Boy Scouting, 1921

A rare glimpse into early Boy Scouting in Ridgefield is offered by a letter from one scout to another, mailed in 1921.

William Dingee, then 16 years old, is telling his older friend, Adelmar “Del” Bryon, then 22, about current scouting activities. Bryon, who was a member and possibly a leader of the local troop, was off studying at Princeton. 

Dingee, son of a town constable, was born in Redding and had moved to Ridgefield two years earlier. He grew up to be very active in town, running a couple of restaurants, founding Dingee Electric in 1950, serving on the Board of Finance and for 50 years on the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire

Department, and belonging to many local organizations. 

Bryon, son of the local doctor who developed Bryon Park (Fairview and Bryon Avenues, and Greenfield Street), became a Presbyterian minister and missionary in China. Later in life, he settled in the Catskills. His sister, Kathryn, founded the town’s first Girl Scout troop in 1921, the same year this letter was written. (His son, Dick, is active in Old Ridgefield.)

Dingee died in 1980, Bryon in 1995.

The letter speaks of Mr. Kasper — that’s Joseph F. Kasper, an early leader in Ridgefield scouting (some have said he founded Boy Scouting in Ridgefield; the letter suggests he wasn’t the initial leader, but he may have been the first to make things work). 

Here is the text of the letter, written on official Boy Scout stationery (a few spellings have been corrected):

“Ridgefield, Conn.

“Feb. 8, 1921

“Dear Del —

“I was very glad to receive your letter. Mr. Kasper is taking up the scout work and getting

along fine. At first we thought the troop would break up, but the boys took so much interest in it after Mr. Kasper took charge, that he said he would be scout master till we get starting up. We have about 31 boys in now and four patrols. Each leader has a certain thing to teach his patrol each week. I am going to take my patrol on a tracking trip Wed. night after school. Wish you here to go with us.

“I got through my exams all right with an average of 88%. Hope you got 98%. I am glad you are coming soon, for we can do some scout work then. We haven’t had any sliding since you were home last. We had to write a composition of a storm and I just finished writing mine. I wrote about the one at Lake ‘K’? [probably Kitchawan, in Lewisboro].

“With best of luck

“William Dingee”

The First Movies

Bioscope Pictures of 1899 Were

Far Cry from Today’s Films

The Ridgefield Press, 1950 — The “new marvels of animated pictures” made their appearance in Ridgefield around the turn of the century. An advertisement in The Press of 1899 so referred to the American Bioscope Company movies augmenting Billy Lester’s new show of  “8 great artists 8.”

Three years later The Press reported that “A large and enthusiastic audience greeted the Edison Projectoscope Company on their second appearance in Ridgefield at the Town Hall Monday evening. The program was opened by piano overture. Mr. Forrest gave a few short stories and parodies on popular songs. His jokes were witty and new, and were well-received by the audience.

Then Mr. Plant, the manager, announced the moving pictures which were thrown on the screen, interspersed with illustrated songs, sung by Mr. Plant, who has a very pleasing voice, and stereopticon pictures of noted men.

“'The first moving picture, our late president’s (McKinley’s) funeral, was very impressive. After a short intermission more moving pictures were shown and nearly all of a laughable nature. The other scenes, those of noted cities and places in our own and in foreign parts, were explained by Mr. Plant. The pianist played selections appropriate to the scenes and accompanied the singers.”

The “large and enthusiastic audience” was evidently large and enthusiastic enough to support a permanent movie theater, for in the next few years several companies came in and out of business.

Town Hall Photoplays, an enterprise run by Julius Ficken and Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Ferry, was not as successful as it might have been, for some reason. But the hour long trip to Danbury by horse and buggy, though just right for spooning, was too tedious a drive to make for a mere movie, unless it happened to be “The Birth of A Nation.”

In 1915 The Press reported that “Mr. Ferry announces that he will start a series of excellent comedy and dramatic pictures,” which didn't speak too well of the quality of the previous pictures.

