Scialo Bros. Bakery: The Tradition Is Baked Right In

When I first visited the Scialo Bros. Bakery before Thanksgiving, I told myself I would randomly buy the first thing that caught my eye. The fruitcake was just about the last thing I expected to see at this family-owned Federal Hill institution. I stifled a groan, feeling like I’d just lost some kind of wager. But, I reasoned, how awful could it possibly be? Despite fruitcake’s bad reputation, Scialo’s (pronounced “shallows”) has been in business for over 90 years, is still wildly popular and features products that are all hand-made from scratch on the premises, with high quality ingredients. Surely all that would count for something?

Indeed it did. As oxymoronic as a “good fruitcake” might sound, there it was: a handsome little loaf, rich but not too sweet, loaded with dried fruits and chunks of walnuts. And it was merely one of the many things I sampled that busy day last autumn. As a matter of fact, I discovered quickly that one could hardly go wrong with anything that’s crafted here, in the old-world Italian tradition. For when people buy fruitcakes at Scialo Bros., or bread or pies or cannolis, they’re not just buying a quality pastry. They’re also buying a little taste of history. Much has changed over the years in Rhode Island’s “Little Italy,” but the desserts at this bakery have not. The products are truly the same today as they were when the Scialo brothers first opened for business.

That was in 1916. Luigi Scialo came to America from the Italian province of Pomigliano d’Arco, with his older brother, just before the outbreak of World War I. During the period from the turn of the century to 1932, more than 54,000 Italian immigrants arrived at the port of Providence in search of a better life. The majority of them settled on Federal Hill. Most came from south of Rome, where there were few opportunities: no factories, no industry, no great wealth of skills or education and therefore no future. The two brothers came here because they were the youngest of 13 children and they were sent by their parents to make money in America and send it back home. After a brief stint in the kitchens of Butler Hospital, Luigi decided that the best way to be successful would be to start a business, and since the older brother had baked in the old country, the Scialo Bros. Bakery was born. They lived upstairs together, in the tenement at 257 Atwells Avenue, and worked together until the mid-‘20s, when Luigi bought his brother out. Luigi ran the bakery, with the help of his family, for the next seven decades until his death in 1993 at the age of 103.

By then, Luigi’s three daughters were in a bind. After their father’s passing, they had to decide what to do. They’d all grown up in the business, lived upstairs in the tenement until they were married and were familiar with what was going on. “I always did the books for my dad,” said Lois (Scialo) Ellis, “so it wasn’t like we had no clue. We were always here on weekends, vacations and holidays. But my feeling was—all of us were married, all with children and one sister in Florida—what could we do? We thought, just sell it.”

They put it on the market. At the same time, customers hearing that the bakery was up for sale were visiting, calling and writing letters: “‘Oh my God, where will we buy the sfogliatelle? The bread? The cookie trays?’” Lois said. “We had a buyer but the deal fell through. So we thought, uh-oh, maybe we should take a step back and rethink this.” The sister in Florida wanted nothing; she wasn’t going to come back North. Lois and her sister Carol (Scialo) Gaeta formed a partnership, took out an SBA loan, and became the owners.

But what made people say that the bakery couldn’t close? It’s because they use no preservatives in any of the products, everything is made right there on the site and it’s made virtually the way you would make it in your own home by hand. They have very few machines, and they don’t use artificial flavorings. “People really appreciate it; that’s absolutely the reason,” insisted Lois. Several years ago, when the price of vanilla spiked up to three or four hundred dollars per gallon, the sisters debated whether they were going to continue using the pure vanilla or buy the inferior. “We decided it simply wasn’t worth lowering the quality of the product,” she concluded.

Obviously, then, the artistry begins with the mixing. The breads, for example, are all made from the same four ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast. They’re formed by hand into the various shapes, such as rounds, Sicilian braids, baguettes or the traditional elongated Italian loaves served in the restaurants. The proofing times and baking temperatures are varied, producing some loaves with a thick crust and dense crumb, and others (such as the rolls) that are soft and great for sandwiches. “When I was growing up, my parents often spoke of two kinds of people,” according to Lois. “We were Italian, but everybody else was American. And you could tell the Italians from the Americans because Italians would buy the bread unsliced. When Americans come in they always buy it sliced.”

