Lindsay Marie Morris

Set in Milwaukee's Bay View, a historic Italian enclave, Semolina MKE proudly carries on old-world pasta traditions while catering to an appetite for regional flavors and staples. 

Owner Petra Orlowski's maternal grandparents were Sicilians from Chiusa Sclafani and Vicari. She credits her grandmother with teaching her how to cook pasta, among other things. 

Today, Petra gives that knowledge back to her community, teaching pasta-making classes and showcasing high-quality Italian specialty items like olive oils, vinegar, honeys, salts, wine, and cheeses.

 

"I'm all about sharing," she says. "I want people to make food. I don't want to be a gatekeeper holding these recipes for myself. Everybody should be cooking."

Petra took time to chat with me about her journey to starting Semolina MKE, popular products and classes, and her hopes for her customers, many of whom she considers friends. 

 

 

Tell us about your background and what inspired Semolina MKE.

I worked as a dental technician for years, and then I got married, got pregnant with twins, and stayed home with them for four and a half years until they went to kindergarten. Then, I wanted to get out of the house again, so I started working at Sanford Restaurant as a host. I worked there for about 15 years and did everything but the kitchen. I did two years as a pastry chef for a different restaurant. Then, I was managing another restaurant prior to COVID, and that shut down. 

So, when I was sitting at home alone with no work to do, I started doing a really deep dive into pasta-making. I had always made pasta, but this was me making more intricate shapes and just kind of trying to keep myself busy. Then, I was making so much pasta that people started wanting to buy it.

I realized that pasta does not fall under the cottage food laws in Wisconsin. I had to actually find commercial kitchen space, and that's how Semolina was born.

 

You carry quite a few specialty items in addition to pasta. What are you particularly proud to showcase?

There's a brand, Bona Furtuna, in Corleone, Sicily. As far as I know, we're the only store that carries their products in Wisconsin. We actually just visited the farm, and the president of the company was there. We got to go out into the olive groves and pick wild fennel from the side of the road. Their olive oils are top-notch. They are a wonderful organic 1% for the Planet, B-Corp, the whole nine yards. So we're very proud to carry those products. 

I also carry olive oil from a company called Mandranova, which is another farm in Agrigento that we visited. 

Both farms are very modern. Everything is temperature-controlled, so the oil doesn't get too hot as it's being crushed and mixed. The polyphenols stay at their highest levels, and they are doing everything to make the highest-quality ingredients or products. 

We also carry some fantastic honeys from Sardinia. It's a mother-and-daughter team, Maria and Daniela. Maria is around 80 years old. She was a little spitfire and yelled at me for not knowing more Italian.

I love working with these small producers we get to visit and get to know. Also, while we were there, we went to a winery called Quignones in Licata. I can't carry Alfredo's wines, but I can carry some of his food products. So we are able to go there and have a wonderful afternoon with him. It's so great to be able to build these relationships with producers, and they're so happy to have their products in the U.S., too.

 

 

What are the most popular products you offer?

Probably the most popular is the culurgiones [Sardinia's answer to the ravioli]. I make them every Sunday, and people have gotten used to having those available. My favorite is probably pappardelle, the simple egg pasta. I like the wide noodles. 

 

How did you learn to make pasta?

My grandma used to make pasta. Not often, but it's one of those things that I took upon myself to learn. I didn't take any classes. I just started making it and just figuring it out on my own. 

My husband and I went to Rome about six years ago and took a cooking class. It was about pasta-making and a bunch of other things, which really bolstered my confidence that I could do this myself and show other people how to do it as well.

 

Tell us about your pasta-making classes.

The classes in the shop are limited to a maximum of six people. I offer three different classes: classic egg dough, hand-shaped pasta, and ravioli. 

Each class starts out with making the dough from scratch. While the dough rests, we go into the kitchen. I show everyone how to make a sauce, and then we cook up pasta I had made earlier in the day. Everybody sees how I cook, sauce, and serve it. Then, they get their bowl of pasta and a glass of wine or some Italian non-alcoholic beverage. When we're done with that, I answer all of their questions about olive oil and cheese and whatever. During that time, we go back to the pasta room and do all of the rolling out and shaping. They can see the salt I'm putting in the water to boil and how I'm not rinsing the pasta. They can see my method of cooking so that they can replicate that at home.

 

What do you hope participants take away?

I want people to actually learn and walk away feeling like they can do it at home. And I know a lot of them do because they come back and buy flour to make everything at home. So, I am confident that people leave with the knowledge they need.

I try to teach them about the ingredients we're using so that they know how to buy olive oil and how to use it. They don't let it sit in their pantry for a year because they want to save it for a special occasion. It's food; you use it. 

I also just want them to feel comfortable and have a really fun time while they're doing it and that they can call me and ask me things. When they come into the shop, I want them to know that we have carefully curated, we have tasted things, and we have talked to the people who grow these things, so you can trust us when we tell you this is a good product. 

 

 

 

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Sicilian olives, particularly those grown in the Mount Etna region, benefit from long, hot summers and mild winters—something the western Sacramento Valley's semi-arid climate delivers.

That's where Bondolio olive oil producers Karen and Malcolm Bond grow their Sicilian olives. The couple first purchased their farm in 1986. Back then, it was an almond farm. However, the trees were never big producers, so they pulled them out in 1999 with an interest in starting anew.

A chance encounter with a particularly good fresh olive oil inspired them to set their sights on olive growing. 

Getting started was far from easy, but through persistence and self-taught craftsmanship, the couple is not just growing certified organic Sicilian olives but producing award-winning olive oil. 

I spoke with Karen to learn more about Bondolio's start, why she chose Sicilian olives, and her favorite ways to use her olive oils. 

 

Tell us how you decided to grow olives.

We were in Naples for Christmas between 1999 and 2000. We stayed in a villa east of Naples. Just as we were leaving, the owner said, "We just made our fresh olive oil last night. Would you like to taste it?" And I said, "I've always cooked with olive oil, but I've never tasted fresh olive oil." 

Being a nice Italian girl from South Jersey, I was very anxious to taste it. She took us to their farm, where all the trees were over a thousand years old and had huge gnarly trunks. She took us to a little stone building with a wood-burning stove. She toasted some bread and poured this wonderful liquid on top with a little bit of sea salt, and I fell in love. I said, "This is what we're doing on our farm."

 

Why did you choose Sicilian olive cultivars?

After deciding to do olives, we went on a two-year mission to find the right olive oil that met my needs. I always bought Italian olive oils because they tend to be fruity—especially southern Italian oils. And so we went all over Italy tasting oils at farms. If we saw a sign for olive oil, we would stop and buy some. We would go to grocery stores and farmers markets all over Italy to taste the oil. My husband would put olives in brown paper bags for me to taste, and I always picked the same three olives: Nocellara, Biancolilla, and Cerasuola. It's your typical Sicilian blend that most families have. 

We asked nurseries in California if they had these trees, and they said no. It would take two to three years before they could sell any to us; they would have to import them. So we got our own import license and imported the trees. 

 

Karen Bond holds her prized olives.

 

Tell us about that process.

We found a grower who said they had imported trees to the U.S. When the trees arrived, the FDA called us and said, "We have a problem; come down to the San Francisco airport."

So we had to go to the Department of Agriculture at the airport, and they took Malcolm through a series of clean rooms, opened the box, and showed that the little baby trees had soil on the roots. They then opened an incinerator and threw our trees away. So that was heartbreaking. 

We had to find a grower who could prove they had imported to the U.S. We finally found someone. In the meantime, the University of Florence helped us design our orchard, and they recommended that we bring in a fourth tree type, a Pendolino. Even though olives are self-pollinating, the Pendolino is a pollinating tree, and we'd have a higher production.

Our little baby trees arrived on Christmas Eve, 2006, six years into the process. I always tell people we were born during a time when delayed gratification was a good thing.

We took the baby trees home on Christmas Eve. They arrived on a Lufthansa flight at around one o'clock. We were just praying they would get through customs and then the Department of Agriculture because they were only packed in vermiculite. It was a three-day holiday, so everything would be closed, and we wouldn't be able to pick them up. They arrived at the Department of Agriculture at ten minutes to five o'clock, and they got cleared. So we were able to bring them home.

The next day, I cooked dinner, family and friends came over, and we planted 1,250 trees in two-inch pots. The problem was that they had to be quarantined, so we had to put them in a greenhouse.

 

The state and the feds would come and pull a tree out with its roots and take it with them to test for pests and diseases. 

Because the trees were growing, we had to transplant them to five-gallon pots. And finally, after two and a half years, they said we could plant them. 

So that's 2008. I think they went into the ground in the spring of 2009 because they were cleared in late summer, and you just can't plant at that time. It's too hot. 

In the first year, 2010, we actually had little olives on all the trees, so we picked them all. We only got about 300 pounds.

Malcolm made his own homemade mill, and we milled them, and it tasted good. So we said,
"Okay, let's move forward." 

The very next year, we got around 3,000 pounds. There was a mobile mill then, and the oil tasted great, so I said, "Let's enter the Yolo County Fair." Malcolm said, "No, we're going to New York and L.A." They're the two big international competitions where everyone from around the world enters their olive oil. We won gold in New York, gold in L.A., Best in Show in Yolo County, and Best in Show in Napa County in our very first year.

Our phone started ringing off the wall, and people wanted to buy our oil. The same thing has happened just about every year.

Malcolm and Karen Bond

 

What sets Bondolio apart from other California olive oils?

California olive oils are Spanish, French, northern Italian, or Greek, which have different flavor profiles. Arbequina tends to be a very mild oil, and so many people grow Arbequina. I wanted ours to be different from everyone else's.

Some people have brought in Biancolilla, and some people have brought in Nocellara, but no one has brought in Cerasuola. It's very difficult to propagate. They told us we would lose 80%, and we did not. We probably lost only 10%. Because we have such rich soil here, they were happy growing here. But I think that's what sets us aside. It's a totally different blend from everyone else in California. 

 

Karen Bond sips her liquid gold.

How do you use your olive oils?

I use olive oil every single day. For example, we normally have poached eggs and roasted potatoes for breakfast, so we roast the potatoes in olive oil and pour olive oil on the eggs. I use olive oil in just about everything I cook, including pasta, risotto, and fish.

 

We make mandarin oil with our Pendolino. We pick it on the very last day of milling and throw fresh whole mandarins in as we're milling. So it's a great orange oil. I put that over halibut and bake with it. Then, when it comes out of the oven, I pour a little bit of oil over it. 

When Nathan Norris was the head chef of Zuni Cafe, he told us that we had the most versatile olive oil. They always have an olio nuovo dinner in December; he did a whole dinner with our oil. He started with a persimmon salad with goat cheese and pomegranate seeds on the top and poured our oil with a little bit of salt on it. He then made a salad, then he made fish, and then he made a dark chocolate sorbet with our oil on top. And it was to die for. Our olive oils don't have a bitter flavor, so they can go with a lot of different foods.  

 

Bondolio olive oil served with crostini.