About 1920 at the parish house of St. Stephen’s Church, the pillars were removed and movies were booked by Arthur Carnall, the moving spirit behind many of Ridgefield’s cinematic enterprises. The parish house movies were of the better sort, and although no admission was charged (a hat was passed after the performance for voluntary contributions), there was never a deficit.

However, the trustees of the church objected to showing movies in the parish house, and the entertainment there was stopped.

At about this time the American Legion Post found itself in straitened circumstance and Arthur Carnall thought of showing movies for the benefit of the Legion. The post purchased the machinery the Ferry enterprises had used and began showing photo-plays in the Town Hall on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Wednesday shows were the better or “cultural” shows and the Saturday shows were more run of the mill,  the theory behind this being that people went to the movies on Saturday night in any case. Interestingly enough, the Wednesday night movies made more money.

When St. Stephen’s gave the Legion their projection machine, the booth at the town hall was enlarged so that Jack Cranston, the operator, and his two machines would fit in. Up until this time slides had been shown during intermission while the reels were rewound.

All of these enterprises had musical accompaniment, furnished at one time or another by Mr. and Mrs. Willis G. Boyce, violin and piano respectively, and by Arthur Ferry, piano. Charles Stannard further enlivened Ridgefield evenings by selling popcorn and peanuts on the steps of the town hall. During this period there was sometimes dancing after the movies, too.

The Legion enterprise was successful, and the veterans enjoyed a steady income from it until the advent of the talkies, which made the machinery obsolete. This soon found its way to some corner

of South America, where talkies were unknown, so all in all, the Legion came out ahead on its movie venture. This proved to Arthur Carnall that Ridgefield would support a movie house that presented good features and did not show any “B” films.

It was not until 1938, however, that Irwin Wheeler, of the New Canaan Playhouse, became interested in opening a branch of the chain owned by Casey and Wheeler in New York (later the Prudential chain) and he and Mr. Carnall picked a site at the rear of the library as a likely spot for a Ridgefield Playhouse. The library was willing to sell the property, though a provision in the deed of the library property required title action in Superior Court before it could be sold.

The next problem faced by Mr. Carnall was the job of selling the public a $40,000 first mortgage bond issue. The library agreed to invest $6,000 of the receipts from the sale of the property and a public announcement was made that if $40,000 was raised, the new theater would be built. At the same time a lengthy prospectus of the plans of the theater company was drawn up and appeals were mailed to one hundred possible investors. In the next year this amount was raised, oversubscribed, and placed in escrow.

Construction would have begun immediately, as plans of the theater had been completed, and printed in the Press, but the contractors estimated that the cost of the building according to the plans would make the total investment too high. The plan for the present building was prepared by John Eberson of New York, architect. John McNeill of Floral Park, Long Island, was contractor. The building was completed and ready for the first performance on March 26, 1940.

Under the present manager, William Johns, the Playhouse is still sticking to the original formula of presenting good single-feature attractions and short subjects, which has proved so successful in the ten years it has been followed in Ridgefield. 

In addition the Playhouse has presented art exhibitions from the start and many prominent local artists have there shown their work to the community. Some Ridgefield artists who have exhibited at the Playhouse in the past few years include Herb Olsen, with his own and his students paintings; Elizabeth O'Brien, with her “table-toppers”; J. Clark Work, the portrait  painter; Photographer Richard Marks; Mrs. Wognar, with her embossed pictures and boxes; Mrs. Nicholas Lefore, the landscape artist.

Other exhibitors have been Mrs. Elizabeth Schleussner, with her California desert scenes; Photographer Alexander Alland of North Salem; landscape artist Bernice Webster; watercolorist Hazel Tobias, director of art at Danbury Teachers College; watercolorist Thomas De’Stasio, of the Walt Disney advertising department; Jeanne Melin, of New Canaan, whose specialty is painting horses; Ralph Jaeger, watercolorist of Armonk; photographer Janet Arem, of Croton Falls; and Mrs. Charles E. Wegmann, who has exhibited her own and her students’ work in oil painting.

