Buona Mangiata-Prelude to Good Eating

Buona Mangiata-Good Eating

I'm on a journey to tediously translate an Italian cookbook I purchased over 20 years ago in Italy.  I don't speak Italian (except for the flawless pronunciation of every good Italian curse word.  And, trust me, there are some really good ones that make you feel so much better simply because you emphasize and linger on each syllable as if it were a song).

I digress.....the recipe book is called Scuola di Cucina by Simonetta Lupi Vada.  It's not available in English as far as I can tell.  I've looked.  Simonetta has others that were translated but I'm determined to work with this book because I bought it while browsing a bookstore in Italy with my dad.  He assured me that he could help me translate whatever I wanted.  Unfortunately, I put the book down for 20 years.  During that time, dad passed away.  I'm going to try to make up for lost time with Google translator.  Any translations and recipes that I successfully create from this book are dedicated to my dad.   Any failures will be chalked up to lousy translations or my own stupidity.  Cooking isn't hard.  It's a matter of reading a recipe.  I've failed countless times and each time it was because of misreading the recipe.  This time, I might have another excuse.....bad translation.   I promise to work on a recipe to get it right and to share the shortcomings or the bad translations along the way.  This might spare you unnecessary pain if you attempt to replicate noteworthy recipes.

This book caught my attention because it appeared to be a more authentic representation of regional Italian recipes than the dozens of other books I own.  There are 5 siblings in our family.  Based on our ancestry.com results, we appear to have more Italian blood pumping through our veins than most native Italians.  My dad spoke a fluent Napolitano dialect that was over 150 years old.  We found this out on a visit to Naples where he was wildly celebrated by local retailers as speaking a dialect that was almost extinct.  This was the result of his being a young tile setter in Washington, DC who worked alongside many older stone mason immigrants from rugged Southern Italy.  He was 20 and they were 75. By the time we traveled to Naples, dad was 80 years old.  So....the dialect was easily over 150 years old.   His dialect may have been dated but he had no trouble communicating.  Dad's love of food and everything Italian (including his well-known crush on Sophia Loren) came through in any conversation he had with locals and has lived on with each of his five children.  Authenticity is what I want and I'm hoping I've hit the mother-load with this book.

My mom and dad have 13 grandchildren and those children are busy working on the next generation.  We see the dilution of traditions and recipes with each successive generation.  Although we might not be able to stop this trend, we're going to try to revive a little bit of the love of food that we hope is genetic.   The value of this particular cookbook is that there are no 'short cuts'.  The ingredients aren't canned or processed.  It will be a pretty laborious effort to translate and cook even a portion of the 700+ pages.  However, I've already learned a few more words of Italian and hope to be totally fluent in reading Italian recipes by the time I'm done.  There could be more useless endeavors so I'm happy to indulge myself in this past-time.

There's one specific recipe that caught our attention 20 years ago in that bookstore so I'm eager to start with that one.   It was reminiscent of my dad's matriarchal sister who had already passed away at that time.  Dad saw the 'Rustic Spinach Pie' and declared..."now that one looks like Vienna's".  She took her special recipe with her when she died.  I don't really have high hopes that this one will hit the bulls-eye.  However,  one of the main ingredients is puff pastry.  With puff pastry, how can it be bad?

If this collection of recipes proves to be a close replication of some of the ones I recall as a young girl visiting relatives, I hope that family and friends will enjoy them.  Keep in mind that the serving sizes are not meant to be enjoyed by one person.  They are all meant to be shared around a large bountiful table with lots of love, wine and laughter.

So....for all of dad's children grand-children and great grand-children, I dedicate this to the man who loved to share his passion for food and cooking.  I hope you will come to appreciate the fact that the love that goes into cooking is the only special ingredient you will ever need.

Buona Mangiata