 

You give tours by appointment. Tell us about those.

On our tour, we serve food. If there are 10 or more people and they request it, we'll do pizza on the patio for them. Our biggest tours right now are from retirement communities. They'll come up with 40 people on a bus, and we'll do a tour, and then we'll do pizza for them.

They'll get to taste our oils and vinegar, but sometimes, I serve it with hummus. In the summer, when there are cherry tomatoes because we have a big garden, I will do what I call caprese shooters with our olive oil. I sometimes do crostini, where I'll take fresh tomatoes with garlic and basil with our olive oil and put that over toasted bread. I try to give people ideas on how to use the oil. 

 

We are open to the public one day a year, the second Sunday of December, when we introduce our new oil and have other vendors there. We have pizza, beer, wine, and sodas on the patio, rain or shine. 


Bondolio olive groves

What do you hope people take away from your olive oil?

How to use our oil and to use it quickly: Many people have the misconception that olive oil is like wine in that it ages well. It does not. The longer you keep it, the flavor profile goes down. Ours usually last two years, but it doesn't have the oomph it initially has.

 

I also try to make people understand how healthy olive oil is for them. There's so much evidence coming out now about how olive oil reduces breast cancer, reduces cholesterol, and helps prevent Alzheimer's disease. Both my husband and I are in our seventies. Neither one of us takes any medications. We're extremely healthy. We exercise every day, and we ride our bikes every day. We do Pilates and things, and we go to the doctor, and they say, "We can't believe that you don't take any medications." But I think it's partly because of the olive oil.

 

 

 

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Search for the phrase "Sicilian sea salt" online, and you'll stumble on Sicilian Sea Salt. When you learn that the company's co-owner, Joe Styler, works in tech, it's no wonder the brand has optimal search engine results.

The senior marketing manager of GoDaddy's Domain Academy runs Sicilian Sea Salt with his wife, Leslie Styler, in Phoenix, only fitting for a product once harvested by the Phoenicians. 

Joe's grandmother was from Western Sicily, where he first encountered Sicilian sea salt production. After one taste of the product, he was hooked. As a trained chef, he's fully incorporated it into his food preparation. He's confident other people will have the same experience. 

Joe and I recently chatted about the Sicilian Sea Salt Company and sea salt from Sicily. He shared what sparked the development of the business and what sets his salt apart from that of other salt producers and purveyors. 

 

 

What inspired Sicilian Sea Salt's start?

It was kind of an accident. My son really liked science, and he loves geology. We were in Sicily with my parents and brought my mother-in-law. My dad wanted to take my son out to do what he wanted. He wanted to see rocks. Where are you going to see rocks? They went to the salt museum. They came back with salt, and it was unbelievable how good the salt was.

I've cooked my entire life, worked in many restaurants, and tried different salts. I know salt's importance in different seasonings, but this salt was just different. 

We got some from the museum, and when we went back home, I needed to figure out how to get more of this salt. We couldn't get it here. So, I started reaching out to people in Sicily, and I found a way to get the salt. Then, I started giving it out to people as gifts, and I'd have to get more and more and more salt because everyone wanted it. So, we started getting it in bulk and just giving it away. 

I was talking to one of my friends to whom I gave salt, and they said, "You should sell this because everybody who has it likes it, and there's not enough for you to give out. You should just try and figure out a way to sell it."
 

What makes Sicilian sea salt unique compared to other salts on the market?

There are a couple of things that are really cool about the salt. First, really, there's something that I think is indescribable about it. We call it "magic salt" because everything you put it on tastes better than it would with a different salt. 

What makes it special is that it's harvested in a protected space, a marine reserve in Sicily. So the water where they get the salt from is really pure, and they've been doing it there for thousands of years. We live in Phoenix now, and it's funny because the Phoenicians started it there. For thousands of years, Sicily was conquered by different people, and everybody used the salt. That was one of the main things of importance that they would take from there.

 

When you drive on the coast from Trapani to Marsala, you just see miles and miles of salt pans, and they've been there for thousands of years and have windmills. Those are not really in use; they're decorations now, but they had those windmills to pump the seawater in these flats. 

Sea salt is made from evaporated ocean water, which is solar evaporation. They put it out into big flat spaces called pans, and then the sun and the breeze from the ocean evaporate the water. Then, what's left is the salt. So it's really pure; there's nothing added to it.

It would be organic. The FDA regulates salt, but the USDA does not because it considers it a rock—and this was another challenge when we started to figure out the regulatory issues of running a food business. The FDA regulates anything you put in your mouth. The USDA designates things as organic, and since they don't recognize salt as something that comes under their purview, you can't get an organic designation. But it is really very pure the salt that we get. 

I think that that's different than what most people get. The stuff that you get off the shelf is made by giant chemical companies, and it's really processed to be the same no matter what. They need to do chemical processes to make it like that. Then, they add different chemicals for anti-caking and make sure that it can pour out if it's humid. They also make sure that it's white. They do a lot of processing to it, which makes the bland, almost metallic flavor of normal salt compared to a salt like ours, which is special.  

 
Even the kosher salt is processed in most cases. It has a more bland taste to it. They also strip out a lot of natural minerals, which are trace elements. 

Since each batch that you pull comes from the ocean, it will vary. But there are different amounts of trace elements in there. Some people say it's beneficial for your diet, and there are studies on that, but I think that it just gives a different flavor profile.

What makes Sicilian salt special is its long history. The ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Romans all used salt pans and the grain they grew there as key ingredients in their empires. It's just been a natural way of life for thousands of years. 

It's also environmentally friendly to use salt from the ocean. It has been there for thousands of years and doesn't hurt the land. There's no erosion. 

If you buy Himalayan salt, it's fine; the pink salt is good and helps people, typically in poorer communities, make money. But they do a lot of deep mining and destroy much of the earth. 

Ours is sustainable, which is another thing we like about it.  

 

How have you incorporated sustainability into your packaging?

We try to use paper as much as possible instead of bubble wrap or other things like that so it can be recycled. Then we have these jars that we bought, which can be reused. We just did some packaging with paper envelopes so that you can refill those jars and reuse the jars over and over. We actually recently upgraded to a different jar from France, and it's a little sturdier. You can use our jars for canning or holding other spices, and there's really not much waste.  

 

You source your salt from Trapani. Tell us about its production.

We have a supplier there whose family has been harvesting salt for 50 or 60 years. They do everything by hand. You see them out there with rakes. 

 

There are different types of salt: fleur de sel, which is the French word, and fiore del sale, which is Italian.

 

It forms when the water's still there, and the salt separates and floats up to the top. That has to be really carefully skimmed because if you bump it, it will sink. And that is really crunchy, almost like Maldon, but Maldon's different. It's thin; it's very expensive and labor-intensive to pull it out, but that's all done by hand. I don't know if there's any machine that can do that. So, across the world, that part is done by hand, but as it evaporates, it just gets into these big clumps that have to be broken up.

 

Your core salt comes from what's broken up, and then you have to grind it down further. So all that stuff is done by hand in the same way it's been done for thousands of years with the company we work with. So they're out there with rakes, raking or shoveling the salt into wheelbarrows, and they make it the same way that it's been made for thousands of years. 

For us, that's important too because you can get a lot of salt from Sicily. Many different types are for sale. There are many bigger conglomerates, and they make it in a large-scale manufacturing process. They're not doing it the same way that it's been done. It's not artisanal, and you can taste the difference. You can actually see the difference. The salt's good, but it's not great. It's not that next level. You can look at the two salts by side and just know, just by seeing them, that they're different. When you try them, you can taste the different flavor profiles that they provide. So, it's important for us to have something that's really at the highest level.  

 

How do you enjoy your salt?

I like it in a lot of different ways. I use coarse salt as a finishing salt. We made roast vegetables yesterday, and we used it on top.

We have the coarse salt that we use for a margarita; we put it on the rim. Then, we use the fine salt if we're going to do something like a sauce or if we're baking.

 

I also use it if I'm going to make rubs for barbecue, age steaks, or try to tenderize things like lamb. I use the coarse salt, put it over that, and let it sit.

 

It really makes a difference in almost anything you eat. In fact, my mother has this little salt shaker in which she grinds her own salt, which she brings around now. After trying it from Sicily, she won't use any other salt.
 

What experience do you hope customers will take away?

I hope they have some connection to the Sicilian people, even if they're not Sicilian.

 

One important thing is that there's still high unemployment in Sicily. So, I think it would be good if people were more aware of Sicily as a part of Italy that they could visit. It definitely doesn't get the same amount of attention. It gets quite a bit of Italian tourists, but outside Italy, not many tourists come. I think the more recognition it can get, the more it can help their economy.

If we can make the connection to Sicily and the unique food culture there, I think that's important. Sicily has a really different food culture from the rest of Italy. The one thing I like about Italians is that they're really strict about what qualifies if you make something. If you don't make the exact right ratio of ingredients, then it isn't right. You made it wrong. They have protections over their food. Those things are good because they keep traditions alive. As a chef, I like experimenting with things and changing things up. So, for example, I make pizzas. If I'm not using the right flour, the right tomatoes, and the right cheese, then it doesn't count as a true Neapolitan pizza. 

 

Because so many cultures have ruled over Sicily, there's a lot more flexibility in the type of food that's there, and it's a much more diverse food culture. I like that about Sicily, too. And I think that that's something that people don't really realize. They think of Italian food as spaghetti, meatballs, pizza, or things like that. And there's such a wide variety in Sicily. If you look around at different restaurants or marketplaces, they'll say, "This is Sicilian style," or "These came from Sicily." Italians hold Sicily, in some ways, in high respect as far as their food goes.

I think we can bring more awareness to Sicily as a whole and have more investment there by having people say that they want to go. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was in Partanna, Sicily, and he started olive oil and coffee. That didn't go well, but it was good because he said, "This is what I discovered when I was in Sicily," and it brought more attention to the island. 

I think it's really important for people to do more to help the economy overall and continue the culture. So that's the one thing I hope people take away when they try our salt. I also hope that they start to think more widely about their ingredient choices, how that impacts their health, and how it impacts the flavor of their food. 

 

 

 

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One of Maria Gallo's fondest memories is of her grandmother asking her to fetch a handful of mint so they could make iced tea to serve with supper. Today, Maria, an entrepreneur from Albany, New York, is happy to share Nani's Iced Tea, which is sold in a mason jar bearing a photo of her kissing Nani, who came to the U.S. from Castiglione di Sicilia.

 

"It's thrilling to me to be doing this in her name and her honor," Maria says. "And I feel like she's been with me the entire time before it even started. Obviously, she gave me this, right? She always took care of me, and I feel like this is her way of still taking care of me."

Nani must have been watching over Maria as, after a challenging start, the brand has become a favorite in Upstate New York stores where it is sold. Expanding that reach is part of the plan, which Maria shared with me, along with how she got started and how she chooses to stand out in the crowded beverage market. 

Tell us about Nani and how she inspired you.

