta—my nonna (Italian for annoying grandmother), who owns Miracolo.

“So who left it?” I asked.

Paulette shrugged. “Two well-dressed women who knew enough to get the Barolo with the veal.”

I like this woman for a couple of reasons. First, she used to date my father, Giacomo (Jock) Angelotta and she stuck around even after he didn’t. Second, she is the field commander you want in all the battles of daily life.

“Ah,” I said appreciatively, “foodies.” Wine selection is always the giveaway.

Paulette’s gaze swung to my cousin Landon, my sous chef, who was garnishing an order of his profiteroles and doing the famous hat lift from the Bob Fosse number, “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man.” Her eyes narrowed. “Mm,” she hummed, shaking her head slowly, “something more.”

“More? What could that be?” I had been so busy during the dinner rush that I hadn’t poked my head out of the kitchen even once. “Did Maria Pia recognize them?”

She’d been swanning around the dining room all evening. My grandmother sincerely believes our customers come because of her. The rest of us believe they come in spite of her.

“I don’t think so.” Paulette is my ally in my ongoing effort to keep the dragon (Maria Pia) at bay in the business of the restaurant, which is why she always keeps me in the loop reassuringly ahead of my wild-card granny.

I brought the violet envelope next to my ear, squeezed it between my fingers, and then held it up to the overhead lights. “Well,” I said philosophically, “it’s not ticking, oozing white powder, or holding cash, so I think I’m losing interest.”

She held out her hand. “I’ll give it to Maria Pia.”

Which is when I said with a shrug, “How bad can it be?”

I found out just two minutes later, when my grandmother flung open the double doors to the kitchen and stood there dazed, the opened envelope hanging loosely between her fingers. Out in the dining room the regulars were tuning up, trying to find an A they could agree on. They’re amateur musicians who several years ago decided Miracolo was the perfect place to try out their stuff in public. To get the picture, think squatters with musical instruments. Maybe none of them has a garage.

“It’s happened,” Maria Pia croaked, her arms pushed quivering against the double doors like she was trying to launch a lifeboat from the
Titanic
. Her expression was ragged.

“What?” I asked as I plated an order of risotto. “You finally been invited to a baby shower?”

“It should only be yours,” she answered in a strange voice, staring past me. Looking at my nonna, it’s hard to tell the difference between alarm and ecstasy, which must have complicated her love life with my grandfather, the sainted Benigno.

At seventy-six, Maria Pia Angelotta is pretty much what you’d call a babe—with wrinkles. These she slathers nightly with half a dozen different creams labeled “crèmes” to jack up the price. She looks a lot like Anne Bancroft; those big wide-set dark eyes, that broad and sensuous mouth. From her I got my good legs, something she never lets me forget, although hers are shorter—something I never let
her
forget.

“Then what, Nonna?”

“It’s Belfiere.”

Which didn’t clear it up. “And Belfiere is—?” I prompted her slowly.

Nonna got testy. “Have your pants cut off the circulation to your brain?” She believes I’ve ruined all my chances at a niceItalianboy by preferring pants to skirts. I resist telling her that niceItalianboys have no trouble getting past garments of any sort. And I do mean getting past. “Belfiere is the oldest culinary society in the—the—world.”

Landon and I exchanged a look. His said:
Do you think it’s time to take her in for an evaluation?
Mine said:
I thought this blessed day would never come.

Landon cranked up his help-me-to-understand expression, leaned into her, and said, “Kind of like the American Culinary Federation, Nonna?”

I crossed my arms. “Or … The American Cheese Society?”

She hit us both with the violet-colored invitation. “No, you ninnies, not at all like those.” This was followed with a spray of sentiments half in Italian that—from what I could follow—compared Landon and me to that traitor, Little Serena, her other granddaughter, whom she likened to bread made with expired yeast and then taken off to the woods by non-Italian wolves. (But then, my Italian is a little rusty.) All Little Serena had done was to come out of the culinary closet—“I don’t cook”—after which she blew town to work at Disney World.

I held out my hand. “Can I see the invite, Nonna?”

Nonna,
a soft little nursery rhyme kind of word. Makes you picture some mild-mannered, smiling human cushion that shells peas, slips you five dollars if she thinks you studied your catechism, and uses her loose dress as a dish towel. But this would be somebody else’s nonna, not mine.

She glared at me. “Of course you can’t see it. It’s not for the uninitiated.”

Landon went for logic. “Well, you’re uninitiated.”

Maria Pia gave him the look she usually reserves for overcooked pasta. “Yes, but I am among the chosen.” She clutched the invitation to her generous breast. “Belfiere,” she explained in the hushed tone usually reserved for deathbeds, “is two hundred years old. It’s a secret society of no more than fifty chefs—all women, no men—and you can’t apply to become a member. You are selected by a secret process.” Her expressive eyes widened. In awe, I thought. Maybe fear. Hard to tell. “And inducted in secret.”

I know it took a lot for Landon not to roll his eyes; I was fighting the same urge. “We get it, Nonna—it’s very hush-hush,” he said.

“Well, what do they actually do, these Belfiere ladies?” I asked.

“Do?” Nonna gasped. “Do? They don’t have to ‘
do’
anything. They just”—she exhaled reverently—“are.”

