Another story with one old index card.

Old. How old? Old enough where it is safe to write about Three Finger Luis?

I cannot say too much… I know Big E would not have wanted me to write explicitly about this man.

Three Fingers? It is true, and probably one of the best mobster names I have heard yet.

If you asked my godfather’s father — the District Attorney of Westchester from 1968 to 1994 — he would have told you Three Finger Luis was definitely not a myth. In fact, Carl Vergari — the father of my godfather (my godfather who was also my uncle because he married my dad’s sister…. yes, one big Italian family) — came to Big E asking her to reveal the whereabouts of Three Finger Luis and she would not say. Luis gave her the good bread, she wouldn’t be disloyal to him!

All of this from one index card. Yes.

How?

Because you talk while you cook. You talk while you eat. You talk about eating while you eat if you are in my family. Nanny and Big E would plan out what they would have for dinner while still eating breakfast.

A recorded recipe straight from my grandma is rare.

This index card — when not in my room here at New Paltz — is stored in a box in my kitchen closet. The box is deep in width, but small from top to bottom. It is on the top shelf. If you are my mom, sister, or me we pull up one of our broken kitchen chairs to get to the top shelf. It seems we are always pulling the chairs across the floor to the closet to get a recipe… maybe that is why they are broken. There are many other recipes in the box. Recipes my dad has written down, or my aunts have added, or my mom taken the time to record, to print ideas from online, or to cut out of a magazine. Some of these are recipes are the collaboration of family members recreating a recipe that was my grandma’s and some are just part of the overall collection.

Pineapple bars are best frozen. You take them out of the freezer, unfold the tinfoil, and bite into a sweet bread base topped with a soft pineapple mix. Online you will find recipes for pineapple coconut bars, lemon bars, pineapple, coconut, and oatmeal bars. But this, this recipe recorded on the stained old index card, is the real deal.

I called my dad to solve the mystery of the origin of Pineapple bars. His first response was telling me to be careful with the recipe because “it is the only we got.”

My dad knew exactly where the recipe came from, but not the exact person. He recalled for me the two years they lived on Buckingham road in Yonkers. One of their neighbors gave my grandma the recipe because my Nanny liked it and so did the rest of the family. Of course this lady was an Italian lady, but the recipe itself is not specifically Italian.

The next step that I see, is to start spreading this question to the rest of family to figure out the name of the Italian lady who lived on Buckingham road that gave my family the recipe that is now being discussed in 2015 through a class at SUNY New Paltz. This opportunity to go back leads to more questions. And these questions are important. Knowing the history gives a fuller present, a deeper sense of here and now.