We were always very close. When I was in my early 20s, I lived with her, and later, I lived next door to her. And so, just as I had been in my childhood, I was always in her kitchen.

The iced tea was something that I loved to do with her because she had a routine. My grandmother's house was immaculate. She would get up in the morning and have breakfast, and then she would begin her housework. After her housework was done, she would shower, and then in the afternoon, she would read, say her rosary, and then start to prepare for dinner.

Before she started cooking dinner, she would steep the tea in a pan on the stove. As we got closer to prepping dinner and setting the table, she would ask me to run outside and grab mint. Then, I watched her make it.

Those smells and those memories just always stayed with me. And also it was delicious, which doesn't hurt. She made one pitcher every night when it was warm in the summer months.

I started making it when my kids were little. I would have friends who would say, "I'm coming tomorrow to visit. Make the iced tea." So luckily—I mean, it's not luck by any stretch; it's her hand—I was able to recreate the taste of her tea.

It was something that I loved to do, and I was thrilled to be able to replicate it and make it for my friends and people that I was close to. That led eventually to me bottling the tea.

We have five flavors now. When I first began this, I just had her original iced tea, which was just sugar, lemons, mint, tea, and water. But then, when I was out, people requested it unsweetened, so I added a few more flavors.

On the side of every jar, I always tell the story of my Sicilian grandmother. The tea was part of everything that she was, and that's now ingrained in me.

 

Share your start and the challenges you faced.

I was teaching at the time. I would bring it to school. In the summer and on weekends up in Saratoga, I would waitress and bring it in for staff. I would bring it in a five-gallon drum, and everybody loved it, which made me feel great. It was fun. It was a good couple of summers.

The restaurant owner and I had been friends for some time, and he came to me and said, "Let's get this going. I know a bottler, and let's talk about bottling it. The guy I want you to talk to is bottling some things for me. I spoke to him this morning, and we were talking about doing the tea in a plastic pinky jug."

 

I kind of paused and didn't say anything. And he said, "What?"

 

I said, "Well, I don't want to do plastic. I just always pictured a glass mason jar with her picture on the front, maybe black and white."

Instantaneously, I was thinking, "Oh my God, Maria! Here's somebody you love and respect who is calling you and saying, 'I'm going to get this going for you.'"

He said, "This is your story, and don't compromise for anybody."

I began working with the bottler, and when we met and sat down, he just said, "This is amazing, and you'll be bought out in five years. There's nothing like it on the market packaging-wise or taste-wise."

I asked him whether his R&D team could replicate the tea without chemicals or artificial preservatives. He said, "Oh, yeah."

But they just couldn't nail it. We tried everything, and chef friends of mine tried to help. We tried cheesecloth and simple syrup. The problem was that every time we heated it up, it tasted like Sleepy Time tea. We couldn't get it to be where it needed to be to be shelf-life stable in stores without affecting the integrity of the taste, so we parted ways. 

I have a lot of friends in the restaurant business in Albany, and someone had given me the name of a second bottler. I went up to see her. She was about two hours away, and she was amazing. Within three weeks, she nailed it.

You know how when you make sauce or sausage and peppers, it's always better the next day? It's the same thing with my grandmother's iced tea. So I put a pitcher in the refrigerator, and then the next day, I took that tea to her and said, "This is what I want it to taste like."

She was wonderful. She found an extract company, and everything was all-natural. It was amazing. We started bottling together.

 

I was teaching then and got a notification on my Facebook page: "Hi. We were just in the shop in Delmar. My name is blah, blah, blah. I work for Whole Foods. We're coming to Albany. Would you like to meet at Whole Foods?"

All my little local guys who had been with me from the beginning were like, "Girl, this is it. This is so great!"

Five minutes later, my bottler shut down. New owners came in. They decided they didn't want a co-packing plant's liability, so they took the production facility in a different direction. So, I was back to square one.

In the interim, the restaurateur I'd mentioned got me a sit-down with a distributor, the biggest distributor in our area at the time. So, in about 2015, I met with this guy, and he just said, "Look, I love the product. I love the story. I love your tenacity. I'll put the money up. When you find a bottler, let's do this. This is going to be great. It's going to be such a great story."

It took me a year to find a bottler. I went to a bottler downstate in New York, and the bottler botched the whole run that we did: 1,200 cases.

My distributor took off and was not happy. That was a brutal summer. We were renting a house that I thought I was about to buy. We lost the house, and my car got repossessed. It was a pretty ugly time.

In the interim (after the bottler debacle downstate), I had reached out to a few bottlers, but besides being very costly, I would have been at their mercy as far as a production schedule goes. Eventually, I decided it was time, so I took my last few thousand dollars and secured the space for Nani's.

So many people loved the story, but no one wanted to cut a check. Every time they would tell me no but that they loved my story, etc., I would say, "No worries; thanks so much." Then, I would tell them that someday I was going to have a ribbon cutting at that space, and I'd wear a lemon dress. I felt like they were probably thinking, "Okay, crazy girl. You have no money, no credit, no house, no job, and no machinery."

Eventually, I found capital. This group around here works with entrepreneurs, and I got capital for the machinery in the summer of 2022. I started bottling shortly after my ribbon cutting last winter. And I wore that lemon dress!
 

Maria Gallo wore her lemon dress to her ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Tell us why avoiding plastic is so important to you.

When I first started, all the numbers guys I met with said, "You can't use glass if you want to do a mason jar. You have to use plastic."

I never compromised on that. As soon as I was out doing demos at Whole Foods and even smaller places, everybody loved and appreciated the glass. And now, over the last five or six or seven years, everybody's back to realizing how bad plastic is and how good glass is.

The thing for me about glass is that, like so many people, I drank Snapple when I was at work or out to lunch, and I did not like the transition to plastic. It didn't taste the same. I wanted a tea that, if you left it in your car overnight, whether it was 10 degrees out or 95 degrees out, it would never change the integrity of the tea. That glass jar and not adding chemicals were just two things that I wouldn't compromise on.

 

What else sets you apart from other teas on the market?

I haven't found anything comparable since I started this tea company in 2011. I don't taste every iced tea out there, but it's still basically the staples: PepsiCo makes Pure Leaf iced tea, and Coke makes Gold Peak. I don't find either comparable.

It's because of the ingredients in the tea, the extracts that we source, and also the way I make the tea. At some point, I may have to move to a concentrate, but right now, I make the tea on a grander scale, the same way my grandmother made it. That's how my scheduled process was made through my first bottler.

I still soak tea bags in drums overnight in the refrigerator, pull everything out that morning, pull the tea bags out, strain it over and over and over, and throw it into the kettle of hot water. The kettle takes about two hours and 15 minutes to get up to temp. And I bottle at 190 or 191, so it's a shelf-stable product. When I bring it to places, I can say, "It can sit in your back room for a couple of weeks because it's safe to be out of the refrigerator."
 

What are your plans for the future?

I'm hoping we can eventually get the tea on a national scale. I'm about 40 minutes from Saratoga Springs. A lot of people come here in the summer for the track and the baths; it's a beautiful area.

Every summer, people tell me, "I had your tea this summer in Saratoga." Or, "I had your tea this summer in Albany." They ask, "Do you ship? When are you going to be here?" When I was in Whole Foods, I had someone who worked at that store who then moved to the Boston store say, "Oh my God, I miss your tea so much. Can you get it here?"

National distribution obviously is quite a challenge both financially and logistically, but it can be done. We're talking about getting into some places in New York City with my distributor. And for me, that's as thrilling as having Nani's available on a national level. We're talking about meeting with Italian wholesale grocers down there and getting into the Italian delis in the Bronx and Brooklyn. My dad was from the Bronx. Nani had cousins in Brooklyn. So, for me, that would be so thrilling. I would be so honored because I know that those people are paying homage every day to their aunts, uncles, and grandparents.  

 

What do you hope your customers take away?

When I get out, dressed up and in front of people, and talk about the teas and my grandmother, that rejuvenates me.

It goes a long way; it validates everything for me. Whenever I do a demo, people tell me, "This is the best iced tea I've ever had. I love this story so much." They hold the jar, and they look at my grandmother. And I love it, and they love it. It validates for me that there's a reason why I wanted the jar and her face on it and not just another iced tea in plastic.

Besides physically making the tea, my favorite part of doing this is hearing people respond to it. I mean, people will message me and text me, and they'll tag me on Instagram and say, "Oh my God, I love this tea so much," but really, being out and pouring tea for two or three hours at an event and hearing the feedback is wonderful. That really goes a long way for me.

 

 

 

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Railways have long been a part of Sicilian entrepreneur Giovanni De Lisi's life. The 39-year-old started at a young age, working for his family's maintenance company, De Lisi Costruzioni Ferroviarie. There, he observed problems associated with traditional railroad ties, called sleepers, which are made of concrete and subject to high wear and environmental impact. Giovanni investigated the potential of using recycled materials, such as plastic and rubber from used tires. That led him to found Greenrail Group in 2012, with offices in Milan and Rome.

"The goal was to create a more innovative, sustainable, and high-performance railway sleeper," says Giovani, who divides his time between Palermo and Milan.

We recently corresponded via email, during which he shared Greenrail's innovations and benefits, current and upcoming projects, and his optimism for the future of smart technology in the railway industry.

 

 

Can you explain how Greenrail's smart sleeper technology works?

The Greenrail railway sleeper is an innovative sleeper designed to combine sustainability, efficiency, and durability. This railway sleeper is a combination of traditional and recycled materials, aimed at enhancing performance and reducing environmental impact.

Key technical features:

• Hybrid structure: The inner part is made of reinforced concrete, ensuring the structural strength and stability of the sleeper. The outer coating consists of a mixture of recycled rubber and plastic obtained from used tires and other plastic waste, thereby reducing the need for virgin raw materials and contributing to recycling.
  
  
• Durability: Thanks to the outer coating made of recycled materials, Greenrail is less prone to wear compared to traditional concrete sleepers. This outer layer protects the internal structure from weather, erosion, and chemical action, extending the lifespan of the sleeper. The estimated lifespan of a Greenrail sleeper is over 50 years, making it a long-lasting solution compared to conventional options.
  
  
• Mechanical and vibrational resistance: The mechanical properties of reinforced concrete ensure high resistance to compression and dynamic loads typical of railway lines. The rubber coating acts as a natural shock absorber, reducing vibrations transmitted to the ground and improving the comfort and stability of train passage.
  
  
• Electrical insulation: Greenrail provides better electrical insulation compared to conventional sleepers, reducing the risk of electrical leaks and ensuring better operation of electrified railway lines.
  
  
• Environmental sustainability: Each individual Greenrail sleeper recovers approximately 35 kilograms of recycled rubber and plastic, reducing waste accumulation. During its lifecycle, it helps reduce CO₂ emissions through the use of recycled materials and increased durability compared to traditional solutions.
  
  
• Compatibility: The Greenrail sleeper is designed to be compatible with standard railway technologies and can be installed on existing railway lines without significant modifications to the infrastructure.
  