During World War II the Playhouse held food fairs and several bond rallies. At one rally, September 1943, $524,013 worth of bonds were sold in little over an hour. The auction by which the bonds were sold was broadcast over NBC, with Francis D. Martin serving as auctioneer. Volunteered services and articles auctioned off included a speech by Walter Hampden, nylon stockings, a pig, a calf, and cartoons by Wood Cowan and Paul Webb.

Stephen Zvonkovic, the chief projection operator, is the only remaining member of the original staff of ten years ago. Except for his two years in the Army he has been with the Playhouse since its beginning. Adolpho Casagrande, custodian, has been on the staff for nine years without missing a day. Other members of the staff are Mr. and Mrs. Allen W. H. Sterry, Lois Sterry, Mrs. Marion B. Redman, H. E. Todd, John A. Hayes, David Clapp, Harold T. Scott, and Jack Yelinek.

[Note: This article, written by Karl S. Nash, appeared in The Ridgefield Press’s Jubilee Edition, a special 100-plus page tabloid publication marking the newspaper’s 75th anniversary in 1950]

Charlotte Wakeman, 

The First Superintendent

As of 2019, Ridgefield has had 19 school superintendents. Only three were women, but among those was the very first superintendent: Charlotte Wakeman. After she left in 1921, it was 85 years before Ridgefield hired another woman for the job.

An impressive person who was said to be close to six feet tall, “Biddy” Wakeman was remembered not only as a leader in bringing modern education to Ridgefield, but also as a disciplinarian and one who had a fondness for huge hats.

A native of  Copake, N.Y., Charlotte J. Wakeman was born in 1877 and grew up in Danbury. She came to Ridgefield in 1906 to be principal of and a teacher at the Center School on Bailey Avenue. 

In 1915, Ridgefield’s school system was considerably modernized with the addition of the Benjamin Franklin Grammar School, to which her classes were moved, and the opening of Alexander Hamilton High School at what had been the Center School. A year later, the district modernized even further with the creation of the job of school superintendent to oversee all the teachers and other staff. Wakeman held the position and at the same time continued to serve as a teacher. 

Wakeman was one of a number of Ridgefielders — educators, parents and “summer people” — who were leaders in modernizing the schools and moving the curriculum into the 20th Century. When she arrived here, the town had no high school. After Hamilton High opened, Wakeman then focused efforts on making it better. Even students chipped in: The girls in the home economics class under a Mrs. Myer created a “for a better high school” fund to raise money for the school.  

“I bought three hundred-pound bags of raw peanuts,” Wakeman recalled in 1968 when she was 90 years old. “After school the girls under the supervision of Mrs. Myer shelled those peanuts and salted them. Then they sold them at entertainments in the town hall and took orders for them. When they were finished with that, they gave the money made from sales to the Board of Education ‘for a better high school.’”

The girls also encouraged their mothers “to make cakes for several cake sales. They did many other things and gave the profits to the fund.”

Wakeman was known for keeping her classes orderly. Tabby Carboni, who had her as a teacher in 1912 and 1913, recalled that “she gave me the ruler many times!” Carboni added, however, “I wasn’t bad — there were others who got it a lot more than I did.”

She was also known for her hats. During her career in Ridgefield, Wakeman was photographed several times wearing enormous hats — in one picture, the hat appears four times the width of her head, and nearly twice as high. They were no doubt a style of the day, but she would don them indoors, too, even for group photographs where everyone else was hatless.

After World War I, the town was going through a protracted and sometimes bitter dispute about the modernization of  schools. Leading the support for a conservative approach was school

board Chairman Richard Osborn, owner of the Ridgefield Supply Company. As chairman, “he tangled repeatedly” with  Wakeman, and with Dr. William H. Allee, “her sponsor and supporter,” The Ridgefield Press later reported. (Dr. Allee, covered in a separate Who Was Who profile, was perhaps the most active worker for better education in Ridgefield early in the 20th Century.)

