Real Italian cooking for everyone
Have you noticed the lines, or that you need a reservation at red sauce Italian restaurants lately? Or that upscale eateries that once refused to recognize the tomato have added lasagna Bolognese and eggplant parmigiana to their menus?
Not only the restaurant world but the food media have re-discovered Italian-American food. Saveur magazine features it on its current cover. Inside articles range from Sunday family dinner to the annual Celebration of the Seven Fishes. Even the New York Times Book Review recently recognized Italian-American cooking. On Sunday, its closing essay by Laura Shapiro described researching a 1950s cookbook at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. She writes that American home cooks were not ready, not for its lyrical descriptions meant to be the actual recipe, or its inattention to exact measurements.
Thirty years later American home cooks were not only ready they heartily embraced Mary Ann Esposito when she debuted her Italian cooking show, “Ciao Italia,” on PBS. They looked forward eagerly to her first book so they could re-create her recipes. Mrs. Esposito became the most beloved Italian cooking teacher in the USA. Not only because of her books or show, but because her personal appearances are full of warmth and willingness to engage with her readers, answering questions and dispensing kitchen wisdom until everyone’s hunger is sated. (A tasting and book-signing on Nov. 30 at Gordon’s Fine Wines in Waltham is nearly sold out)
Her latest book, “Ciao Italia Family Classics,” is different from all her previous books; there’s a thickness to it beyond its 450 pages. It captures the current excitement in the restaurant world and brings it home. It acknowledges that Italian-American cooking never went away; it continued in home kitchens through generations of cooks honoring their culinary heritage.
As a history teacher and translator of ancient Italian texts, Mrs. Esposito gently and lovingly traces the history of Italian cooking as interpreted on American soil, aka Italian-American cooking. She guides the reader through several generations of recipes using her own family remembrances as the vehicle. Each one demonstrates a stop on the journey from the first immigrants who adapted available ingredients to recreate a taste of home. It follows the ensuing generations of American tourists who sought out their roots in Italy’s trattorias and their children, today’s new cooks, back to the kitchen.
Remembrances of Sunday dinner evoke the early morning fragrance of tomato sauce simmering on the stove and extended family piling in the door. There’s her grandmother’s rolled beef, pounded thinly and stuffed with cheese and parsley and walnuts and eggs, then cooked in tomato sauce, the tomatoes tenderizing the beef, the beef lending its flavor to the tomatoes. More flavor memories appear in chickpea and pasta soup, the Friday supper staple during Lent when meat was forbidden.
And, there’s today’s stylish branzino in orange sauce, featured on big city upscale, or alta cucina, menus. Mrs. Esposito’s recipe reveals it as simple-to-prepare — providing you can find sea bass at your local fish store. And penne alla vodka, an idea that Mrs. Esposito discovered was the brainchild of liquor distributors. Only briefly accepted in Italy, it became a hit in this country. She improvised her own recipe based on traditional Italian techniques.
The gamut of Italian-American cooking finds a comfortable place on the pages of this book laced with memories and lovely photographs of finished dishes so that the cook knows the result. The flavor will follow as well as a future of warm memories.
The following recipes are adapted from “Ciao Italia Family Classics” by Mary Ann Esposito.
GRANDMOTHER GALASSO’S STUFFED ROLLED BEEF