  
• Advanced versions: In addition to the basic version, Greenrail also offers variants such as Greenrail Solar, which integrates photovoltaic modules into the design, allowing for solar energy generation, and Greenrail Linkbox, which integrates sensors to monitor the state of the railway lines.

These features make the Greenrail sleeper a cutting-edge solution in the railway sector. Its strong focus on sustainability and technological innovation revolutionizes its ability to improve safety and reduce operational costs.

 

 

What are the key benefits of integrating sensors and solar panels into railway sleepers?

The integrated sensors allow for constant monitoring of the network's status, improving safety and reducing maintenance costs through predictive interventions. Solar panels, on the other hand, generate up to 44 megawatt-hours of energy per kilometer per year, transforming railway infrastructure into sources of renewable energy. This has a significant impact on environmental sustainability and energy efficiency.

 

How does Greenrail's use of recycled materials contribute to sustainability?

By using recycled plastic and rubber, Greenrail significantly reduces its environmental footprint. Our sleepers reduce CO₂ emissions by 40% and decrease noise, energy consumption, and water usage compared to concrete sleepers. This circular economy not only limits waste but also extends the operational lifespan of the sleepers.

 

What impact do Greenrail sleepers have on the passenger experience compared to traditional sleepers?

Greenrail sleepers contribute to a reduction in vibrations of up to 40%, ensuring greater comfort for both urban residents and passengers. Additionally, the smart technology will help prevent failures and service interruptions, ensuring greater reliability and safety.

 

What has the response been?

The response has been extremely positive, both from railway operators and environmentalists. Our pilot projects in Europe have confirmed the effectiveness and sustainability of our solutions. Greenrail Solar, in particular, has attracted a lot of attention for its ability to generate renewable energy, in addition to all the other advantages of Greenrail technology for railway infrastructure.

 

What are the next steps for Greenrail in terms of market expansion?

We are aiming to expand into international markets, especially in Europe and North America. We have already patented our technology in over 80 countries and plan to build industrial plants to meet demand. Our strategy also includes licensing our technology to local manufacturers, who will use local recycled materials.

 

How do you see the role of smart technology evolving in the railway industry?

Smart technology will be the future of the railway sector. Predictive maintenance and real-time monitoring will become the norm, improving safety and operational efficiency. I foresee an increasing integration of artificial intelligence and IoT technologies to further optimize infrastructure management and minimize human errors. Our smart sleeper technology is just the beginning.

 

Are there any projects or collaborations that you are particularly proud of?

One of the most significant projects is the pilot installation of Greenrail Solar in Emilia-Romagna. It was the first concrete example of our solar technology applied in the real world, with very promising results in terms of energy production and durability. We are also proud of the collaborations that are being concretely activated in the short term with some operators of European subway lines to modernize their outdated systems.

 

What kind of experience do you hope to provide for your clients and partners?

We want to provide an innovative, reliable, and sustainable solution that brings long-term benefits to both our customers and the environment. We guarantee our partners a smooth collaboration process, from design to implementation, with the shared goal of modernizing railway infrastructure. We focus on trust, transparency, and a constant commitment to improvement.

 

 

 

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There are countless ways Sicilians have touched, inspired, and vivified American culture, one of which is through music. 

I recently discovered the introspective yet energizing works of Chicago-based composer and pianist Maria Rago, who hails from the small Sicilian town of Santa Caterina Villarmosa in the province of Caltanissetta. Atmospheric and even otherworldly, the title track of her latest album, Red Land, blends electric guitar thrashing with symphonic sounds. Like so much of her music, it defies genre constraints with vibrancy and texture drawn from her Sicilian heritage. 

"My Sicilian roots have significantly influenced my identity as a pianist and composer," says Maria. "The way I perceive the world—its sounds, colors, the contrasting shadows of tragedy and beauty, the allure of history, the relentless sun, and the vibrant spirit of the Sicilian people—shapes my artistic vision. Being an islander allows me to create an 'island' of sound, a smaller haven within a broader context."

 

Maria took time out to share her music inspiration, creative process, favorite composition, future projects, advice for musicians, and what she hopes listeners take away.

 

 

What inspired you to pursue a music career?

Music has always been central to my life, but it wasn't until I turned 24 that I transitioned from being a listener to becoming a musician, ultimately deciding to dedicate my life to music. It happened during a cello concert when I found myself immersed in the notes of "Suite No.2 in D Minor" of J.S. Bach. Amid those vibrations and melodies, I realized this was the world I longed to be a part of—a realm of infinite possibilities where I knew I was a unique piece of that puzzle. When you write or perform, you expose your inner self; it feels as if you are recounting your own story through another's voice, sharing, rediscovering, and sometimes concealing the experiences that shape you, all through the medium of music.

 

Who are some of your biggest musical influences?

In my musical journey, the music of J.S. Bach and his infinite being, the earthly conception that meets the universal—the divine that is revealed among his compositions—has a fundamental role. There is a sacredness that runs through his work, a human logic that transforms into a spiritual path, a path that leads you elsewhere. The divine manifesting itself in man. This path impacted my compositions not in the stylistic sense but in the spiritual sense. 

I also admire Ludwig van Beethoven and his human testament, a project around man and where man dares, challenges, chooses, free from every chain. The divine manifesting itself in nature. Here are two composers who approach, through music, the concept of life differently. 

 

Can you tell us more about Red Land?

The album Red Land emerged from the desire to blend two musical languages: classical orchestration and the electrifying sound of the guitar, masterfully played by Martin Szorad, among other amazing musicians. This album paints the world in hues of red, reflecting a tumultuous environment filled with conflicts and strife—a world where life is hard to come by, yet death is all too easy. Red Land embarks on a journey through such a reality, with the electric guitar serving as a poetic explorer seeking the lingering beauty within.

 

Do you have a favorite piece you've composed, and what makes it special?

Typically, after completing a piece, I try to distance myself from it. When I revisit it later, I often feel as if it no longer belongs to me; it becomes a "free creature with its own life," one that I no longer recognize, a "being" detached from its "creator." However, there is a piece titled "Lullaby on the Sea," composed just as I was leaving Sicily—a farewell to my homeland, where I felt that "creature," which is me, started to separate from its origin: Sicily. 

 

What upcoming projects or performances are you most excited about?

I recently composed soundtracks for two projects: one called The Rebellious River with Studio Dance Arts New York, aimed at supporting young talent in the Bronx, and another, called Two Hands, with the organization Unity Freedom Power in collaboration with an English production, using hands as a symbol of either unity or destruction depending on one's decisions. I'm particularly excited about a new theater project exploring the lives of remarkable women throughout history, guided by the exceptional mediator Leonardo da Vinci.

 

What advice would you give emerging musicians?

Being a musician is a privilege that demands love, dedication, and relentless practice. My advice for emerging musicians is to cultivate the ability to listen, remain curious, and not take themselves too seriously. Let the music lead you; ultimately, it's the music that transcends time when everything else fades.

 

What do you hope listeners take away from your music?

Writing or performing opens you up to vulnerability; you lay yourself bare, taking risks in communicating your intended message, never knowing how an audience will interpret it. My hope is that listeners walk away with an idea, a thought, or a mindset—not always positive, but rather a perspective that prompts reflection. Indifference is the greatest enemy, and it's what art, music, and humanity simply cannot afford.

 

 

 

 

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One of my Sicilian mother's signature dishes is stuffed peppers. But unlike regular Italian stuffed peppers, she loads hers with veggies. It never occurred to me that her style was uniquely Sicilian until I stumbled on Ada Parisi's Sicilian stuffed peppers recipe.

Ada, who was born in Messina, Sicily, blogs at Siciliani Creativi in Cucina from her home base in Rome. 

She recently shared with me memories associated with this dish, what makes her stuffed peppers Sicilian, the recipe's key ingredients, and her serving suggestions. 

 

 

What does this dish remind you of?

Stuffed peppers are a traditional Sicilian recipe, but I cherish the family version I inherited from my great-grandmother. A completely vegetarian version that was prepared at home every summer as soon as the peppers were in season.

 

What makes this recipe Sicilian?

The Sicilian characteristic is certainly the filling, which is not made with minced meat, as in the rest of Italy.

 

What are the key ingredients used in the Sicilian-style stuffed peppers?

The filling is made with a mixture of breadcrumbs, oil, parsley, capers, garlic, grated and chopped cheese. Many also add anchovies, olives, or some chopped tomatoes.

 

Why do you use breadcrumbs?

The use of breadcrumbs in fillings in Sicily is linked to the fact that peasant cuisine was a poor cuisine made of ingredients that farmers always had at home. Nothing was thrown away. Vegetables were stuffed with this old bread seasoned with oil, cheese, and aromatic herbs. Meat or fish were foods for the rich.

 

What do capers add to this dish?

Capers add a very interesting salty note and are typical of Sicilian cuisine (we produce capers in Pantelleria and Salina). Many use salted or oil-preserved anchovies instead of capers, a very common combination with peppers also in northern Italy.

 

If you're vegan or lactose intolerant, can you omit cheese?

Of course, you can omit the cheese and add a larger amount of aromatic herbs.

 

Do the types of peppers matter for this dish?

The most suitable peppers for this recipe are round peppers, usually red, green, or yellow. I think the red ones are the most suitable, but in terms of color, it is nice to use all three.

 

Are there any specific tips for ensuring the stuffed peppers turn out perfectly?

First, you must not spare the extra virgin olive oil because it is the oil that makes the filling soft and fluffy. Then, cook in the oven at a temperature that is not excessively high, 180 degrees Celsius maximum, so that the peppers cook without drying out.

  

How do you typically serve your stuffed peppers?

We usually serve them among the appetizers or as a side dish for meat or fish. In fact, since the filling is carbohydrate-based, they are also an excellent main dish if accompanied by a rich salad.

 

>>Get Ada's Sicilian stuffed peppers recipe here!<<

 

 

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Harper Alexander had little experience with Italian food before traveling to Italy and meeting his wife Eva Santaguida, who is from Calabria. But today, as co-founder of the Pasta Grammar YouTube channel and co-author of The Italian Family Kitchen: Authentic Recipes That Celebrate Homestyle Italian Cooking, he's doing his part to educate the masses about the food and culture that's inspired him. 

I sat down with Harper and Eva to discuss their new cookbook, why and how they started Pasta Grammar, what goes into recipe writing, the biggest misconceptions about Italian food, which Sicilian recipe is their favorite, and more. 

 

 

How and why did you start Pasta Grammar?

Harper: We started shortly after we got married and right as COVID hit. It was one of those COVID hobbies that a lot of people did during the pandemic when they weren't working.

 

I'd been to Italy a few times to visit Eva when we were dating, but food wasn't something I deeply cared about or knew very much about. And so, at first, I made these videos joking around with her because she was new to America and getting her reactions to American food, whether it's Domino's Pizza or the prices at Whole Foods, whatever. At the end of every video, Eva would cook to show how she would do things. And more and more people started asking for recipes. As we did more of these videos, I realized something I didn't even know when I married her: "Oh, you're a really amazing cook, and Italian food is very different from what I thought." and "I really like it, and I want to know more about it."