By 1921, Wakeman had had enough fighting and resigned. She took a job teaching English at the high school in Mount Vernon, N.Y., remaining there until her retirement in 1937. 

However, she continued to live in a small house on Main Street for some years,   commuting to Mount Vernon, and maintained contact with her former staff members over the years. In 1937, Ridgefield teachers and friends honored Wakeman on her Mount Vernon retirement, holding a tea for her at the Book Barn on Wilton Road. The attendees included a who’s who of 20th Century Ridgefield educators: Mary Regan, Mary Moylan, Marie Kilcoyne, Mary and Elizabeth Boland, Ruth Wills, Eleanor Burdick, Josephine and Alice Hearst, Margaret and Agnes Carroll, Catherine O’Hearn, Grace White, Isabel O’Shea, Linda Davies, Francis J. Bassett, Charles D. Crouchley, Levio Zandri, and Clifford Holleran.

Although she held no academic degrees, Wakeman had studied at Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, and New York University. She was also a founder of the American Woman’s Association, a once active suffragist organization. She died in 1969 at the age of 91. 

One of the few Ridgefielders alive by the turn of the 21st Century to remember Biddy Wakeman was Mary Creagh, who recalled her as her school’s principal in 1918. “I remember I thought she was very tall and imposing, like a ship in full sail,” said Miss Creagh. “When I met her years later, she didn’t seem that tall at all.”

Perhaps she had taken off her hat.

A Lost Landmark

The black-and-white picture here is a rather remarkable snapshot in several ways: The crowd, the trees and the beauty of a long-lost landmark.

First off, for newer-comers, the scene is Main Street looking west from about where folks sit in front of Tazza and drink coffee. That big, handsome building is the Jesse Lee Methodist Church on the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets. The accompanying color photograph shows what the same corner looks like today.

The occasion is the September 1958 parade that marked the end of Ridgefield’s six-month celebration of its 250th anniversary. That tent at the right with a cross on it was part of a float, possibly done by St. Mary’s School pupils. (Many other pictures of 250th anniversary parades have been posted here.)

Trees dominate the picture, especially that Norway spruce at the right. It was one of two spruces that stood tall in front of the rectory, hidden at right by the boughs. The other, just a bit north, snapped in half when Ridgefield’s village was hit by a twister on July 13, 1950.

The tree at the left would have been near the front of Bedient’s or now, Books on the Common.

Then there’s the church. This picture does a remarkably good job of capturing the beauty of the facade of the building. If you enlarge the picture and look closely, you can see many find details like dentilated moldings, gable carvings, and nice use of clapboards and facings. And, of course, there are the two handsome towers.

Why, many have asked, would a building as beautiful as this, in the very center of the town, be torn down, as happened in 1964?

Several factors contributed to the church’s demise. To the growing congregation of Methodists, the church’s serious lack of parking space became a real problem. The building could not be expanded to handle the increasing needs of the membership. Then, too, the building was old — the earliest parts dated from 1841 — and was probably expensive to maintain.

So the congregation moved a couple blocks south to its present site, building a much bigger church, with support facilities and plenty of parking spaces. 

Couldn’t the building still have been preserved? Probably, but in the early 1960s, Ridgefielders were only beginning to develop a strong preservationist movement that resulted in establishment of historic districts and a commission to oversee them, as well as organizations like the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society, the Ridgefield Preservation Trust, and the Architectural Advisory Committee. 

The church might have been nice for a new, smaller religious congregation, but none was available or wanted the building. It could have been “repurposed” but apparently its age and the fact that it looked so much like a church dissuaded potential buyers. (However, the rectory next door — which looks like a Victorian house — was repurposed, and today serves as offices and shops.) 

