But, I did learn how to cook. And for me, cooking meant family. It meant Sunday dinner every Sunday with Aunt Lena (my mother’s sister). It meant tradition…whitefish with garlic and parsley, calf brain and tripe…all things that remind me still of my Nonna’s apartment in the Bronx. It meant my mother having dinner every night even in its simplest form…pasta e fagioli, pasta carbonara… aglio e olio…everything my father liked. And, of course she loved anything that was different…and would make it. I had a very expansive palate at a young age, and I have my mommy to thank.
The food section of the New York Times inspired her to cook more non traditional fare, but she would always laugh when the recipe of the week on Sunday was “Polenta.” “Ha! We ate that because we were poor,” she would snicker. “Now it’s a delicacy.”
Proud that even our peasant food had made the grade.
I still am not attracted to liver, brain , tripe, sangunaccio, and other stuff that hangs in the windows on Arthur Avenue. But the inspiration infused by my grandmother, my aunt Lena, my mother, and my Aunt Ginney, a non Italian we turned into an Italian will come with me to my assisted living space, and then to my grave.
The food section of the New York Times inspired her to cook more non traditional fare, but she would always laugh when the recipe of the week on Sunday was “Polenta.” “Ha! We ate that because we were poor,” she would snicker. “Now it’s a delicacy.”
Proud that even our peasant food had made the grade.
I still am not attracted to liver, brain , tripe, sangunaccio, and other stuff that hangs in the windows on Arthur Avenue. But the inspiration infused by my grandmother, my aunt Lena, my mother, and my Aunt Ginney, a non Italian we turned into an Italian will come with me to my assisted living space, and then to my grave.
