Potica and Tamales

I write a lot about Pueblo and So. Colorado. It's culture, sights and history are diverse. Pueblo has had 5 nations flags fly over it. The result of all of this is great food! OK, there might be other benefits to living in the area, but food is at the top of my list.

If it is a holiday in Pueblo you count on tamales and potica. Below is an article published in the Pueblo Chieftain. Lisa Everitt publishes in The Denver Post.

Melting-pot Christmas is Pueblo in a nut shell                                               

By Lisa Everitt
Special to
The Denver Post

Article Created: 12/12/2006 11:06:10 PM MST

In Pueblo, the best place to buy a Slovenian pastry is at an Italian market. You eat it at Christmas with tamales. That's Pueblo in a nutshell.

The pastry in question is potica. You say it "po-TEET-za." That's Slovenian for "May I have another slice, please?"

It's a loaf of sweet dough rolled up with nuts and spices. Variations on this theme exist in several Eastern European cuisines. Croatians call it povotica or povitica, or orehnjaca, which means "walnut roll."

A slice of potica with ham or melted cheese on top is traditional, but you can toast and butter it for breakfast, or serve it for dessert with whipped cream, fruit or ice cream on top.

It takes a lot of work to make, so it's special-occasion food. Chas Clifton, a Pueblo native, says you just might be from Pueblo if you think potica and Italian cookies are the main food at a wedding - or if tamales are always on the Christmas dinner menu.

The chef at the Cactus Flower just made 65 dozen tamales, said Kim Harding, general manager at the Mexican restaurant. You can get them to go or eat them there, along with posole, another traditional Christmastime food made according to Cactus Flower owner Dena Dejoy's recipe.

Harding doesn't know why the posole's so good, but people say it's the best in Pueblo. If you add cheese, lettuce, tomato and tortilla chips, it becomes a "wet taco."

Gagliano's Italian Market on Pueblo's Southside sells potica by the carload this time of year, says Josephine Gagliano.

"A lot of the Italian people eat more potica than the Slovenians now," she said.

Slovenians and Italians came to southern Colorado to work in the coal mines and steel mills. In Pueblo, they settled in the Bessemer neighborhood near the CF&I mills, although "we're all spread out now," Josephine Gagliano said.

Two Gagliano uncles came to Pueblo 84 years ago and opened grocery stores, one on Elm Street and the other around the corner on Northern Avenue. Anthony Gagliano came from Italy with his dad at age 16 and went to work.

Bonnie Gagliano Glessner grew up running around the store with her cousins and brother Vince. Now her daughters, Brittanie and Brianna, hide in the same nooks and crannies she did, and little Anthony, Vince's son, will no doubt do likewise, but he's only 4 months old now.

"We have customers who are in their 80s," Glessner said. Other people, Colorado newcomers from Philadelphia or Chicago, follow their noses to Gagliano's. "A man from Woodland Park came in. He moved here from New Jersey and he said, 'This is the place I've been looking for. It smells just like home."

Fish is the traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner. Sicilians like bacala, which is salted cod. You soak it, sauté it with some onions and olives, then sprinkle it with a mixture of wine vinegar and sugar and bake it. "People from the north use it in spaghetti sauce, or serve it on capellini or polenta," Josephine Gagliano said.

Posole goes on the table in Latino households on Christmas Eve, with tamales, of course, smothered in Pueblo's famous green chile.

"I don't know why we eat tamales at Christmas," Harding said. "It's just something that Pueblo people do."

Then you eat potica for dessert, or on the side, or maybe breakfast the next day, or all of the above.

In the process of researching potica, I discovered that everybody's grandma tinkered with the formula, so every recipe is a little different.

The basics: Buttery pastry is rolled and stretched until you can see light through it. Purists call for dough so thin you can read a newspaper through it. The sheet of dough is rolled up with a nut filling.

Nowadays you can get almond, fruit, poppy seed or cream cheese potica, but walnut is canonical. Some potica bakers use cream in the filling, others condensed milk or butter, plus vanilla or whiskey for flavoring. It can be baked in a rectangular loaf pan or in a ring, in a Bundt pan.

"Ohh, potica," said Lori Ozzello, a Pueblo native who now lives in Greeley. "I could eat a whole loaf by myself."

Lori, whose dad, Tano Ozzello, taught and coached at Roncalli High School, introduced me to potica at Rheinlander Bakery in Arvada. "Heaven on a plate," she called it.

She remembers going to Gagliano's Market for potica and "your other Italian must- haves" like goat cheese and Sicilian olives. It's around the corner from Gus' Place, a Pueblo hangout "since I think beer was invented. I remember going there with my dad for a 'Dutch lunch' - plates of Italian cold cuts and cheeses and hard rolls - and hanging around with him."

I mentioned the Cactus Flower and Dena DeJoy to Lori Ozzello. "The DeJoys! That's my Uncle Charlie's family," Lori said. Pueblo in a nutshell, again.

Josephine Gagliano made me hungry just by running down a list of Christmas specialties. Butter beans. Sausage bread. Brasciole. Ravioli. Pizzelle, ladyfingers and scalidi, "ribbon cookies" glazed with honey.

"The store is like my kitchen," Josephine said. "Everybody's welcome in my kitchen anytime, and when you come, I do nice things for you."

That's Pueblo in a nutshell, too.