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"Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother," Puzo confessed in the new preface to his novel "The Fortunate Pilgrim," which was re-released in April. "I heard her wisdom, her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life itself, qualities not valued in women at the time." Certainly, those qualities were not valued in Puzo's Italian-American female characters. Locked out of the family business, the women who were married to the mob seemed to have little to do beyond looking pretty and getting blown up. His men, on the other hand, were dynamic supermen -- cold-hearted killers, yes, but also devoted family men, guys who could go to work, knock off a few enemies, carve out a little more territory and still remember to bring home the cannoli. They were the inspiration for the generation of rising mobsters that included John Gotti. The Dapper Don with the sunlamp tan and Brioni suits carefully cultivated his image after that of Puzo's mobsters. Now, it turns out, the Dapper Don's role model was really a welfare mom who held her family together in the tenements of Hell's Kitchen while her husband broke down under the stress. As much as I loved "The Godfather," Puzo's sex roles never rang true to me. My Sicilian-American grandmother had no Mafia connections to speak of, but she definitely controlled the strings in her family. With an eighth-grade education, Mary trained herself as an electrician and bookkeeper. She did all the household repairs, sewed her own clothes, crocheted beautifully, made beer and was a gambler and card shark, the only woman allowed into the poker games after family dinners. She was strong-willed: When she developed Parkinson's paralysis at a tragically young age, she fought it by expanding into intricate crocheting projects that required ever greater degrees of precision. "She would try anything and could do everything," my father recalls. "She was the strong one in our family, but as an Italian wife, she had to make my father feel like he was the strong one." "She made all the decisions in a way that made him feel like he had made them," interjects my mother. One of the few acceptable places where Italian and Italian-American women of her generation could show off their competency, of course, was in their cooking -- which could partially explain why Italian food ranks as one of the two premier European cuisines. Carol Field's newest book on Italian cooking, "In Nonna's Kitchen," a collection of regional recipes, folk wisdom and family histories from Italian grandmothers, provides a glimpse at how cooking was both oppressive and liberating, and how the hard life helped shape a tradition of home cooking in which imagination and resourcefulness were lifted to an art. The first thing that struck me about "In Nonna's Kitchen" was the name. My nonna never cooked in her kitchen. In the days when most lower-class American homes did not have furnaces, the kitchen, with its wood- and coal-burning stove, was the warmest place in the house, and Italian-American family life centered around the kitchen table. My grandmother's kitchen was always kept gleaming and spotless, the place where the rocking chair displayed her handmade lace doilies, where the family sat around or listened to the radio at night, taking turns on the chair nearest the stove. "I grew up believing there were two kinds of people," says my father. "The Italians, who lived and ate in the kitchen, and the people who had everything -- cars, furnaces, vacations. They were the Americans." Now my nonna's back porch was a different story because it was the tradition of many Italian-American immigrant women to do their cooking there or in the basement. The porch was the headquarters of Mary's family empire, where the endless rhythms of the laundry and the endless tasks of cooking somehow meshed together in the steam and the San Francisco fog. On a single gas stove, she fried up "skinny steaks," simmered spaghetti sauce and boiled the laundry in a huge kettle, stirring it with a long wooden stick. On one end of the clothesline, drying ribbons of pasta dangled overhead like ropes of licorice; on the other, shirts and trousers puffed and fluttered above the chickens and herbs in the yard. Like all self-respecting Italian-American women, my grandmother was armed with cooking utensils that could easily have doubled as weapons, from the bastone -- a huge, clublike polenta paddle -- to the mezzaluna, an ultra-sharp, crescent-shaped blade with handles on both ends. "The beauty of the house is order," reads the spidery handwriting in Mary's book of cooking notes, and her house was so well-ordered that the weekly menu plan is stamped into my father's memory like the mass in Latin: fish and polenta on Friday, pasta and pot roast Saturday, chicken fricassee and risotto on Sunday ... The rotating main course was preceded every night by homemade soup and salad and followed by a slice of Parmesan cheese and a homemade dessert. Grandma's cooking in any culture is "make-do" cuisine -- and especially in Italy, where even "haute" chef Marcella Hazan says there is no such thing as "haute cuisine," only family-style cooking. On this side of the Atlantic, my urban grandmother was blessed with an exceptional array of ingredients to make do with because my family exemplified nearly every Italian-American stereotype with the exception of Mafia membership. Fresh fish came from her father, a Sicilian fisherman who shoved out before dawn every morning from San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. From her father-in-law, my paternal great-grandfather, came bouquets of leeks, pearly green cabbage and other fresh vegetables. An orphan in Genoa who had lived largely on chestnuts and rice (and saw meat just once a year at Christmas), he became renowned for the produce he sold from his cart to the plush Nob Hill hotels. My grandfather, Ernest, a teamster by profession who sang a booming "Pagliacci" at family dinners to the endless embarrassment of his Americanized grandchildren, stomped grapes to make his own wine and aged it in barrels in the basement. For holidays, Mary