The specialty item at Scialo Bros., however, has to be the sfogliatelle (pronounced sfo-lyah-TEL-e), a traditional pastry. “If you go any place south of Rome, the bakery shops will have those,” Lois said. “We call it a dessert, but it’s not really the kind of thing you’d eat after a full meal. It’s more substantial… In Italy you’d go to the coffee shop in the morning and order one with coffee, or in the afternoon to tide you over until dinner.” The bakers make a sweet dough, stretch it into a thin sheet, then roll it tightly on a long bench. It resembles a very long roll of paper towels, but without the hollow tube in the center. It’s cut into ¼” slices, jellyroll style, and these “skins” are refrigerated for 48 hours to rest. Afterward, the bakers make the semolina cream filling from lemon, vanilla, sugar, milk and eggs. Each of the skins is worked into a little well into which the pastry cream is placed, folded over and layered two dozen to a pan. They bake up into hundreds of crispy little layers, with a tight cream inside. “We may be the only place in southern New England, maybe even all of New England, that makes sfogliatelle from scratch.”

The baking method hasn’t changed with the times, either. There are no modern ovens. Everything is baked in a huge, 14-foot square, gas-fired brick oven—though it was wood-fired when the bakery first started. Workers brought the logs in, placed them in a compartment off to one side called the fire box, and waited until the wood burned down. Some time in the ’30s they converted to gas-fired burners to heat the brick, and they’ve been using that system ever since. The bakers keep the gas running for about two hours until the temperature reaches 800 degrees, then let it gradually cool down. “But it’s not a consistent temperature,” Lois explained. “Near the fire box, there’s a more intense heat. These guys have to know exactly what they’re doing, and where to place things [within the oven]. It’s really an art, a skill, to do this kind of baking.” There is a full line of cookies which come out of that oven, including biscotti, pignoli, amaretti, macaroons and chocolate-dipped butter cookies, and the list of cakes, tarts, pies, squares and biscuits are too numerous to list here.

Yet the baking is just the beginning of the impressive selection of sweets and pastries. The cannolis are all made from scratch, from the shells to the cream filling. They roll the dough, cut it into circles, put the circle on a wooden dowel, deep fry the dowel then remove the shell. Each one is just a little different. “If you go into a place and they’re all absolutely perfectly colored and shaped, then you know they’ve been processed someplace, probably baked up frozen. We make them every day, and fill them as we need them,” Lois said. They also make torrone, a milky-white almond and nougat candy that’s traditional to eat during the winter holidays, when it’s cold enough to harden properly. They’ll make zeppoles for St. Joseph’s Day, March 19^th, which happens to be in the same week as Easter this year. “That never happens,” sighed Carol. It will be very busy, since they make Italian pastieras for that holiday: pastiera di riso (“rice pie”) and pastiera di grano (literally, “grain pie”). Lastly they’ll make pizza rustica, a pepper dough crust covered with ham, cheese, egg, mozzarella and spicy abruzzese sausage.

Not bad for a company that doesn’t advertise, although they have appeared in all kinds of print media and national TV shows such as FoodNation With Bobby Flay, Molto Mario with Mario Batali and The Best of: Bakeries with Marc Silverstein, all aired on the Food Network. But you don’t necessarily have to watch television to see what goes on behind the traffic-stopping window displays and the glass counters piled high with all the goodies. The sisters give tours by request—call for information ahead of time. But despite all the publicity, “we don’t want to get bigger,” Carol stressed. “It’s a labor of love, and we try very hard to keep it rooted in family.”

And what about retirement? “We get that question all the time,” she laughed. “This is our retirement.” Let’s hope that the Scialo family will continue the tradition for generations to come.