Sandra Scalise Juneau

St. Joseph Altar Devotee

by Karen B. Gibbs

After her husband of 57 years died in 2017, Sandra Scalise Juneau wondered, “What is my life’s purpose now?” Before long, the answer came.

Considered an expert on St. Joseph altars, Sandra has traveled the country sharing the history, traditions and foods of this beloved Sicilian custom. At the conclusion of one such presentation to the St. Tammany Council on Aging, the hostess told Sandra about a gathering the next Saturday for those interested in publishing a cookbook.

That caught Sandra’s attention. More than once, she had thought about compiling into a cookbook her family’s time-honored recipes. And more than once, life got in the way. “My commitment has always been to my family first, so I tucked away that idea, somehow knowing that when the time was right, it would come together.”

Despite a blinding rainstorm, Sandra drove over the Causeway to the event. There, she met Cynthia LeJeune Nobles, editor for LSU Press, with whom she shared her idea for a St. Joseph altar cookbook. That set in motion a flurry of emails between the two in which Sandra detailed her vision for the book.

“It would definitely include centuries-old family recipes, vintage pictures and descriptions of altars as I experienced them in a loving Sicilian-Louisiana family. I also wanted to include the history, traditions and religious symbolism of the earliest Sicilian St. Joseph altars.”

Saint Joseph Altar, Benedict’s Plantation, Mandeville, LA, 2004.

Meanwhile, Sandra placed her faith in St. Joseph that LSU would accept her book. At every altar she visited that St. Joseph Day, she wrote out her petition and counted on the ever-faithful St. Joseph to make it happen.

And he did! Unbelievably, on March 19, an email arrived stating: Congratulations, LSU Press has approved your project.

“It left me speechless!” says Sandra. “To have my book about St. Joseph altars approved on St. Joseph’s feast day was no coincidence.”

You could say that Sandra’s devotion to St. Joseph is in her DNA, since both sets of her grandparents were born in Sicily. Growing up in the ’40s, Sandra spent many an hour in the kitchen of “Mommie”— Angelina Caronna Accardo, her maternal grandmother. There, they prepared foods for the trilogy of winter feasts, beginning with St. Lucy (December 13), continuing with Christmas, and culminating with the feast of St. Joseph (March 19) and the family’s St. Joseph altar. St. Joseph altars originated during the Middle Ages as a way for Sicilians to thank St. Joseph for relief from a drought. Food on the altar went to feed the poor and needy. In the late 1800s, when Sicilians immigrated to New Orleans, they brought the custom with them.

Fruit Plate cuccidata, symbolizes Abbondanza, abundance.

Items on the altar reflect typical Sicilian crops like lemons, wheat and figs. The foods symbolize the Holy Family. For example, the rose motif on baked goods honors Mary, the fish represents Jesus, and bread crumbs in the stuffed artichokes symbolize the sawdust from St. Joseph’s carpentry work. The ever-popular fava bean—aka “lucky bean”—represents the plant that sustained Sicilians and their livestock during the drought.

Saint Joseph Altar, St. Anselm Church, Madisonville, LA, 2018.

“St. Joseph altars are about promises, petitions and thanksgiving,” says Sandra. Families often promise, after a petition is answered, to have St. Joseph altars in thanksgiving. Such a promise is considered sacred and sometimes continues for generations.

Sandra has vivid childhood memories of working for months with her grandmother and her Sicilian friends preparing foods for the family altar. “First, we’d bake things that could store well, like seed cookies,” says Sandra. “I’d roll and cut simple things from dough and put sprinkles on the cookies, just as my two great-granddaughters now do with me. We’d pack them in large tins and stack them in my grandmother’s dining room. The more delicate fig cookies and cuccidati (elaborately decorated figfilled pastries), we baked later.”

Beginning nine days before St. Joseph Day, the ladies concluded their daily baking sessions by chanting the Litany to St. Joseph. “I can still picture my great-grandmother, my grandmother and all the ladies singing those beautiful prayers every night in the Sicilian dialect. There was such devotion; it was mystical.”

About a week before St. Joseph Day, out-of-town relatives arrived to help with final preparations for the altar. For many, the most beautiful part of preparing for a St. Joseph altar is the spirit of camaraderie that develops. It is the blessing—the sacred by-product— of this devotion.

Sandra’s grandmother staged the St. Joseph altar in her home above the family grocery store, Accardo’s, on Clio and Liberty Streets. “The altar was open to family, friends and neighbors,” says Sandra. “Mommie fed every visitor a meatless meal (because it was during Lent).” As was the custom, guests left donations, which went to the parish church, St. John the Baptist.

“After World War II, the crowds grew so large my grandmother moved the altar to the Convent of the Good Shepherd. One year, she fed over a thousand people!” The Sisters used donations from those altars to build a gym at their new Bridge City convent.

Sandra Scalise Juneau teaching class at Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University.

While cooking and baking for the altar are socially rewarding, the traditions that occur the day the altar is blessed are spiritually inspiring. Beginning with the Tupa, Tupa—Sicilian for “knock, knock”—children representing the Holy Family reenact the Bethlehem story. In Sicily, it is done outdoors with children in costume, riding a donkey and parading through the streets with dance and music. Here, however, it is held indoors as a simple pageant.

St. Joseph knocks on three doors, seeking shelter for his family. He is rudely refused at the first two but warmly greeted at the third with, “Come in and enjoy the feast prepared for you.” The door opens to reveal a beautiful, three-tiered, food-ladened St. Joseph altar. After the priest blesses the altar, he joins the children for a meal consisting of samples of every food on the altar, as well as the main dishes prepared in the kitchen.

Saint Joseph Altar Presentation, Delgado Culinary Arts School, New Orleans, LA, 2006.