If the same opportunity were to occur today, the church would probably have been preserved,

perhaps for use as shops or offices, or maybe even as a historical museum.

The church was replaced by a two-story, flat-roofed building of stores and offices that was aimed at looking colonial, with brick to match the town hall and the Ernest Scott buildings on two other nearby corners, and the firehouse and telephone building up Catoonah Street.

Incidentally, in 1964, the historic Philip Burr Bradley/Biglow/Ballard house farther north on Main Street was also torn down. That was not the choice of the townspeople, however; part of Elizabeth Ballard’s bequest of the land to the town included that the house be razed so the land could become Ballard Park. She also did not want the house to be a burden on a community that had only recently set up the Community Center in the Lounsbury mansion — Ridgefield already owned one big old mansion on Main Street and didn’t need another, she felt.

War Horses

This odd scene recalls the era of World War II when Ridgefielders, trying to do their part in the war effort, went out of their way to collect scrap — what we today would call “recycling.” 

The horse-drawn wagon is loaded with metal contributions in what was later called “Ridgefield’s greatest wartime scrap drive.” We believe the snapshot was taken Oct. 17, 1942, when hundreds of local volunteers collected more than 133 tons of metal in a huge, one-day scrap drive. (That total, by the way, equalled 166 pounds per resident of Ridgefield at that time.)

The use of the horse-drawn transportation was probably designed both to entertain and to emphasize the need to conserve gasoline.

Scrap drives — wartime versions of today’s “recycling” — were important sources of metal and other materials to be melted and reformed into ships, tanks, guns, ammunition, and other pieces of weaponry. 

During the last three years of World War II, Ridgefielders collected 539,262 pounds of iron and steel — nearly 270 tons. They also donated 12,644 pounds of waste fats from kitchens; 48,925 pounds of tin (mostly cans); 4,000 pounds of rags; and 292,975 pounds of paper.

According to a Ridgefield Press account, “great piles of scrap metal began to appear in George G. Scott’s lot at the rear of the town hall (about where Colby’s is today). People put out piles of metal in front of their homes and it was picked up and transported to the main collection points by Irv Conklin’s horses, Ray Keeler’s trucks and a Dodge truck that belonged on the Swords estate on West Lane.  (In 1975, 50 years after the war, Ralph Deli-Bovi, then owner of the former Swords estate, still had that truck.)

As noted in an earlier posting on Old Ridgefield, the town’s scrap metal-collecting efforts gained national attention when the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Westbrook Pegler, who lived on Old Stagecoach Road, was photographed in Life magazine, removing his car’s bumper in front of town hall to contribute to the war effort. 

A bumper is nice, but nothing compared to Mrs. B. Ogden Chisholm’s donation: She gave her entire 1933 Cadillac roadster.  The car was shown in The Press (and on Old Ridgefield) being dismantled and turned into “scrap.”

Albert H.Wiggin: 

Chase’s Controversial Chief 

Throughout his long career, Albert H. Wiggin of Peaceable Street did wonderful things for his company, the Chase National Bank in New York City. He helped make Chase one of the biggest and most influential banks in the country, if not the world, and aided European countries recovering from World War I. But his reputation was tarnished  after the Crash of 1929, during which he pulled off maneuvers that made millions for himself in ways that wound up being investigated by the U.S. Senate.

Once listed among America’s richest people, Albert Henry Wiggin was born a minister’s son in 1868 in Medford, Mass. He never attended college and instead went to work in Boston straight out of high school, soon becoming a bookkeeper for a local bank. By the age of 23, he was an assistant for a national bank examiner. 

He continued to rise in the Boston banking world and in 1899, moved to New York where he became at the beginning of the 20th Century one of the founders of Bankers Trust (which, at the end of the century, was acquired by Deutsche Bank).

It was around this time that Wiggin caught the eye of Alonzo Barton Hepburn, CEO of Chase National Bank. Hepburn liked the young man’s ideas, hired him, and in 1904 Wiggin was named the

youngest ever vice president of Chase National Bank. He also became the youngest member of the bank’s board of directors, a situation that irked many veteran Chase executives.

