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It wasn’t until I was a student at the Culinary Institute of America in the late 1970s that I first realized that growing up as a first generation Italian-American family in the Bronx and New Jersey wasn’t as typical as I had thought. My parents and their parents were all born and raised in Italy. Throughout my youth and beyond, my father and mother referred to their five children, four boys and a girl, by the number in the order of which we were born. To this day, my mother still occasionally refers to me as “Number Two Son.” But when it came to hanging around the kitchen, I was definitely the number one pest.
I was the little punk kid always by my mother’s side as she was cooking or baking. I would jockey for position wherever my mother moved, stand on a kitchen chair up against the stove, and otherwise constantly be in her way as I tried to get a better look at whatever was being done. Same when either of the grandmothers - Nona Lisa or Grandma Melfi - or other relatives were there.
Maybe it was something in the water around Pisa, but I suspect it’s a genetic condition. For my mother, her mother, cousins, aunts and countless generations before them in this food-fueled blood line, the world revolved around the kitchen and dining room table. Life was not good unless family, friends, or anyone close to the dinner table was fed to excess, ritually seduced with course after course of delicious, abundant and temptingly presented food. This attitude seemed to pervade all branches of the family, but my inspiration and mentor was Maria Gracia Melfi, aka Mama Melfi, aka The Food Pusher.