“Well,” I said, scratching my head, “are you going to have time for this secret cooking club? I mean, the restaurant kind of needs you.” Was I crazy? Belfiere could be the perfect excuse to get her out of my hair.

Chef Maria Pia Angelotta pulled herself up straight and gave me a stony look. “You don’t understand. This is not some little club for”—her fingers twiddled the air in the Italian gesture that says
you are so inconsequential, even my fingers are bored
—“tap dancers or hairdressers. Belfiere is the greatest honor in all the world for a woman chef. If you are called,” she said, rippling an eyebrow at me, “you go.”

Landon looked alarmed. “What do you mean, you go? Is it a commune? Do you have to sell all your stuff and go live with them?” He was winding himself up, but it was alarm I happened to share. “If so,” he finished with a self-conscious little laugh, “I get the Art Deco blue mohair armchair. Please, oh, please. Just remember I’m your oldest grandchild.”

I elbowed him in the ribs.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said imperiously. Then she lifted the invitation and scrutinized the printed instructions. “That’s not how it works. Tomorrow will be busy. I start preparing for the special meal I create as part of my initiation—so we’ll be needing extra help.”

Landon groaned. “Extra help?”

“Cooking? Serving? What do you mean?” I asked.

She waved us off, lost in a daydream about hobnobbing with her fellow wizards. “Belfiere,” she said, all choked up. “I can hardly believe it. I only wish Benigno had lived to see it,” she finished with a magnificent sniff.

Then she bit her lower lip and stared at a far corner of the ceiling. “So much to do,” she said, turning away, tapping the invitation against her hand. “First thing tomorrow, I get my Belfiere tattoo.”

Tattoo?

Maria Pia Angelotta?

The woman who, on the subject of body art, runs the gamut from nausea to horror?

Little did I know that before the week was up, I’d be seeing another Belfiere tattoo—on a corpse.

*

If this Belfiere cooking society was enough to get my squeamish grandmother ready to run out and get inked, I didn’t like it. Neither did Landon. I could tell by the fact that in the last thirty seconds he had left traces of mint leaves and chocolate shavings in his otherwise perfect hair.

We followed her back into the dining room, where the last of the evening’s customers were weighing the effort of pushing themselves off their chairs against hanging around for the late-night regulars’ first set. Our cousin Choo Choo Bacigalupo, the maitre d’, dimmed the lights and smiled suggestively at his crush, our server Vera Tyndall.

Paulette and Mrs. Crawford—our mysterious pianist who I suspect was named Mrs. Crawford at birth—could tell something was afoot from Landon’s hair and the fact that my black chef’s toque had fallen over my eyebrow. The two of them shot us questioning looks. Pointing at the violet invitation in Nonna’s hand, I mouthed, “Get the card,” at them.

Paulette improvised. “Is that a cockroach?” she exclaimed loudly, stalking over to a dark corner behind the bar where our octogenarian bartender, Giancarlo Crespi, was slicing lemons with manic ferocity.

“Where?” gasped Maria Pia. She quickly glanced around to see what effect this discovery was having on business—zero—so she headed toward the corner, still clutching the violet invitation from the crackpot cooks at Belfiere.

I looked pleadingly at Mrs. Crawford. Without a ripple of change in her expression, she performed the arpeggio that opened my grandmother’s favorite song, “Three Coins in a Fountain.”

All interest in an alleged cockroach evaporated.

Maria Pia fanned herself demurely with the invitation, acting as though her nightly mad interpretive dance to the fountain song had been vigorously requested by the crowd.

There was no crowd. There was a red-nosed businessman hoping another split of champagne would cure the eye-rolling boredom of the young redhead with him. There was a table of five flashy women who kept trying to top each other’s bad boyfriend stories but had dressed with enough dazzle that they were probably secretly hoping those boyfriends would walk in. There was a very pregnant gal thumbing through a baby name book and disagreeing with everything her husband liked.

No one was clamoring for my nonna’s expressive whirling, but with a theatrical flourish, she set the invitation down on an empty table and launched into the song. She got as far as “Three—” and was sucking in a big breath, when our singer, Dana Cahill, came motoring up to her shouting, “No, no, no!”

At that moment Landon oozed by the table, snagged the violet card, and disappeared into the kitchen. I knew he was heading to the office at the back, where he’d make us a copy of this invitation from Belfiere that was already smelling like five-day old mackerel.

Dana smiled indulgently at Maria Pia and drew her aside, out of earshot of the late-night regulars. “Don’t you remember what week this is, M.P.?”

To which my bemused grandmother said, “Heh?”

Dana smoothed her bobbed and dyed black hair, as if it ever got wayward, and licked her vampirish red lips. She was wearing a sleeveless black sheath I think I saw at Saks in the Donna Karan collection and a black armband. Who died? Knowing Dana, it could have been the death date of some obscure Russian poet—anything to throw out there if someone asked her about the cloth around her bicep. She chooses her dramatic effects and then digs up a plausible reason for them.

“It’s Grief Week,” she said in a way that reminded me a nun in fourth grade when some poor boy couldn’t name the ninth Station of the Cross.

My grandmother looked puzzled.

Dana explained, enunciating each syllable. “
Se-mano do-lo-ro-so
. Grief Week.” For someone wearing a black armband, she was sporting a lot of gold jewelry—about two pounds of it.