 

For me, it was an evolution of not really understanding what I had at home, which was a very talented cook and discovering this whole world of Italian food.

 

Behind the scenes of a Pasta Grammar video.

What goes into writing your recipes?

Harper: As the native English speaker, it is always kind of a fun challenge because part of my job is translating what Eva does, which is a very home-cooked Italian style. Nobody measures anything. You ask any Italian cook how much cheese they use. And they'll look at you. You're absolutely crazy for even asking such a silly question. But of course, when you publish recipes for people unfamiliar with that kind of food or write a cookbook, you have to translate something she does intuitively into a recipe. So we work very closely together when we're developing recipes. And so obviously, she's doing the cooking and coming up with the food, but then I'm measuring, seeing how much cheese she actually used, and then translating that into a recipe.

 

Eva: This is also very useful because if I write the recipe, I write from my point of view, whereas Harper's recipes are very detail-oriented. He writes for every kind of home cook.

 

What are common misconceptions about Italian cooking?

Eva: What I discovered coming here is that people think we love garlic. Yes, we do love garlic in Italy, but we don't love garlic as much as Americans think. In Italian food, the taste of garlic is very, very mild. Even if we cook with a lot of garlic, we usually remove it or let it cook for such a long time that it becomes completely delicate.

 

Harper: Another big misconception that a lot of people have is that Italian food even exists because Italy is so regionalized. When people visit Italy, they think, "I'm in Italy. I am going to get good pizza at every restaurant."

 

You sometimes need to go to a specific town to get a dish made properly. Don't go to Sicily and order a carbonara. It's not the place for that.

 

Our second-highest viewership on our channel is Italians. They watch the channel to learn about food in other regions they don't even know about. Someone from Naples might not even know what they eat in Milan. So, a lot of people need to disabuse themselves of the idea that there is Italian food. 

 

Which kitchen skill should everyone master?

Eva: The first thing people should understand is that you need to put salt in the food and taste it. You need to taste everything you cook to understand if you made a mistake and if it actually needs more salt or spices.

 

Harper: Unless it's a very specific baking thing where you kind of need some specific chemistry, we never give an amount of salt to any recipe. It's always to taste because that's a really important skill. When you see a recipe that says "a half teaspoon of salt," it is like, "Well, what kind of salt are you using? Some salts are saltier than others. Are you using professional Diamond Crystal salt?" 

One of our biggest pet peeves is recipes that give specific salt measurements. You really need to learn from every step. Also, with pasta, people are used to following the package instructions, where you just put a pinch of salt into the water. But people don't understand that you need to actually taste the pasta while it's boiling and make sure that it's properly salted even before you incorporate it into the sauce. So, we put all of that in the cookbook because I know, as someone who knew nothing about cooking before I met Eva, my approach to salt was always, "I just have to put a pinch of salt in my dish. It's just a mandatory thing." But I never tasted it and never added nearly enough to make the ingredients really stand out.

 

You feature several Sicilian recipes in your cookbook. Which is your favorite?

Eva: One of my favorite recipes in the cookbook is pasta alla Norma. 

Harper: Pasta alla Norma probably takes the cake because we consider it to be the perfect pasta dish. When we talk privately about trying a new pasta, our conversation always ends with, "Well, it was good, but is it pasta alla Norma good?" On an objective level, it's just kind of the perfect pasta, and that's why it's actually on the cover of the book.

It is just the balance of flavors. It's a tomato sauce in which you incorporate some of the oil you use to cook the eggplant. The combination of eggplant, tomatoes, ricotta salata (dried grated ricotta), basil, and olive oil just sums up that southern Italian flavor.

 

Why is incorporating the historical and cultural context of recipes important to you?

Eva: This is very important because if you understand the history of a dish, you can appreciate the dish by itself. A lot of people think that we Italians don't like to change our recipes. That's not true because what we have today is just the evolution of what we've discovered through tradition.

So knowing why, for example, they use these ingredients more than others makes sense in the dish. For example, the food of Venice: In the Veneto region, they use a lot of spices like cinnamon and cloves. Venice was one of the main cities during the medieval age that had the availability of all these spices. So they started to use them, and what we have now are spiced dishes that you don't have in other regions. Knowing the history gives the food a new meaning.

 

Harper: I have a dish that is tremendously important to me, which is just a really crappy grilled cheese on white bread, like Kraft American cheese dipped in Campbell's tomato soup. It's not that the food is particularly good, but it brings back memories that I had as a kid out in the snow in Maine. You would come back in from the cold and have this hot grilled cheese and tomato soup. So, the story informs how we eat and changes how the food tastes. I don't think food is ever objective. Those stories matter a lot.

 

You introduce people to experiences on tours. Tell us about them.

Harper: We do a couple of different tours. The one we started doing years ago is a more traditional tour through Southern Italy. We start in Naples and go all the way down through Calabria and into Sicily. What makes it unusual is that we wanted to make a tour that took people off the beaten touristy track. I'd actually visited Italy before I met Eva, so I thought I had the place figured out.

 

But then, when I started traveling with a local, she would take me to the places she wanted to go, and it was a completely different experience. So when we started that tour, the idea was to share a lot of those experiences that most tourists would never have, but in a way where it was accessible to someone who doesn't speak the language and doesn't even know about these places or foods to try or things to see.

The second one that we do is expanding off of that idea. We do something called the Week in Dasà, which is where a group of people come to Eva's small village in Calabria and spend a week living there with us. We cook together, we eat together, and we party together Calabria-style. It's a project that we're really proud of, something that's very unusual. People come to a place where there's never been any tourism, and they get the real deal of what it's like living in a small Calabrian village.

 

What experience do you hope people take away from Pasta Grammar?

Eva: What I see right now is that a lot of people treat food like something just to put in the stomach. It doesn't matter where you are or where you are eating. This is very bad because it's a moment that you need to use to take care of yourself and of the people that you actually love. So I hope they understand spending more time in the kitchen is a very important time of your life.

 

Harper: I went from being someone used to convenience food culture where I would say, "I'm busy. I'll just grab a sandwich or get takeout." And now I've gotten to the point where I can't imagine not spending time every night cooking food and eating together. It's something that is very important. And I didn't realize how important it was, and now I can't imagine going back.

 

 

 

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Driven to rejuvenate Pezzolo, the Sicilian community her parents once called home, Mariagrazia LaFauci founded Trinacria Theatre Company in 2016. While the company's shape has changed, its focus on community building, placemaking, and intercultural exchange has remained in a way that defies convention. 

Unlike most theater companies, Trinacria doesn't perform in theaters. Instead, they've been known to take over piazzas, terraces, and even soccer fields to perform pieces rooted in tradition as well as original productions. 

I had the opportunity to speak with Mariagrazia, who also serves as Trinacria Theatre Company's artistic director, to learn more about its important work and what she hopes audiences will take away. 

 

 

What inspired the creation of the Trinacria Theatre Company?

In the summers, I spent most of my life going back and forth to Pezzolo because my family lived there. 

Around the time I was getting ready to graduate college, I started thinking about doing a project to help the village. Sicily has gone through a real diaspora, with many people leaving and many businesses going under. 

In 2008, the year I graduated high school and went to college, the last bar in Pezzolo slowly shut down, and life screeched to a halt. Nobody had a place to meet up. That kind of really important cultural community space was just gone. I saw the population plummet after that. 

Then, there was a really massive storm here in 2009 that really impacted people, and actually, quite a few people died in Giampilieri Superiore, which is the next town over, and a lot of homes were destroyed. 

All of that together was just terrible and devastating. When I graduated from college, I started looking for opportunities to do a fellowship or something that would let me give back to this community. In 2016, I started the theater company here in Pezzolo to do that. 

 

How did the company evolve over the years?

It's gone through many different iterations. In 2016, it started out with just an all-volunteer cast out of Boston and New York City. I held auditions in both places and found this group of actors. We were like, "Okay, let's go do this. Let's spend four weeks in Sicily and create a piece of theater about it."

It was such a beautiful piece, called La Storia di Colapesce, based on a local myth that's really closely connected to Messina. We toured it around Sicily and brought it back to the U.S., where we did it in Boston and New York. 

Then there was a year gap because I went and did my master's during that year. But when we came back, I was sort of like, "That was beautiful, but how do we expand beyond just dropping a bunch of people here, doing a show all on our own, performing it, and then leaving? How do we make this a community event and space?"

So, we started to play around with this festival format, where we did workshops and storytelling circles. We put on an exhibit by a local artist, created pieces, and featured these local theater companies. Then it was like, "Oh, there's something here."

 

Since then, there's been more of a festival format to it all. And so it's gone through different iterations. Sometimes, we do create shows; sometimes, we don't create shows. This year was an open residency, which we've done twice now, where we just look for artists, they apply, and then we bring them in for residency. They get to kind of use the time and the space to create on their own independently, and then they share that in the festival afterward.  

 

Tell us where you perform.

We don't use traditional theater spaces at all. We use piazzas, streets, and abandoned spaces wherever we can find them. This year, we held events on a terrace and a soccer field. 

I love theaters. I genuinely love them and will always love sitting in a seat, the lights going dark, and all the bells and whistles that come with it. But I think that space can be intimidating for people sometimes if it's not the kind of space you regularly engage with. Sometimes, it can feel a little bit like you're going into the temple or church of a religion you don't belong to, and you're kind of like, "When do I sit? When do I stand? What are the rules? What do I say?" And that feels intimidating for people. 

We take it from that context and just plunk it into, "This is your piazza. If you're going to answer a phone call, your kid's going to run across the piazza, or you're talking in the corner, we can't stop you, but we will also put on a show for you. So, if you also want to sit and watch that, great." It's a very different vibe.

 

How does that unconventional style translate to your performances?

Necessity is the mother of invention. We've got no stage, we've got no lights, we've got no speakers, we've got nothing. How are we going to put on the most incredible show possible? So, you take a show like Colapesce, which will take place 80% underwater and also in a volcano, and all of these things that are completely impossible to stage. How are you going to do that with absolutely zero lights, sound, set, or props to indicate we're underwater? It was like, "Cool. We have our bodies and voices. We have some music that we can make using these three instruments that we brought. Let's do it. What are a million different ways that you can make someone look like they're swimming when they're not really swimming?" And so that was how our first piece was made. It's very physical, it's very playful, it's very silly at times. 

 

How does communal living during the residency foster creativity?

The artists who come here always live together in a shared house, sometimes even shared rooms, depending on the number of people and what they've agreed to. 

For me, it's two things. One is Italian households. They're intergenerational. There are often a lot of family members. I've got my aunt, who lives five minutes down the road, and I'm probably at her house eating dinner two to three times a week. Communal meal times are so important; that family connection is so important. It's part of Italian culture. It would be weird if we didn't all eat together as a company. I always make sure you're living together or sharing meals together. And then, often, what comes out of that is people who find these points of connection. 

