Making an old-time LI Thanksgiving in Italy

I grew up in Huntington Station in the 1970s and ’80s in a typical mixed-ethnic, middle-income neighborhood, just a few blocks from New York Avenue and the Long Island Rail Road depot. As a teenager, I delivered Newsday on my bike.

The families up and down the block were a close-knit community. Though we each made our own Thanksgiving dinners, before feasting, the kids and some dads on our block on Folsom Avenue would play touch football for a couple of hours. To us, it was the Jets vs. the Dallas Cowboys.

My family’s Thanksgiving dinner was pretty standard — roast turkey, stuffing, canned-green-beans-and-mushroom-soup casserole, pumpkin pie. We also made a cheese ball covered in chopped nuts that we ate with Ritz crackers.

My wife, Zeneba, and I had always loved traveling to Italy. In 2019, we grabbed the chance to live and work there. At the age of 51, I moved with Zeneba to Soriano nel Cimino, a little town about a 90-minute drive north of Rome, to start a new life as musicians and travel writers. We organize and perform concerts in Italy and also run a travel business.

“Thanksgiving,” of course, is not a holiday in Italy; getting together with family to enjoy traditional food is just called “Thursday” (actually, “giovedì”). We love our Italian life, but sometimes, like Thanksgiving, we create for ourselves a version of the holiday, and we modify the classic foods with Italian ingredients.

Turkey is common here, but whole birds are not sold in stores. One must order them from a butcher weeks in advance. Instead, we make a turkey involtini — pounded-out turkey breast rolled up with prosciutto and spinach, slow-cooked in red wine. For the casserole, instead of the canned beans and mushroom soup, we use fresh green beans and local seasonal mushrooms baked with parmigiano and real cream, topped with homemade seasoned croutons instead of canned crispy fried onions.

Canned pumpkin can’t be found here either, but pumpkins of several varieties are sold — as food, not decoration. At vegetable vendors, you can buy one big slice! We cook it down with sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon, and combine it with whipped mascarpone and cream, and biscotti instead of a crust, making a sort of pumpkin tiramisu. (Our neighbors don’t know what to make of this strange hybrid.)

And we still make a cheese ball, replacing American ingredients with Italian — port wine, real provolone and local hazelnuts from the valley below our house. Instead of the Ritz crackers, we just go to one of our local bakeries for some nice bread.

Of course, we can’t play street football — we wouldn’t know where to get an American football if we wanted to, and the streets in our little hill town are nowhere near straight or flat or wide enough. (Also, I’m older.) Instead, we take the classic Italian passeggiata — a leisurely stroll into the town piazza or up to a nearby 13th century church, greeting our neighbors as we walk, and watching kids kick a soccer ball around. I might even join them for a kick or two. So, we still get that sense of community here in our new home.

This is how we celebrate Thanksgiving — it’s not the “Long Island” holiday I grew up with, but I’m definitely thankful for these little touches that really take me back.

Reader Matt Walker, formerly of Huntington Station, now lives in Soriano nel Cimino, Italy.