Re-creating a family tradition, one walnut at a time

By Corinne Purtill, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Fifty years ago my great-grandfather Carlo Portolan hauled down from the roof of his Lincoln Heights home a glass jug full of fragrant black booze, warm from 40 days in the sun.

He decanted it into smaller bottles, affixed to each a masking tape label inscribed with the year — 1974 — and passed them around to friends and family.

He died four years later. His bottles of nocino, an Italian liqueur that looks like tar and tastes like Christmas, carried on.

My mother has one. So do each of her siblings. The glass bottles still get pulled out sometimes at the end of holidays and long family gatherings. All flavors, save for the sear of grain alcohol, have long since faded. It’s drinkable, but serves mostly as an excuse to speak fondly of the people who made it, the places they came from and the threads that still tie us together.

But the level in the bottles is dropping. The people around the table are getting older. Recently it occurred to me that if a new generation doesn’t pick up those threads and take on the weird family habits we kindly call tradition, those will fade away too.

Which is why I texted my brother: Do you want to make nocino this year?

Yes, he wrote back immediately. I absolutely want to make nocino this year.

Nocino, pronounced no-CHEE-no, shows up in written records as early as the Renaissance, where 16th-century physicians raved about a “water of walnuts” that “cooleth the pestilence.”

You can buy it today at big-box liquor stores or make your own if you’re feeling crafty. It’s a dark, semisweet liqueur with a flash of spice, an amaro that adds a zesty note to a cocktail, tastes great on vanilla ice cream and goes down nicely on its own after dinner.

Mike and I went first to Carlo’s original instructions, a formula passed down from his parents that his wife, our great-grandmother, scrawled on a scrap of paper decades ago.

The recipe reads, in its entirety:

80 nuts

10 cloves

10 lb sugar

Distilled H20

Alcohol

Cut green walnuts in quarters

A careful reader will notice some gaps. Cut the walnuts, and then … what, exactly? How much water? How much alcohol?

We peppered Mom and her siblings with questions at a family birthday party. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the descendants of the “Cut Green Walnuts In Quarters” people were also fuzzy on details.

The walnuts had to be harvested on a particular saint’s day, someone remembered. Google confirmed this was June 24, the Feast of San Giovanni Battista, or St. John the Baptist.

They agreed on the massive size of the walnut tree that once stood in their grandparents’ backyard (“monstrous,” said Aunt Kathy) and that the alcohol-walnut mixture spent a Christ-like 40 days on the roof (“biblical crap,” said Uncle Kenny).

But the amount or kind of alcohol used, whether it was ready to drink immediately post-roof or needed more rest time out of the sun — of that, no one was certain.

I did a little digging. Despite a strong familial tendency for persnickety perfectionism, it turned out that my clan has historically taken a much more relaxed approach to its libations.

Like many of L.A.’s Italian American families during the Prohibition years, our ancestors — then recently arrived from northern Italy after a stop in Colorado coal country — treated the ban on alcohol as an embarrassing mistake by their adopted country that they would politely ignore.

My great-uncle Harry Portolan recalled being roused from sleep as a boy of 6 to assist with a home wine-making operation in the late 1920s.

“A ton of grapes was delivered in boxes and these were slid down a shoot to the cellar where the grapes were mashed and then dumped into a large vat,” he wrote decades later. “I remember asking my grandfather if we should wash the grapes as they had leaves, stems and god only knows what else. He only laughed at this comment.”

While still technically illegal, homemade wine for personal use was often overlooked by enforcement officials. Grain alcohol-based nocino was prone to stricter scrutiny. Apparently my great-great-grandfather laughed at that too.

“No one knew where he was able to get the alcohol as it was against the law to have it,” Uncle Harry wrote.

The nocino turned “coal black” as it steeped in the sun and “was only drank on special occasions, and only in a very small amount,” he recalled. “I remember it giving me a warm feeling all the way down.”

Mine wasn’t the only family in Lincoln Heights with homemade spirits perched safely on the roof.

“This looks like my family’s recipe,” said Marianna Gatto, executive director of the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, scanning Noni’s handwritten instructions in her office off Olvera Street.