One of the other things I do as part of the residency is each artist leads a morning warmup. They get a chance to present their practice in some way. And the people who come here are some visual artists, some of them are writers, and some of them are theater majors. They all go at it from such different angles, but they get this morning of "Hey, you're going to engage with my creative practice today, and that's going to set you up for whatever it is that you're going to do for the rest of the day, or how you're thinking."

So, these really wonderful synergies come out of that often where somebody says, "What you did today really resonated with me. I didn't realize that you did that. I want that in my piece. Can you help me? Can we collaborate on this?"

These cool little collaborations naturally and organically emerge, or people just bring wild talents, and suddenly, you figure out that this person can play a kazoo in this piece. 

 

What impact did the pandemic have on the company?

It was tough. We had decided to do the open residency for the first time that year. We'd chosen four really incredible artists, but obviously, they couldn't come to Sicily that year. 

What was really miraculous was they all waited the two years that it took for us to finally be able to travel again. And so they came in 2022, which was amazing.

It was a tough year. I had been living in London up until that year. In February, I found out that we'd gotten an Arts Council England grant to do a research and development period on a show we'd been creating called the Hades & Persephone Project.

We'd gotten this amazing grant, and I had these incredible actors ready to do it. Then, the pandemic shut the whole thing down. So, I got to go back to London in 2021, and we were able to use those grant funds to do the project.

One of the really cool things that happened during the pandemic was we created an audiobook. We took the Colapesce story we created in 2016 and turned it into an audio story. We had music, and we did all the sound effects.

During the pandemic, many people said, "Oh, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a pandemic." But I had this feeling: We have to take care of ourselves first. We can't just be creative when things are hard just because we've suddenly got time and space to do it. So, it was also important to put the brakes on and make sure that everybody was taken care of first and foremost. 

 

How has your work bridged cultural gaps?

One of the things I am most excited about is seeing some of the folks here who really want to get involved. For example, there's this wonderful young woman who doesn't live in Pezzolo, but her grandfather, Stephano, does. Her name is Giada. Giada speaks beautiful English. She's going to go to school for translation. 

She's 18 years old but is so put together, articulate, and smart. She has come in and done translations, gotten involved with the performances, and taken on many directing roles over the years. It's been cool to see her develop this way. 

Her grandfather, Stefano, was an incredible artist. He works with wood. He used to work a lot with steel, but he'll find beautiful pieces of twisted olive wood, and they'll turn into an octopus lamp or something incredible like that. A lot of people in Pezzolo didn't know that he had this incredible museum of his work in his house. And so he started featuring his stuff and putting it out there during the festival.

The two of them are a really great example for me. Every year, somebody has this incredible connection with Stefano, where they wind up at his house every day working in his shop, having coffee with him, helping with a piece, and putting his stuff on display. It's this wonderful interaction. 

I feel like these micro-interactions happen all over the village when we're doing this residency.  

 

How else have you involved the community in your shows?

Whatever we do has to involve the community in some way. And so when I'm looking for artists, I'm looking for artists who have some sort of a community focus to their work. I tell them that it can be part of the process, especially for the open residency where they're creating their own pieces. It could be part of the final piece of what you perform, but in some way, you have to engage with this community and have them be a part of what you're doing, which isn't always easy. Sometimes, people just want to sit back and be audience members. 

So it's about finding people like Giada and Stefano who really want to be up on the stage, in the audience, and in the crowds. Finding ways for people who don't often go to museums or theaters to feel like they can engage is such an interesting artistic challenge.

Sometimes, it can be a really low-stakes engagement. Instead of sitting back, you'll be walking around and following the narrator. Last year, the piece that we built went through the whole village. It took you through a tunnel, and there were calls and responses to it and things like that. Some of those can be really low-stakes ways to engage, and some can be really high-engagement. 

We had this one incredible artist, Heloise Wilson, who is just so phenomenal. She did this whole storytelling workshop. With the stories told through that workshop, she created these beautiful little posters that were put up around town with snippets of the stories, photos, and images. Then, she created a chorale piece that members of the community performed. She crafted this beautiful Greek chorale poem using their words, and they performed it as part of the festival. They did an amazing job, and she guided and facilitated that.

 

Your pieces tap into folklore and mythology. Tell us about a particularly inspiring one.

My brain immediately goes to the story of Mata & Grifone, the last full theater piece we created last year. We created this piece based on the Hades & Persephone Project. The story of Hades and Persephone is the most well-known outside of Sicily, but here in Messina, Mata and Grifone is the best known.

It's the story of these two giants. Mata is a Sicilian princess, and she's white. Grifone is a Moorish conqueror, and he's black. This is set during the time when Sicily was an Arab Emirate and had been conquered by North African Islamic conquerors. And so the two of them see one another and fall in love. Her father objects, and he locks her away in a tower.

Her father would only accept it if Grifone converted to Christianity, which he did for them to be married. And so the two of them become the rulers of Messina.

They're now the pagan deities of Messina.  Every summer during Ferragosto, these massive paper mâché statues of these two giants parade through the streets.

They're known as the ancestors of all Messina people because we're all said to have descended from them. They had so many kids together. I love this story so much, first of all, because it's the story of this interracial couple on an island where I think xenophobia and racism are quite present today.

Also, Sicily itself has an incredible multicultural background. It was Arab for 200 years. It's been Spanish, French, Greek, and everything in between. There are so many cultures. It's a continent and island, and that's where we come from.

At a time where now we're facing these really harsh lines drawn, politically, especially for people who are refugees or who are emigrating from the African continent into Europe through Sicily. Seeing the really beautiful presence of these two lovers, who are the ancestors of all Sicilians, reminds us that this is where we all come from. 

There's a harshness to it, a difficulty to it. Grifone had to give up a part of his cultural identity and religion to be with this person. So it's complex, it's nuanced, and it's celebrated throughout Messina.  

 

How do you ensure your productions remain authentic and respectful to other cultures?

It's always about talking to people authentically and respectfully. If it's always rooted in a truly excellent intention, "I believe that your story is worth telling, and it's worth telling with honesty, respect, and integrity."

You're always approaching it with that lens. I'm part of this group called ITDS (Indie Theatres Dismantling Supremacy). We're this cohort of artistic directors of small independent theaters that came together in 2020 to talk about how our organizations exist in a world where there's white supremacy, and there's oppression. There are all of these systematic things that we all have to deal with, and we all have to consider how they show up in the worlds where we're working. 

Something about showing care and kindness to the people you're around is so simple. When you take that care and kindness and implement it into the systems you're building—because we're all building systems—to function or survive and be sustainable, we have to systematize certain things. But when that kindness and that care are embedded in you, it's a part of what you do. 

I think we've never approached it without the angle of, "We do this because we love these people, and we're going to listen to these people and listen to these stories, and we want to involve you and not force you into being involved if that's not what you want." We always bring it back to kindness, which has been a much more powerful driver than I think I would've ever thought it was.

 

What do you hope audiences take away?

There are different parts of an audience. There's the local audience, the Pezzolo people. And I think what I really want them to leave with is, "I live in a place that is capable of producing great art and great beauty."

Every day can be activated, brought to life, and turned into something beautiful if you just apply a creative lens to it. And the place where I live is capable of being that spark and being activated into that beauty. 

 

 

 

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Ksenia Molostvova lives between two churches, where she sees plenty of weddings each month. However, the founder of Sicilian Wedding Lab doesn't typically plan Sicilian weddings for Sicilians. Instead, she caters to those individuals who might have a connection with Sicily, whether it's through heritage or simply because the island is a favorite destination.

 

"The world is discovering Sicily," she says. "People always want to search for authentic destinations. And Sicily can offer a lot."

Ksenia shared more about her Palermo-based business and background, the differences between Sicilian weddings and Sicilian destination weddings, the most popular wedding destination, her favorite wedding sites, and her wedding planning goal.  

 

What's your background?

I'm from Moscow, and I've been living in Italy since I started coming here in 2006 because I was responsible for Italy as a journalist. I met my future husband, and we started dating, flying back and forth for six years. And then, I moved to Sicily in 2012. In a couple of years, I left my news department and stopped working for Russian TV channels. But I still create documentaries for different European YouTube channels. So I've continued this work as a producer, but I also started doing weddings in 2015, so now I can say I've become a "wedding producer!"  

 

How did you get started?

First, I had friends say, "Organize our wedding in Sicily." I said, "I'm not a wedding planner. I'm a producer." They said, "Well, if you are a producer, you can do anything."

So I did one wedding, a second, and a third. I was focused more on small weddings, up to 50 people. And then, at some point in 2021, there was a royal wedding in Sicily, and it came to me in a strange way. I knew the man who was organizing this wedding. The bride was the daughter of an earl from Scotland, and the groom was the Spanish prince, the direct descendant of the last Bourbon King of Sicily. And this man I knew asked me to be an interpreter here. So, we started doing this wedding together. I was just his local assistant. But then, he had to quit the planning at some point due to health issues, and I was left alone with this wedding. And it wasn't just a normal wedding, it was a Royal Wedding!  I had a chance to say no to that. But then, after some reflection, I said, "Well, if it came to me for some reason, I have to go forward."

I formed my team. We did bring it to life. It was extremely challenging, but it worked. At that point, I understood that I may have to fully dedicate my time to weddings. 

 

 

Describe the differences between your weddings and typical Sicilian weddings.

I have to bring to life some ideas that are not real. A normal Sicilian wedding doesn't look like a Sicilian wedding for American or Australian clients. It could have more traditional elements than the modern Sicilian wedding; for example, the modern Sicilian wedding wouldn't have a folk band, some really Sicilian elements, or Sicilian food.

Food is extremely important for Sicilian weddings, but it must be something particular, not just simple traditional recipes. For example, you wouldn't serve the simple caponata at a Sicilian wedding. Whereas Americans look for traditional Sicilian recipes and venues like Tonnara di Scopello, an old tuna fishery. It's just like a shed where you keep boats and fishing nets. But the place itself is spectacular. And it has become really popular and expensive just because of foreign weddings.

Local Sicilians would never, ever, ever go to a place like that for a wedding. They need a palace, something chic, some really fancy-looking venue. They don't see the beauty in some rustic place.

 

What goes into one of your weddings?

We work with many local artisans who make handmade ceramics for guest favors and local bands that perform and feel that people seek them out. There is plenty of stuff that you can give to your guests, like local honey, jams, or other typical local products or objects. 

 

What services do you offer to wedding couples?

Each couple is different, so I'm against packages. I offer a full planning service because it's important to me. A destination wedding is about the destination. So it's not just about the couple and the family.

 

Normally, it's at least a two- or a three-day wedding because most couples and their parents come here for a long period. We organize a lot of experiences before and after the wedding. It can be a beach day, a wine tasting, or a pizza party. It can be a tour of some beautiful place like an archeological site. It's always about an experience because showing a destination is important. So, everything that Sicily can offer, including beaches, wine, and nice food. It's a holiday, and it's also a holiday that will never ever be repeated in their life because all their friends come here. This is something I like to focus on all the time. It's not just the wedding, it's the experience.

