Quinn Lucinda Scala - Lucindas Rustic Italian Kitchen

Copyright 2007 by Lucinda Scala Quinn. All rights reserved
Photography copyright 2007 by Quentin Bacon

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Quinn, Lucinda Scala.

Lucindas rustic Italian kitchen / Lucinda Scala Quinn.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-544-46401-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-0-544-18722-1 (ebook)

Cookery, Italian. I. Title.

TX723.Q56 2007

641.5945dc22

2006010289

Food Styling by Alison Attenborough
Prop Styling by Darienne Sutton
Design by Elizabeth Van Itallie

v1.0515

I am eternally grateful to Martha Stewart, who has given me more opportunites than any cook could hope for. Thank you, Martha, and all my colleagues at MSLO, for continually teaching and inspiring me every day. Thank you Carla Glasser and Justin Schwartz. You gave my dream to write books a chance. Uncle Jim and Aunt Lucia safeguarded the family recipe files and shared them with me. To all my cousinsI hope you find something within to spark your own memories. Our old-time, multi-generational family gatherings live cinematically in my mind.

I am fortunate to have been raised in a family where the simple act of gathering together at the family table for meals was a highly valued routine, one that allowed for the daily exchange of thoughts, feelings, emotions and fundamental nourishment. Love and thanks to my parents, Rosemary and George Scala. Today, my brothers, Jim, David and Peter, and I continue the tradition with our own families.

Richard, Calder, Miles and Luca, I love you forever.

This is the food of my heart and soul. Most of my warm family memories are inextricably and forever linked to Italian food. This humble volume of simple-to-prepare recipes is culled from my familys personal collection. It combines tastes from my Italian-American childhood with flavors remembered over years of visiting Italy. Be it a weeknight supper or a languorous Sunday dinner, the Italians know that there is goodness to gain from the rituals that lay within a carefully made meal shared with family and friends.

From early childhood, I remember being perched on my grandmothers knee, as she argued with her sister-in-law over the proper technique for cooking meatballs; the Scalas browned them first, the Ferlos dropped the raw meatballs into the bubbling hot tomato sauce. Their lasagna had miniature meatballs tucked between its layers, and those same little jewels could be found floating in a bowl of escarole soup.

My great-grandparents Thomas and Aqualina Ferlo, Rome, New York.

I recorded my Italian family history many years ago in a photographic documentary titled Five Sisters from Rome, New York , about my paternal grandmother, Mary Ferlo Scala, and her sisters, Elizabeth (Bessy), Valentine (Wally), Sara and Jane. Every story was shared while we prepared and ate meals together. The sisters legacy along with that of their mother, Aqualina, daughter of my great-great-grandmother, Archangela Spadafore, is a powerful snapshot of Italian-American immigrant women and their rituals, which centered around the family table.

My dads sister, Aunt Gina, remembered her grandmother, Aqualina. My grandmother was a very forceful woman. When people came from the old country, Grandpa would sponsor them. He used to send her to New York City to meet the boat. She was a great woman who knew a little about a lot of things. She was the business head in the family. When she was young, she was beautiful. Her marriage was at fifteen.

Aqualina on her wedding day.

In the later years, she moved in with Aunt Sara. They never got along because Sara had a tendency to be sharp. When I was sixteen, I would go stay with them. Grandma would stay in her own room and Id stay with Aunt Sara. In the morning she would take the yardstick and poke me. She wanted me to come into the kitchen at seven a.m. and have Coffee Royale. She didnt want Sara to know so she wouldnt get any hassle.

My mother (Mary) didnt approve of Grandma. I can remember sitting at the dining room table and Grandma would have a bottle of Utica Club. Shed swig out of the bottle and Mother would get mad. Mama, cant you use a glass? shed say. Grandma insisted, No, it tastes better out of the bottle.

In 1979, Great-Aunt Bessy, at 83 years old and still living at the family homestead in Rome, New York, recalled her mama, Aqualina. Oh... Mama used to dress like you wouldnt believe. There were no flies on Mama. When she lived here, she was the boss of the block. That is when we owned the grocery store and meat market, right over there across the street. The whole family lived right here, 101 Palmer Avenue. Over there in the parking lot is where Papa built his first bread ovens, in the early days. This china chest here, it was Mamas when she was young. Columbus come on Monday and the chest come on Tuesday. Thats how old it is.

Aqualinas husband, Thomas Ferlo, the sisters beloved papa, made it his business to help feed the laborers building the Erie Canal. The bakery he founded, eventually taken over by one of my great-uncles, Johnny, floods back into my picture memory at the mere whiff of yeasted dough. As a little girl, my visits to the bakery with Uncle Johnny and his wife Dorothy were the equivalent of being wrapped in a warm blanket.

My grandmother, Mary Ferlo Scala, 19 years old.

Great-Aunt Sara remembered her papas family to me, in 1980. Papas parents were from Rogliano, Italy, in the province of Cosenza. Giovanni and Sarafina were their names. I knew Grandpa Ferlo but Sarafina I never knew. She had blonde hair and blue eyes and, according to Mama, a beautiful singing voice.

They had a home on an olive plantation. Grandpa was the overseer for a count named Bardagio. He also had a mill on the property, you know, and people used to bring their grain to be ground. They had what you used to call a gristmill, where they could grind the grains the old-fashioned way. So that is how my family got into the breadmaking business.