Hepburn liked Wiggin so much, he encouraged him to establish a summer place in Ridgefield, and sold him some of the backland of his own estate on High Ridge, called Alnacraig. Wiggin built a many-roomed mansion at 47 Peaceable Street, calling it Peaceable Acres. The estate overlooked the Ridgefield Golf Club, later Ward Acres horse farm.

Locally Wiggin was known for his beautiful daughters, Marjorie and Muriel, and for being among the first owners of an automobile.

In 1911 Wiggin became Chase’s president. Under his leadership the bank’s deposits rose from $91 million in 1910 to more than $2 billion in 1930. He was CEO from 1917 until 1930. Time Magazine, which put him on the cover in 1931, called Chase “the biggest bank in the world” at that time.

In 1926, Chase merged with Mechanics and Metals National Bank to become the nation’s second largest bank, with Wiggin at its helm. At the time, The New York Times said Wiggin was

known as “a man of a million friends,” adding that “intimate associates in [the bank’s] various fields of activity describe him as a great organizer and an inspiring leader, quick in decision and unerring in judgment.”

Despite this acclaim, some authorities were soon labeling Wiggin a scoundrel after it was revealed that, during the period of the 1929 stock market crash, he had been selling short some 42,000 of his personal shares in Chase National Bank at the same time he was committing Chase’s money to buying. He put his earnings in a Canadian holding company to avoid taxes, and made millions that the bank itself did not discover until a later U.S. Senate investigation.

“This is like a boxer betting on his opponent — a serious conflict of interest,” said financial reporter Andrew Beattie.

And yet, he did nothing illegal.

Ferdinand Pecora, chief counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, said of Wiggin, “In the entire investigation, it is doubtful if there was another instance of a corporate executive who so

thoroughly and successfully used his official and fiduciary position for private profit.”  

Economics professor and market historian Charles Geisst said what Wiggins did “gave banking and the stock market a bad name for at least two generations after the Crash.” 

Wiggin was forced to retire, but was never prosecuted for any legal wrongdoing. He was given a $100,000-a-year pension from the bank ($1.7 million in 2016 dollars), but later turned it down after a public outcry.

As a result of the case, Congress added what some called the “Wiggin Provision” to federal Securities Exchange Act to prevent company directors from selling short on their own stocks and making a profit from their own company’s bad times.

Despite this episode, Wiggin received praise for his efforts to curb the crash of 1929. Said The Times in 1951, “Mr. Wiggin was one of the banking leaders who made large sums available to boster the slipping market. The confidence that he and other leading bankers showed in the country was credited with having done much to prevent the complete collapse of the nation’s financial structure.”

Wiggin had sold his Ridgefield home in 1921, long before the crash, and eventually had a retreat on the shore in Greenwich where he died in 1951 at the age of 83.

He was a benefactor of many organizations. When he was a young man, he began collecting art prints, drawings, and watercolors, as well as antique books. He donated his huge collections of

these works to the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library and the Baltimore Museum of Art. He contributed to the MIT library, endowed a scholarship at Middlebury College, and created a foundation that contributed to many organizations.

In 1949, Dodd, Mead and Company published Marjorie Wiggin Prescott’s biography of her father, New England Son. According to the dust jacket, “This is the life of Albert Henry Wiggin, a parson’s son who struggled his way out of Cousin Walter’s hand-me-downs to the eventual presidency of the largest bank in the world. It is a story of hard work, close friendships and salty New England humor — a uniquely American success story. It is a portrait of a remarkable man, the man who built the Chase Bank; but it is, more than that, the portrait of a golden era of American growth and optimism. You will share Mrs. Prescott’s amusement at the recollection of her father’s first job in Boston, when one of his daily duties was to make sure that a certain elderly party on Louisburg Square was likely to live long enough to pay off his bank debt. You will smile with her at the ironic Wiggin reply to a ceremonious cable from a banking group in London.”