 

What are the most popular Sicilian wedding destinations?

Taormina is probably one of the most popular destinations because it has been a tourist destination for a long time. When tourism began to develop in Sicily in the 19th century, Taormina had hotels and infrastructure, and it was easy to reach.

 

Maybe the couples Google "Weddings in Sicily," and Taormina is what they see at the top of the search. Personally, I do think Taormina is a beautiful place, but logistically, it's quite complicated to have an event there.

 

On top of the town, the mountain is all pedestrian. It's really complicated with the delivery of all the stuff, the transportation—well, everything. And Taormina is not really a beach destination. Many people get confused because they see that Taormina is on the coastline. You do have beaches there, but, at the same time, if you are staying on the beach, you are not staying in the town. So, you have to take a taxi, which takes time and is expensive. And the other way around, if you're staying in the town, you are not staying at the beach. Also, Taormina is close to Mount Etna, so the beaches have gray sands or pebbles, and the sun hides behind the mountains, so you cannot enjoy long sunsets on the beach.

 

What is your favorite Sicilian wedding destination?

Scopello is really picturesque. And the coastline from Castellammare del Golfo to San Vito lo Capo and until Trapani is probably the most beautiful.

 

The Province of Trapani boasts white, sandy beaches and beautiful rocks. The color of the water there is turquoise, and the sunsets are really stunning! This part of Sicily is still quite authentic, as mass tourism has never reached it, which is why I love it so much.

 

What is your goal for weddings you plan in Sicily?

The goal, obviously, is to satisfy, to find out what each couple wants and their values, why they chose a destination wedding, and why they chose Sicily. So, what would they like to find in Sicily, and what would they want to share with their guests about Sicily?

 

In September, I had a wedding for a Canadian couple with Italian origins, not Sicilian. They spent two weeks here, traveling all over the island with all their friends. I was so pleased to get their review and see how much they enjoyed the time they spent here. They had so many activities in these two weeks. So, I think that the goal was reached. It wasn't about the wedding, but it was about the experience. 

 

 

 

  

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My Sicilian grandmother always tossed a bay leaf or two into her tomato sauce, and my mother does as well. But lately, I've found myself forgetting to add the bay leaf and wondering what purpose it really serves. 

So, I was intrigued to find an article in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science that addressed this very question. 

I reached out to its author, Charles Spence, an experimental psychology professor at Oxford University and the author of Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, to discuss bay leaves, why they spark such debate, and how his own bay leaf use has changed since his research.

 

  

Why did you choose to research bay leaves?

It was initially a debate with my brother, who's a chef in Oxford, about what they do or what they add. I've got other papers on cinnamon and coriander. So, I am interested in the historical introduction and disappearance of different herbs and spices around the world over the decades, centuries, and millennia. What, exactly, are they doing in our food? 

I've got a verdant bay tree just outside the window here, so I've got thousands of bay leaves, but for others, they can be extra expensive to purchase. My brother is convinced bay leaves add something, and I am, too. I always stick them in whatever I'm cooking. But what, exactly, does it add? 

It's a curious question. It got me searching through the literature, and that brought up the fact that many chefs and others have a big debate about whether bay leaves have a taste/flavor or not. It's interesting to have an ingredient that could be reasonably expensive and for which lots of people don't know why they're using it. 

 

Tell us about the work you do.

As a psychologist, I've always been interested in the senses and how they interact with and apply to the real world. For the first 15 years, I mostly worked on technology, talking window screens, mobile phones, car warning signals, and that kind of stuff. Then, Unilever funded me to help with their fruit teas. I'd never done anything on flavor at all, but they were paying the bill, so I said, "Okay, I'll do some experiments on that."

Suddenly, it got interesting. Flavors are probably the most multisensory thing we experience. They engage all our senses, but flavor is something that psychologists typically don't study. 

Here in Oxford, we'd do experiments on how the senses contribute to flavor and how we can make things sweeter by coloring them pink or red or adding certain scents. But my experience was that the food company chefs could never make anything very exciting from the science.

Then, I was introduced to the world's top chef, Heston Blumenthal, and suddenly started doing experiments around the "sounds of the sea," which thereafter led to one of his most famous dishes. Diners wear headphones, and they hear the sounds of the sea while they eat sashimi plated to look like the seashore.

That got me more work in food, working with chefs, mixologists, and baristas rather than food companies. These latter creatives turned out to be very interested in trying to apply science and psychology to food as a multisensory object, always doing so in ways that ask how people today perceive these things and what they mean. 

Over the years, I've had a few interdisciplinary grants with anthropologists, historians, art historians, philosophers, and a wide range of disciplines. And I guess through some of those workshops, which have been on other things like what aesthetics is, I keep coming up against the anthropologists who say, "You psychologists. When you try to understand sensation or flavor, you don't seem to understand the importance of culture and history."

I've come around to starting to be interested not just in how we perceive things but also in how we have perceived things in the past. Tracing the history of herbs, spices, and fruits allows me to do so. 

Maybe bay is not an expensive or luxurious spice in the same way that saffron is. It's a ubiquitous spice or herb in this part of the world. I'm curious about the history of flavor and psychological history, which lets me better understand how we perceive from a broader social, historical, and cultural perspective. 

 

What have you found interesting about the bay leaf?

Bay is the only herb I have encountered so far where some people say it tastes like nothing and don't know why they use it. That doesn't happen anywhere else, and this debate has even made it into the culinary and trade press; there's this debate going on about what bay is doing.

It could be that a third of people are unable to smell one of the chemical compounds, or it could be that it doesn't really have a perceptible flavor. It just does something to the flavor of everything else. It's like a flavor enhancer. I'm interested in other things like kokumi, the next thing after umami, or monosodium glutamate (MSG). Kokumi has no taste when you add it to food. But when it's added to things that have umami (e.g., mushrooms and Parmesan), it amplifies the other taste sensations. 

Maybe bay leaves are doing that. So, is this difference genetic in what we can smell? Some people can, some can't. What the bay leaf does for everything else is interesting. 

Maybe some people who say it doesn't do anything are focusing on what it smells like itself. They think it doesn't smell like anything; therefore, they think it does nothing. Others say, "I always add it to my cooking because of the end result and total flavor." 

It may also depend on where you get your bay from, what part of the season it was grown in, whether it's California Bay or Laurel, how it's been stored, and whether it's been frozen, dried, or fresh.

What's also interesting about bay to me is the question of whether dry or fresh leaves are better. For most things, you think fresh is better than dried. And yet various people say, "No, dried bay is better than fresh."

So, which is right? How do you answer that when the thing itself doesn't taste very good? 

I've been going to my tree here, picking them, and putting them in boiling water for a while, which, again, may not be the right thing to do. Maybe it needs fat to release all of what it can contribute to a dish.

I also have been putting them in a cup of bay leaf tea and then trying to almost do the blind taste test on myself with a cup of hot water that has bay leaves steeped in it and another one that's just hot water. Can I discriminate?  I haven't done the official taste test because it's a bit too messy and time-consuming. But yeah, there is something there, a curious sensation.

 

How did your bay leaf use change as you were researching the topic?

Well, I never had bay leaf tea before, and then, through the research, I now think differently about picking them. Before, I just picked them whenever the bowl of dried ones ran out, and now I think there's no point in doing that just yet; I should wait till the end of the year.

I switch between the dried and the fresh, trying to decide which is better. Before writing the article, I probably would've only used the dried ones. But now I'm thinking back and forth. They say it makes a difference.  

 

What do you hope people will take away from your bay leaf research?

My hope is that people will come away thinking, "Well, yeah, now that you mention it, I do wonder why I do that. Why do we add our herbs and spices to our food?"

I think there's a whole world that's not really been studied much. A few food historians are doing research on spices, but not anything from the psychology or sensory angle. Growing awareness and appreciation, perhaps particularly in the case of herbs, might be advantageous moving forward. These sorts of herbs can have interesting effects on taste and flavor and also maybe interesting impacts on our ability to absorb other nutrients.

Although I'm not sure bay necessarily serves that function, it is undoubtedly a culinary curiosity that I think gets people interested and thinking this is much more fascinating.  

 

 

 

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Growing up, we never had jarred pasta. My mother was known for her sauce, something she'd mastered by watching her mother and grandmother. In less than half an hour, she'd whip up a simple marinara that was rich in flavor, thanks to a couple of cloves of garlic, a bay leaf, a pinch of nutmeg, and another pinch of sugar. She's always maintained that one doesn't need to sweat over the stove for hours. 

 

Jersey Girl Cooks blogger Lisa Grant agrees. Her "25-Minute Easy Marinara Sauce" doesn't require fancy ingredients or cooking techniques. She simply sautées garlic in olive oil before pouring in a large can of crushed tomatoes, a few herbs and spices, and a pinch of sugar. 

Lisa shared her background, her childhood association with tomato sauce, her favorite way to enhance marinara sauce flavor, why making your own pasta sauce is better, and her favorite ways to enjoy red sauces.

 

 

What is your background as a cook?

I am a home cook and have loved cooking since I was 10 years old. I became a blogger over 15 years ago and have since written two beginner cookbooks: The Super Easy Cookbook for Beginners and The 5-Ingredient Dutch Oven Cookbook. I love helping people cook easy meals!

 

Do you have Italian family?

My dad was from an island in Croatia (Susak) that once belonged to Italy, so the cooking is very Italian-influenced. On my mom's side, some of the family was from northern Italy, including Trieste. 

 

What memories do you associate with tomato sauce?

We typically had Sunday dinner, which included a huge bowl of pasta with "gravy." This was a red sauce with various meats in it. 

 

Can you share any tips for enhancing the flavor of the sauce?

I love using fresh-grown New Jersey crushed tomatoes that I keep in my freezer, but I don't have them all year round, so a good brand of crushed tomatoes works well, especially during the winter months. 

 

Why should you make your own instead of buying a jar?

It is so much better, and you can regulate the salt and spices. 

 

How do you use this marinara sauce?

I love this sauce with any type of pasta, but it is also terrific as a dipping sauce for recipes like oven-fried zucchini. 

 

What do you hope people take away from your recipes? 

You can cook good food at home without stress. I love socializing at the dinner table!

 

>>Get Lisa's 25-minute Easy Marinara Sauce recipe here!<<

 

 

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Maria Rapicavoli says she isn't a journalist, but her works of art tell a story about global events tied to Sicily, encouraging viewers to form their own opinions. She's covered issues ranging from the militarization of airspace and immigration to the mafia and the Second World War. Each piece offers arresting and interactive visuals to provoke thought and further conversation. 

One of Maria's many evocative pieces stands out to me for its subject matter: Crooked Incline. For this piece, Maria created porcelain geometric shapes resembling bombs dropped by the Allies during World War II. The work serves as a haunting reminder of the damage wrought on Palermo, particularly by the Americans, who escalated bombing frequency and intensity in 1943. 

