At cooking lessons with Maria Grammatico we learned to make Brutti ma buoni, Tette delle monache, marzipan, and cannoli, before eating a feast of Sicilian foods (as pictured above). Maria was a skilled, rather sassy Sicilian chef, with an unusual professional training: she learned to make pastries in a convent, where she grew up after her mother couldn’t afford to feed all her children in the wake of WWII. Now, Maria not only has her own bakery, but also a cookbook published in multiple languages and her own cooking school, where her staff flocked around her like doting grandchildren. The fog that covered Erice that night only added to the otherworldliness of the experience.