Mark Perlioni - Mangiamo: Incredible Italian Dishes Inspired by a Couples Roots and Travels

MANGIAMO

Incredible Italian Dishes Inspired by a Couples Roots and Travels

MARK PERLIONI & ANGELA PERSICKE

Creators of Cooking with Wine

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Dedicated to our children, nieces and nephews: Katherine, Joseph, McKenzie, Madison, Ella, Baylee, August, Iris, Linus, Violet and Ansel.

Enjoy cooking and make it a passion, or at the very least, have some FUN doing it! Everyone has to eat, and everyone deserves to feel love. Cook for someone you love, and show them with food how to appreciate the love that goes into every dish you make. It will be an epic personal reward in your life. There are few better feelings than receiving a genuine compliment on a food creation that you put your heart and soul into preparing! Buon Appetito!

Food is the closest thing to a common language that we have on our planet. Although extremely diverse, cuisines across the world inspire creativity, satisfy cravings and palates and bring people together. Food is passionate and emotional, an art, a craft and a science. It can even invoke fanaticism and obsession, but at the foundation it is our daily fuel for survival. We are true lovers of food and are passionate about many different cuisines, yet we still have so much to explore.

This book is, of course, based on Italian food, and that is not only because it is my heritage, but also because Angela and I absolutely love the cuisine and the Italian food culture. This passion started very young for me, seeing my Italian grandma and aunts make homemade pasta and hearing stories of my dad growing up with Italian staples like pasta e fagioli, Italian wedding soup and polenta spread across the kitchen table, along with homemade cavatelli with a delicious sauce on Sundays. Several years back, I began the process of exploring my Italian roots even further and researching the regions where my family came from, as well as the cuisine unique to those regions, to better understand some of my familys Italian dishes and traditions. My Italian familys story is like many immigrant stories, but understanding how and why we ended up in America is part of understanding the food traditions we carry on today.

Lets start with the story of my Italian grandfather. My grandfather was actually born in upstate New York in the early 1900s, making him an American citizen. His parents came to the United States temporarily right before he was born with the hopes that his future would be better if he were to be born in the land of opportunity. Like many immigrant families then and still, the American Dream was what they sought for my grandfather, and they faced the odds and boarded a ship, not knowing if they would make it alive or if this dream was worth the risk to them and their unborn child.

Once he was born and received that American birthright, they moved back to Celano, Italy, which is in the province of LAquila in the western part of the region of Abruzzobasically, in the center of the country halfway between Rome and the Adriatic Sea to the east. He grew up there, and when he turned seventeen or eighteen, his parents sent him back to the United States to make a better life for himself as he already had citizenship. He took a ship out of Naples with his cousin, and he never returned to Italy, nor did he see his parents again.

As is the case in many Italian families that became American families, pasta was an important part of their diet. Pasta is, at its heart, a humble food with humble and inexpensive ingredients that will fill hungry bellies. In the case of my grandparents, it was the main meal at least twice a week and always on Sundays. In fact, my grandmas version of her Sunday sauce had my dad and his sisters on edge sometimes as every bit of leftover meat from the week found its way into the homemade pasta sauce on Sunday. That tradition didnt get carried on by my dad, and I am in no mood to revive it, either! But making homemade pasta was a staple, and I still have and use a cavatelli maker from the 1950s passed down to me through my parents.

After talking with my aunts and cousins, I find it remarkable that even in just one generation, recipes can take twists and turns and change from family to family. Some of my first cousins make family recipes that are so different from the recipes that I grew up eating. These recipes have the same name, have some similarities, but are absolutely different! This obviously was the result of my grandparents and their siblings cooking and baking from memory, taste and feeling rather than following any sort of written recipes. I like to think that my familys recipes live on through their evolution within each generation.

Although we have several dishes in this book that are based on recipes and traditions in my family, this is far from a cookbook of those recipes. My love for innovative food as well as imaginatively developing dishes from an existing concept is much more the theme in this book. But there are definitely some bits and pieces and a lot of the spirit of the Perlioni and DiTomasso influence from Grandpa, Grandma and the rest of my family throughout this book, as well as a few interesting family anecdotes just for fun!

My love for food, and specifically cooking, started when I was probably twelve or thirteen years old. I didnt invest much effort into the creation side of recipes at that age, but I did tinker a bit and enjoyed experimenting with flavors. I slowly developed a love for cooking and teaching myself how to make different things. By the time I met my wife, Angela, I was really into cooking and food. She happened to be an ultimate foodie like me, so our creativity was amplified. Our common passion drove us to do even more cooking, experimenting, recipe developing and tasting. We took food classes and food culture tours when we traveled, including ones in Italy, France and Spain. When we travel, food is a major part of the cultural experience for us and always will be. We tend to base our travel experiences on culinary adventures or food in general, and we always try to take cooking classes to explore regional dishes.

After a while, many friends and family members started requesting recipes of all the fun things we were cooking at home, and this motivated us to create a space to share our recipes. Thus our blog, Cooking with Wine, was born along with our Instagram, @cooking_with_wine. We would share photos Angela would take of the food we made as well as videos of what we were cooking on our IG stories most nights of the week, and we made our recipes accessible to everyone who visited our blog. We never imagined that this passion project would evolve into the food photography and recipe development business we have today, but we are thrilled that we are able to do something we love as a full-time job.