prepared elaborate multi-course meals that included her specialty, hundreds of delicate homemade ravioli -- a remarkable feat in the days when food had to be bought and prepared fresh every day. (My old-country grandfather actually resisted buying a refrigerator until 1972.) Some modernized Italian-American women had begun to cut corners by bringing bowls of their homemade ravioli filling to the delicatessen to be wrapped into ravioli, while they stood guard to make sure that no one absconded with their filling. But my grandmother was not about to share credit for her signature dish with a delicatessen. So for two solid days she cooked, rolling out thin sheets of egg pasta on every flat surface on or near the porch and shaping it into ravioli, roasting turkey and ham, preparing homemade pies (the only food ever cooked in the wood-burning stove) -- and stopping only to attend mass and to cook and clean up after the other family meals. My grandmother died when I was small and most of her cooking secrets died with her. Sadly, although I possess her recipe for Genovese-style ravioli, I have neither the energy to make the pasta nor the stomach for the filling, which quite adamantly calls for "four brains." Fortunately, "In Nonna's Kitchen" fills in for women like me who don't have a nonna in the kitchen. Because these days I don't try any recipe longer than a page, many of those in the book are, for me, pure food for thought, voluptuous-sounding dishes that I would rather just imagine, such as ravioli filled with prunes and figs and laced with cinnamon butter, a traditional Christmas Eve dish in northeastern Italy, or Pasticcio de Maccheroni, an elaborate concoction handed down since the Renaissance, which is actually several courses and sauces contained inside one delicate pastry crust. But the recipes that won me over are those with names that suggest a quiet victory over leftovers, such as Spaghetti Made Just a Little Differently and 'Ncip 'Nciap, a scramble of leftover chicken, red onion and eggs that is named for the sound of the chopping knife. Most interesting are the nonnas themselves, whose stories and personalities spill out of the pages and enrich the recipes. Though they range from rural, white-haired contadinas who remember when all bread was baked in communal ovens to chic urban grandmas who wear miniskirts and watch American soaps, they represent a tradition of cooking and a way of life that has been disappearing rapidly during the last 50 years as Italy has become more urbanized. (Interestingly, where la cucina della nonna is being preserved, it is often by grandsons and male chefs in trattorias and small restaurants.) It is a style of cooking based on simplicity and need, and on a philosophy that nothing should be wasted. After cooking over wood gathered from the yard, one of the women recalls slipping the leftover embers between the sheets to heat the family beds, then reserving the ashes for washing clothes. Warming up around a kitchen stove would have been an unspeakable luxury; another woman, a communal farmer, remembers evenings spent in the animal stalls, heated by the breath of the cows, husbands talking while the wives sewed. The lives of these women make that of my grandmother -- who actually got to sit at the table with the men and boys after serving them -- seem downright liberated. There is, for example, the story of Antonietta deBlasi Rocca, a Sicilian woman whose family traveled to the sea every summer. While the men and boys swam daily, the women were barred from the beach because it was believed that immersion in the water would irreversibly "deplete their energy." Mysteriously, however, the men's energy could be replenished by eating large quantities of hard-boiled eggs. So for two months, while the men bathed every day in the blue waters of the Mediterranean and got fatter, the women sweltered in the kitchen, trying to come up with new and improved ways to serve hard-boiled eggs. Only tears of frustration could have led to Antonietta's exotic recipe for fried hard-boiled eggs in a saffron onion sauce! In fact, the collective philosophy of cooking presented in the book is so unfussy, so sensual and creative, it makes you want to stew the Martha Stewarts in their deglazed, reduced and worked-over juices. These are women who have built entire cuisines on leftover bread (and used the leftover leftovers to make children's dolls), who invented treats for their grandchildren by filling thimbles with chestnut flour and toasting them over an open fire, who can demonstrate how to get 28 pieces out of a chicken or make a single egg feed four. In the days when many of our grandmothers scramble egg substitutes and swear by their microwaves, these nonnas are still tossing fistfuls of pasta into the pot and drizzling on olive oil with abandon. Some of them throw their hands up in exasperation when Field tries to pin them down on measurements or ingredients. Even just reading the recipes, you feel them at your elbow, instructing you to set pheasants in a pan "one next to each other, like fiancés," or to add a little pasta cooking water to the sauce, or to judge seasoning and doneness by touch, never taste. "Touch with your fingers, your hands," says one. "You'll know when it's right. Just look."
My favorite piece of wisdom came from Ida Lancellotti, a woman
known for her light and crispy gnocchi. She used to fry up to 500 of the
potato dumplings at a time for the village workers who came to her family's
osteria in Soleria. When the men came in on their morning break,
they ate them for breakfast with onions, pork cracklings, prosciutto and
salami, chunks of parmesan and wine -- until, she recalls wistfully, the
day a stranger showed up requesting brioche and a cappuccino, and it was
the beginning of the end of an era. Ida believes ambience in the kitchen
(or, I would add, on the porch) is the most important ingredient in
cooking. As she rolls the dough gently between her fingers, she warns that
her recipe may not turn out as well for someone else; she is convinced that
it is the warmth of her hands that makes the dish. She's probably
right.
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