“When I was about five years old, Mommie asked me to be Mary for her St. Joseph altar,” reminisces Sandra. “It was a privilege that lives still in my heart.” In addition to treasuring the honor, Sandra relished the Sicilian food served that day. In fact, she ate her cousin’s share, too. The strange foods didn’t appeal to the mini-St. Joseph.

Quite appropriately, after her grandmother died in 1967, Sandra inherited her pastry carving tools. “Even now, when I pick up her carving knife to make the cuccidati, it’s as if her hand is guiding me, like she’s there with me.”

Indeed, Sandra has used these tools at almost every St. Joseph altar demonstration she’s conducted since then. “It’s almost like my path has been ordained,” she says. For example, two years after her grandmother’s passing, Sandra accepted an invitation to create a St. Joseph altar for Hallmark Card Company’s international festivals display in NYC.

“We made all the foods for the altar in New Orleans, and Hallmark flew us and the cakes and pastries to New York.” One of the organizers, Mimi Sheridan, who later became the food critic for the New York Times, told Sandra someone should write down the recipes for the altar. That planted the seed for Sandra’s book.

Later, when Mimi asked why none of her Sicilian friends in New York knew of St. Joseph altars, Sandra explained that it was a custom of South Louisiana Sicilians. Since then, however, the tradition has expanded to other parts of the country. This is partly due to devotees, like Sandra, who seize every opportunity to spread the devotion.

In 1984, for example, Sandra created a St. Joseph altar for the Italian Village at the World’s Fair in New Orleans. In 1995, she supplied the cuccidati that food art craftsmen replicated for the ItalianAmerican Cultural Center’s permanent St. Joseph altar in New Orleans.

Saint Joseph Altar, Convent of the Good Shephard, 1965. Pictured: Angelina Caronna Accardo, Nuncia Stillone Roppolo, Rosalie Caronna Canal.

That same year, she coordinated a St. Joseph altar at Our Lady of the Lake School in Mandeville and wrote a booklet about the altar’s history and symbolism for the school children. The booklet was so well received that Sandra asked WLAE studios to make it into a video using her script and voiceovers. “That video has been invaluable when I give lectures,” she says.

As her reputation spread, Sandra delivered lectures and pastry demonstrations at a variety of venues, such as LSU-BR, Southeastern University, Chef John Folse’s Culinary Institute and DeLaurenti’s Specialty Food and Wine in Seattle. Here, usually impatient tourists lingered six-deep to watch Sandra masterfully carve a cuccidata. The original French Quarter Festival invited Sandra to set up a St. Joseph altar—and serve thousands of cookies—outside the U.S. Mint.

Xavier University asked her to speak to the faculty and provide a hands-on demonstration for nearly a hundred freshmen students. Working in pairs, the students rolled dough for the fig pastry. After Sandra reminded them that their embellishments should represent their prayer to St. Joseph, one clever coed formed the dough into the shape of an A+—the grade she was hoping to get in the class.

St. Joseph Altar, Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Slidell, LA, 2020. Very Reverend Wayne Paysse and volunteers.

Sr. Dulce, “the healing nun,” invited Sandra to Baton Rouge for a lecture about St. Joseph altars. At the time, Sandra did not know of Sr. Dulce’s fame. “I was totally unaware,” she says. “While Sister was making fig cookies, I took her hands and told her she was doing it wrong and she should do it this way. Later, when I found out who Sister was, I couldn’t believe I had told those sacred hands how to make something.”

Perhaps Sandra’s most memorable St. Joseph-related venture was a trip she and Roland took to Sicily with their twin granddaughters in 2007. During the two-week visit, they met with Sicilian cousins for a demonstration on carving the cuccidata. “Their technique— “squartucciati”—means ‘lace-making,’” says Sandra. “Their work is exquisite.”

After that trip, Sandra was eager to share those techniques. When Liz Williams, a fellow Sicilian and founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans, asked her to create a permanent St. Joseph altar exhibit for the museum, Sandra gave an enthusiastic Yes!

“Sandra has the historical curiosity to learn from masters in Sicily and to read and explore in a way that has made her an expert,” says Williams. “She helped create a permanent St. Joseph altar—and arranged to have it blessed because she believes in details. She also showed us how to prepare the foods and gave us the prayers to say while making the cookies.”

Saint Joseph Altar, DiCristina’s Restaurant, Covington, LA, 2018.

Remember that book deal with LSU Press? After a two-year labor of love, Celebrating with St. Joseph Altars: The History, Recipes and Symbols of a New Orleans Tradition, will be released in March 2021. Part of the Southern Table series, the book contains 60 traditional Sicilian recipes and 40 vintage photographs. “There’s also a how-to section for those who have never made an altar,” says Sandra, “including a stepby-step timeline.” Unlike every other book on the subject, this book is written from a Sicilian insider’s point of view.

“I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I’ve been with Sandra,” says Nobles, her editor. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more knowledgeable about her topic. LSU Press is proud that she chose us to publish this book.”

In his forward to Sandra’s book, Archbishop Gregory Aymond wrote, “Her hope, as well as mine, is that as you read this book, you will be drawn not only to know more about the St. Joseph altar, but to more deeply appreciate the rich tradition and generous spirit of hospitality it embodies.”

For a lady who once wondered what her future path may be, Sandra Scalise Juneau should wonder no longer. At 80 years old, she’s produced a book that honors her favorite saint, preserves her Sicilian heritage and passes on the St. Joseph altar tradition to future generations.

That’s sure to make St. Joseph and her beloved Roland very, very proud.

Sandra’s book is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon for $29.95. For signed copies, contact Sandra at 1ssj@att.net.