Gatto grew up in Los Angeles with a father who rarely drank but was nonetheless a skilled liqueur maker. Crafting one’s own spirits then wasn’t a fussy foodie pastime, she said, but a practical way of turning fresh ingredients into something to celebrate with, or an offering that could be swapped with neighbors for their homemade sausage or cheese.

It was a way of making the best of what you had, especially when you didn’t have much. Gatto still makes her own nocino today.

“You develop an intimacy with the ingredients,” she said, “and it’s never exactly the same.”

I ordered a 5-gallon glass jug on Amazon. Mike tracked down walnuts from an Indiana farm.

In early July he showed up at my house with a Priority Mail box full of ping-pong ball-sized green walnuts, knobbly things that oozed sticky gel from their cores when cut open. Without the protective shell, young green walnuts release a much richer flavor. Several farms in California and beyond set aside a portion of their early harvest for enthusiasts of walnut preserves, pickles and liqueurs.

Mike and I dutifully chopped the nuts into quarters while the kids played Nintendo; my husband fed pieces into the jug. Every single recipe for nocino on the internet warns you to wear gloves. We did not wear gloves. Our hands remained sickly green for a week.

We poured in the sugar and an astonishing amount of Everclear grain alcohol. We took some liberties with the original recipe: a few dozen more cloves, a whole vanilla bean, and the peel of two pounds of lemons. With time each component would transfer its scent and flavor into the alcohol, which would bind them together.

When it was done, the concoction looked like seawater bottled at low tide. I cannot tell you how proud of ourselves we were.

I sealed the jug and Mike packed it carefully into a box. He drove it home and hoisted it onto his roof, where it turned coal black overnight.

A week later he sent me a photo of the bottle, dark and majestic as a California condor. A century of family history, staring down at the swing set.

Forty days is plenty of time to second-guess yourself. Carlo’s brief recipe left a lot of room for interpretation. Maybe we should have tinkered more with it. Maybe we shouldn’t have tinkered at all. I made some calls.

“Well, this is about as bare bones as it gets, huh?” Matthew Biancaniello said, peering at a photograph of the recipe on his phone.

Biancaniello is an L.A.-based chef who often makes his own nocino. He walked me through his process, which sounded different (and tastier) than ours: rum instead of Everclear, a honey syrup sweetener that goes in after the alcohol has infused, cool things like figs and candy cap mushrooms.

But when I questioned whether our recipe was going to turn out, he was encouraging. There’s no such thing as a perfect nocino, he said. As Gatto had suggested, that’s not the point anyway.

The goal is to capture a flavor in a bottle that’s only possible at a certain time each year, and that can never be precisely re-created again.

The walnuts are a little different each season. So are the people chopping them. You’re dealing with living things, which are by their nature imperfect and transitory. That’s what makes them special.

“Things like that in life, not just in the alcohol world, to me will always be the most exciting,” Biancaniello said. “Your attention to it is higher. There’s no throwaway with it. … You don’t take it for granted, you know what I mean?” I did.

Fifty years after Carlo climbed down from his ladder, Mike and I hauled the bottle off his roof. We decanted it into smaller bottles, and affixed to each a masking tape label inscribed with the year: 2024.

Our nocino was different from the 1974 batch, and not just because of its age. The extra cloves made it more holiday-spiced; the lemon peel or something gave it a dark green hue.

That’s OK. Rituals have to change a little to survive. If the past is the gold standard for what a family should be, then every generation afterward can only be considered a diminishment. Tradition matters. So do the things we learn along the way. We are all just future ancestors, acting out our bit part on Earth before shuffling off to spend the rest of eternity watching from the wings.

We brought the nocino to a ravioli party at my parents’ house in Huntington Beach. Friends and family crowded into their kitchen to roll yards of dough and fill little pockets with meat and herbs until everyone was tired and hungry, at which point we cooked the product of our labors.

My aunt brought a tray of braciole, a sumptuous roll of beef and breadcrumbs. I brought my great-great-grandmother’s butter cookies. We showed the teenagers how to knead dough and bowed to older relatives’ emphatic insistence on how to do things right.

As evening approached we poured cups of nocino and passed them around while our kids ran around their grandparents’ backyard, just like Mom and her siblings once did in Lincoln Heights.

We toasted everyone there, and everyone who came before. Then we drank it. It was sweet and spicy and familiar. It gave me a warm feeling, all the way down.

Researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

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