The book, according to Ridgefield historian Richard E. Venus, also “presented a stirring defense of her father.”

He added, “One cannot read this warm portrayal of a father by his admiring daughter without gaining a large amount of respect for one of the most famous bankers that this nation ever produced.”

Ida Fossi Makes Her Own

Ravioli, Sauce & Passatelli 

Ridgefield Press, Feb. 24, 1977 — Homemade ravioli like the kind Mrs. Domenic Fossi prepares on special occasions is a whole different ballgame from the somewhat limp squares of stuffed pasta in sauce which we had tasted before we tried hers. And for anyone who has, or can borrow, a pasta machine, these little spicy Italian mouthfuls are not hard to make.

Her grandchildren love ravioli, Mrs. Fossi explained, and after one bite we came to the conclusion that anybody’s grandchildren would love them!

Ravioli takes time to make, however, so Mrs. Fossi also showed us how to make some marvelous cheesy noodles for soup which can be prepared quickly and ground out through an old fashioned meat grinder. These are called passatelli and are as unusual as they are good. Both ravioli and passatelli freeze successfully.

Ridgefield’s First Selectman, Louis Fossi, was one member of a large family which grew up enjoying such treats. Mrs. Fossi is his mother. Her daughter, Norma Contessa, and Mrs. Louis Fossi were on hand to learn exactly how to make the ravioli. With one accomplished ravioli-maker in the  family, they have tended to have other specialties.

Good eating has always been a family tradition, and Norma reminisced  about the homemade ice cream they took turns cranking in an old-fashioned machine when she was a child and the Fossis lived on a farm in Ridgefield with plenty of cream from the cows.

For  ravioli stuffing for one meal for eight people, you need:

One pound ground beef

A half pound ground pork

One pound spinach

One teaspoon salt

Half teaspoon pepper

Quarter teaspoon nutmeg

Half teaspoon clove

One egg

Cook pound of fresh spinach and chop fine. Mix well with other ingredients.

To make the pasta in which the filling will be stuffed, combine:

Yolks of 10 eggs  

Whites of eight eggs

Six cups sifted flour

Reserve extra two egg whites to use later.

Mrs. Fossi makes a mound of flour on a board, then scoops a hollow in the center of the flour and pours in the ten yolks and eight whites. Then she kneads the egg into the flour with her hands. If the dough were to be rolled out by hand in the old-fashioned way, it would require quite a lot of kneading, and then an hour’s time to rest before rolling out, she says. But by using a pasta machine, the cook cuts down the kneading to a minimum. Also, the pasta machine makes the hour’s rest unnecessary.

Mrs. Fossi pushes a small flat oval of the dough into the widest adjustment in the slot in the machine. The machine has two rollers and a handle which turns these in such a way that they pull in, and flatten the dough in the slot between them.

The long thin strip of dough which results gets folded double and put through the slot again, then folded and pressed through the rollers a third time.

An attachment on the machine will vary the space between the rollers. She adjusts the space between the widest and the narrowest, then puts the strip through again. Then she adjusts the machine to the next-to-the-narrowest width, and puts the dough through again. 

By this time the dough is in a long strip, several inches wide and very thin.

This strip of pasta gets laid flat on the board, and Mrs. Fossi beats the two egg whites till frothy and paints the strip with egg white. A pastry brush is best for this job. Then she places tiny mounds of the stuffing mixture two abreast on half of the length of dough and folds the other half of the strip of dough on top.

No need to press down to seal the edges. Just take a pastry wheel and cut down the center of the doubled strip of dough. Then cut cross-ways between each set of two mounds of stuffing. Next, trim the outside edges so the tiny dumplings are cut zig-zag and sealed all round. The scraps cut from the edges may be kneaded into a flat oval and put through the machine again, or cooked like noodles and served with a sauce on some informal occasion. 

