Not My Mother’s Kitchen: Rediscovering Italian-American Cooking Through Stories and Recipes

My mother was an assassin.             This is a bold confession for a son to make, but it’s true. My mother was an assassin—in the kitchen that is. Now please don’t take this amiss. Outside of the kitchen she was one of the kindest, sweetest, and gentlest of people you could ever meet. As the writer Bill Bryson noted about his own mother, “When she dies she will go straight to heaven, but no one is going to say, ‘Oh, thank goodness you’re here. Can you fix us something to eat?’” I credit my love of books to my parents. Then there was music. Our home was filled with music—Broadway, jazz, Sinatra (of course), and even some opera. After all, we were Italian. But that was outside the kitchen. In front of the stove or at the microwave, my mother was the culinary equivalent of John Wilkes Booth. It has been alleged that Booth killed our country when he shot President Lincoln. My mother did the same to Italy. Martin Scorsese said, “If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?” Clearly, my mother never cooked for him.             Growing up, my conception of Italian food didn’t differ much from that shared by most Americans. It was the food you were served in Italian restaurants: antipasto with olives and provolone, spaghetti and meatballs, veal Parmigiano, and lasagne with plenty of oozing mozzarella cheese. And yet, even before I ever stepped foot into a ristorante in Italy, the very word “restaurant” made me think of Italian food. That word evoked in me the pleasurable sensation I felt as I opened the doors and breathed in the aromas issuing from the restaurant kitchen. My sense of smell was so acute that my father once said that I had a “20-20 sniffer.” Mind you, this was not a compliment, as his remark was in reference to my clipping a clothespin to my nose to block out the odor of our Friday fish cakes. At the time, though, the more pleasant aromas beckoned me to eat, not to cook.             So how does a boy go from growing up in a home where real food and a devotion to cooking were nonexistent to becoming someone who devotes considerable time every day to ruminating over the preparation and execution of every dish? I sometimes look back and wonder if my passion for good food was born out of self-defense: a defense against malformed, nearly cremated hamburgers; frozen and canned vegetables overcooked to the point that you could practically use a straw to ingest them; and, of course, so-called Italian food that was about as authentic as UFOs and Elvis sightings. But Cacio e Pepe (page 133) and Raw Summer Puttanesca (page 149) were a long way off.             Self-defense or not, even as a picky little kid—who hadn’t the faintest idea that he would one day be editing cookbooks, become the winner in a national cooking competition, or spend nearly a decade working in a restaurant— I must have had an inkling that there was more to Italian cuisine than dumping Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs into a pot. When I did begin to realize that there was more, I wanted to cook. It should have been simple. So many people did it. What I discovered over time was that there was much, much more to it than I had imagined. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that all I wanted to do was go into the kitchen and cook. Why did that prove so very difficult?             Back in the early 1960s, our neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, was a mix of Italian, Polish, Irish, and Greek families. On any given summer Saturday afternoon you could hear Sinatra, polkas, the Clancy Brothers, and bouzouki music streaming from different houses. By evening time, the aromas of home cooking began to fill the air. Mrs. Giorsos baked incredible butter cookies—which made up for the stench that filled the neighborhood when she was making her own lye soap. Mr. Berezowski had a special cache of horseradish that could singe your eyebrows if you just sniffed it. I loved it, and have since grown back a full pair of eyebrows.