Mama's Cookies A recipe from Rose Cincotta Cafarella, passed on to Mary Cafarella and submitted by her grand daughter Janice Cafarella Crosen

That has to be the longest title in the entire set of family blogs. Do we understand this thoroughly?
These are cookies made by Rose Cincotta Cafarella. She and her husband Gaetano were the parents of Col. Joe, Rudy and Mary Cafarella, just to name those who know about this blog. Mary passed the recipe on to her niece Janice Cafarella Crossen.
Now that we have that straight....I love getting cookies and pastries from the bakeries in Sicily and the North End of Boston. Sicily has much more variety than anything we find here, but no matter where you are, cookies like these are a wonderful treat. However....It is so much better to bake something like this from a family source.
I never loved my mother and grandmother's cookies that much, but I do love the fact that they and probably their grand parents before them have been using the same(or a slightly altered form, as often happens in moving from generation to generation)recipe.
As long as there was a "slacking" oven, people have been using the left over heat to do little buns and cookies. These could potentially have been made by family for a long...long time, and here they are!
Mary came from the other side of the Gully!
When you go to Malfa, you see that the town is sitting in the RELATIVELY flat bottom of a big hollow,(an amphitheater) facing the sea. The town is divided by several long erosion valleys. There is the town center, then as you move to the east there are a few deep valleys leading to the sea. The house on Via Gelso that you see in the pictures early in the blog is beyond one of these. This is the side of town nearest to Capofaro.
Mary's house was beyond the valley on the West side of the town nearest to the high ridge that separates the town from Pollara, and not terribly far from the Cemetery.
Mary was not exactly from the same branch of Cincottas that my grandmother came from, but like any old...very old family, they are two of a dozen different branches found throughout the islands.
She looks so happy in her very smiling picture, I always smile back when I look at her.