Repeat till all dough and stuffing are used. This recipe makes between 200 and 300 ravioli squares, depending on size. Mrs. Fossi generally doubles the recipe and simply spends a day making lots of ravioli. She suggests a beginner might wish to halve it and try making ravioli for four.

To freeze the ravioli, Mrs. Fossi puts them in a single layer on a cookie sheet and, as soon as they are frozen enough to handle, packs them in plastic freezer bags, each bag containing enough for one meal.

To cook, drop the ravioli squares into well-salted boiling water with about one tablespoon of salt to three quarts of water. If the ravioli is fresh made, cook about five minutes and test one by

tasting. It should be “al dente,” or firm to the tooth, not mushy like canned ravioli. If frozen squares are dropped into the boiling water, the ravioli should be done about three minutes after the water comes back to a full boil.

Drain, top with tomato sauce and freshly grated real parmesan cheese  (we cut cheese in squares and grate it in a blender, but the texture is even nicer grated by hand the way Mrs. Fossi does it.) She served a dry red wine with the ravioli. At a holiday meal, this would be a first course, followed by a roast and vegetable and then dessert and coffee.

Freezer buffs may like to make spaghetti sauce wholesale the way Mrs. Fossi does. She browns five or six Italian sausages and a piece of chuck in sausage drippings, adds a small onion cut fine and two cloves of garlic, and when these are golden brown, takes out the sausage and chuck, and adds about a pound and a half of chopped meat, and browns that.

Then she puts sausage and chuck back, adds 28 ounces of tomato puree, eight six-ounce cans of tomato paste, and enough water to make a sauce that can simmer for three hours. Her daughters say they add some whole canned tomatoes, too, and Mrs. Fossi noted that the amount of onion and garlic can be varied to taste.  The maker also adds salt and pepper and spices as desired.

Generally, Mrs. Fossi removes the sausage and chuck and serves those for supper on the day she made the tomato sauce. The sauce gets frozen in quart containers and thawed as wanted for ravioli and other treats. Be sure to use a rich, meaty sauce on the ravioli, Mrs. Fossi says.

But suppose you don’t have a pasta machine, or time to make ravioli. Try passatelli. 

Mix well with hands:

A cup and a half of bread crumbs

Three eggs, beaten

One cup grated parmesan cheese 

One tablespoon of flour

A fourth teaspoon of cloves

A dash of nutmeg.

The mixture should be pretty firm, almost like bread dough, but moister. It will stick to the hands slightly as you kneed it.

Put dough through meat grinder. It will come out of the holes as small, slightly rough noodles. You can freeze these now and use later if desired.

Drop into simmering chicken stock and cook seven minutes. The resulting chicken soup is just the thing for cheese lovers. The chicken soup may contain diced chicken meat, or just the passatelli — marvelous either way.

Mrs. Fossi follows her usual custom of making lots of chicken stock all at once and freezing in meal-sized amounts. Into several gallons of water she puts one chicken, a few ribs of celery, carrots, a small can of tomatoes, and near the end when the chicken is tender, salt and pepper to taste. The chicken becomes chicken salad for immediate consumption and the stock goes in the freezer.

[Note: Ida Frances Montanari Fossi (1906-1987) lived on Mulberry Street and, at the time of this story, was a widow. She was born  in Senigallia, Ancona, Marche, Italy, a daughter of John and Matilde Montanari, and came to this country in 1917. She and Dominic Fossi were married in 1923 in St. Mary’s Church. They had seven children: Lou Fossi, Norma Contessa,  Elsie Craig, Dorothy Marconi, Thomas Fossi, John Fossi, and Robert Fossi. Members of the Fossi family still live in Ridgefield. The article was written by Elizabeth Daniels Squire, who became a successful mystery novelist in her later years. She also wrote books on phrenology and palm reading. A former resident of Ridgefield and Redding, she produced the “Food and Drink” column in The Ridgefield Press for many years.]