Maria, who was born in a town on Mount Etna, has lived in New York for 13 years. She's currently doing an artistic residency program in Palermo organized by Istituto Svizzero.

 

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Maria, who shared her art inspiration and what went into the making of Crooked Incline. 

 

 

What influence does your Sicilian heritage have on your art?

I use Sicily as a starting point for all my projects. I've been doing a lot of projects related to structures of power, economic issues, and socio-political issues. I am constantly taking inspiration from Sicily. Starting from a personal and familiar point of view, I try to make works that have a wider perspective. 

 

What inspired Crooked Incline?

I was invited to have a show in an old Palazzo in Palermo as part of a project called Cassata Drone during Manifesta 12, an itinerant international art exhibition that in 2018 took place in Sicily. I've already done projects about how the sky is controlled and the militarization of the sky above Sicily—even above New York. I've always been interested in the common idea that the sky is open and accessible to everybody, but it's not. There are borders similar to those that are geographical, but the difference is that the borders are often arbitrary in the sky. They're just lines drawn, not based on geographical borders but on what is below the sky. 

I was born in an area near military bases. Some of them are American bases and have existed since 1943 when the Allied forces arrived in Italy, first in Sicily. So, the militarized sky has always been part of my background. As a child, I remember hearing the roar of military planes, but I couldn't see them because they were super fast. However, this doesn't exist anymore because drones are very silent. 

 

While doing this project in Palermo, I was supposed to remake a site-specific installation called A Cielo Aperto, an artwork related to drone corridors. The idea was to recreate the airspace above Sicily. 

 

Because I usually spend one day or night in the place where I work on my installation, I asked the curator if I could sleep in the exhibition space. When I woke up in the morning, I realized something was wrong. I asked the owner of the building, and they told me that the palazzo was tilted because of a bomb that the Americans dropped in 1943 during an air raid. The building was damaged, but it wasn't destroyed. 

Based on that, I decided to change my project. Because my family has a background in construction, I was familiar with plumb lines, which were widely used to create perpendicular lines. 

 

I decided to make visible this damage related to 1943. I recreated plumb lines, but I used porcelain instead of metal. I made a hundred plumb lines and installed them in the space. Of course, the plumb lines were falling straight, but because the room was tilted, there was a sense of disorientation, so I made the plumb lines a little bit bigger, and they looked a little bit more like missiles or bombs. They looked like they were ready to explode or were about to be dropped.

 

Why did you use handmade white porcelain elements?

So, porcelain is fragile, the opposite of metal and stainless steel. I was also playing with the contradiction that they would break and could not damage anything. They would be damaged if dropped, so it's the opposite of real bombs or missiles. 

I've been using porcelain a lot in my practice. I usually use white porcelain and don't decorate it. I wanted to create this contrast because a bomb is usually never white.

 

How do you incorporate historical narratives into your works?

I research a lot, and then I get inspired by one element that strikes me as urgent. I work on that. And usually, it's always about making visible something that otherwise is not really visible. 

 

What is the impact of power structures on your work?

It's all based on a critique and then an analysis of the strongly connected structures. Economic, military, and political structures are all part of the same system. I like to talk about them because I like to talk about the daily consequences of these structures and what affects our lives.

 

Tell us about your current project.

I am working on a piece related to a criminal trial against the Sicilian Mafia, the Maxi Trial (Maxiprocesso), that took place almost 40 years ago in Italy. I have already documented all the folders of the Maxiprocesso. What I'm doing here now is to research the courthouse designed and built specifically to host the trial. I don't know the outcome yet because I just started my research in Palermo as part of the residency Palermo Calling: Art & Science together with architect Fabrizio Furiassi, who is also researching the courthouse. 

 

What do you hope viewers of your art take away?

I don't want to force anyone to share my view. Every time I make a work, I have an urge to bring up something that bothers me or is relevant to make visible. But that doesn't mean that the viewers have the same approach as I do. 

When I make a work, I like that the viewer will have their own interpretation and view. I would like them to have a broader view. For example, I made a video (The Other: A Familiar Story) about the story of a woman from my family who was a victim of domestic violence and was forced to move to the United States. This is a specific story that belongs to my family, but I tried to make it more universal and ensure that the viewer could appropriate it. It could be any woman anywhere in the world. And that's the approach I have with every project I make.

 

 

 

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Wheat first arrived in Sicily around the 3rd millennium B.C. Due to its ideal cultivation conditions, the region became known as the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

 

By 2021, the island had become Italy's second-largest durum wheat-producing region, with 343,500 hectares under cultivation and a production of 931,800 tons.

 

You may have seen durum on the back of a box of pasta. It's frequently coarsely ground into semolina, a common ingredient in Sicilian bread and pasta. 

 

One of the more popular semolina pastas is cavatelli, also known as cavateddi. This Sicilian version of gnocchi is served with plain red or meaty sauce. I recently caught up with private chef and cooking instructor Antonella La Macchia to learn more about this specialty and what differentiates her cavatelli recipe from typical gnocchi. 

 

 

What is your background?

I was born in Catania, Sicily, and live in Florence, Tuscany. I moved here 23 years ago because I married a Florentine, and I have been teaching cooking classes in Florence for more than 10 years now. 

What is the difference between cavatelli and gnocchi?

It's funny. When people take the class, they usually talk about potatoes and gnocchi because they are the more traditional or famous.

 

If I talk with my mother, gnocchi are completely different. Our gnocchi in Sicily, cavatelli, are made with semolina and water. The dough is very chewy and has a nice consistency. Of course, the flavor is completely different because we have the semolina flour. Also, the sauce that they require is different. Most of the time, Sicilian gnocchi are served with meat sauce because they have this consistency and want a strong sauce.

 

The shape is different because when we make gnocchi, we use a tool called rigagnocchi. You use the board to make a little cavity that holds the sauce. That's the reason why they're called cavatelli.

 

Semolina pasta can also be a little bit trickier than regular pasta. The regular pasta, the pasta from the north—ravioli and tagliatelli—has the classic dough with flour and egg. When we talk about pasta from the south of Italy, from Puglia to Sicily, it's important to balance the right amount of water to obtain the right consistency. This shape is usually made by pushing the pasta on a wooden board with your hand or knife. If the consistency is not perfect, it won't be easy to have the shape of the pasta you want.  

 

Once you have a good dough, you can make the cavatelli with your hands or use the rigagnocchi. It is important to get the right shape because, of course, if this pasta is thicker, it can be pretty chewy.

What makes this recipe Sicilian?

When I teach about pasta, I always say that through the pasta, we can see the difference between the countries. You can see easily that this country was divided for many years, and the food from the north and the south is very different.  

 

When we talk about fresh pasta, the first difference that we can say is that most of the fresh pasta that we find in the north is made with white flour. What makes this pasta really Sicilian for me is the use of semolina and, of course, the sauce. We don't have butter and sage; ours is mostly red, so tomato-based.  

What do you hope the readers will take away from this recipe?

What I like, and I always talk about this during my class, is that at the end of the day, the most important thing is when a recipe becomes yours. It makes the food real and, in a certain way, eternal.

 

>>Get Antonella's Sicilian gnocchi recipe here!<<

 

 

 

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Pina and Rosemarie Sparacio showed up to our interview wearing red—like mother, like daughter. In their case, it's more like being a part of the same winning team. Since September 2021, the New York-based duo has amassed millions of views on TikTok. They also have more than 242,000 followers on Instagram and have a new and growing YouTube channel. 

"The most surprising thing has been walking in the street and someone stopping their car and saying, 'Oh my God! You're Pina's Kitchen!'" laughs filmmaker and content producer Rosemarie. 

"I feel so privileged, so honored to be recognized by them," says her mother, Pina, who came to the United States from Roccamena, Sicily, in 1970.  

The thrill ride started with a few simple, raw videos Rosemarie filmed of Pina cooking her favorite Sicilian specialties. And it just took off.

The three of us sat down to discuss more about how Pina's Kitchen got started, their favorite recipes, surprises, and their next steps.

 

 

Tell us more about how Pina's Kitchen began.

Rosemarie: I'm a filmmaker, so I'm always filming or wanting to come up with something to film or a story. I had this idea of a cooking show for a long time with my mom, but it was always too big in my head to put together. I was being very perfectionistic about it, so I forgot about it. And then, when COVID hit, I was just dancing on TikTok like everybody else was and having fun. I garnered a little bit of a following. 

I wasn't serious. I was working in film production. Then, one weekend, my mom was cooking something: caponata, a Sicilian dish. I was like, "I'm just going to record it for fun on TikTok." I didn't really think much of it. The way I recorded it was not very cinematically, just in the moment. And I posted a month later. It got 100,000 views. I was like, "That's something! Let's try it again. Maybe sometimes on TikTok, you get one hit, and then that's it."

So we tried it again, and the second video was a dish in the oven: baked ziti. It got 500,000 views. I said, "Welcome to Pina's Kitchen!" And that was the start of it. 

Then we did a third video—polpette di ricotta.

Pina: It's a very old recipe. When people in Sicily had no money to buy meat and make their Sunday dinner, they would come up with different ideas for something to serve with the sauce. So, if it was spring and a lot of people made ricotta, they'd make something with that ricotta. They used to make it in my town. It's got a lot of mint and sugar, plus breadcrumbs.

Rosemarie: You could imagine the controversy when she was throwing sugar into this ricotta thing, putting it in the sauce, and eating it with pasta. It got a million views, which was kind of its takeoff. And we just kept going with it. 

 

You draw your recipes from your family. Can you share any fond cooking memories?

Pina: My earliest memory is watching my mother cook.  My mother was a great cook. She had a knack for cooking; it tasted good, even if it was simple. 

I remember her making sausage and drying it for the winter, and I remember watching her making bread. 

When I was little in Sicily, my mother had a brick oven, and she would make a big batch of bread because bread was everything in those days. That was how you supported yourself: with bread, pasta, and vegetables. She would make all these breads, and then, in the end, she would always make pizza—not the American pizza you see: the sfincione on which my mother would put the tomatoes, sardines, cheese, and breadcrumbs on top. 

She would start in the morning; by the time she finished, it was night, and that would be what we had for dinner. I was very little because I could hardly reach the big table that she was working on. 

I also remember my grandma. She and my mother would sometimes bake a very big batch of bread together. Or she would get together with her sisters, and they'd make it together. They always did things together—even in America. They were very close. 

 

Pina and her mother in the kitchen

Did you two cook together?

Rosemarie: When I was younger, my mom worked, and my grandmother lived downstairs. I would go downstairs and stay all day with her, and she would make the pizza, cookies for Christmas, and rice balls. I was next to her, and I would kind of just watch, and I would try to help, too.

I know how to make homemade pasta, and I know how to make all the big stuff. I've observed a lot, but I feel like I've been surrounded by Italian women who can handle the kitchen. And they're like, "But you're busy!"

Pina: The short answer is yes, we cook together. When I broke my arm, she did Christmas by herself. Her father helped cut stuff, but she cooked. And I was telling her, "Okay, do this, and don't forget to do this." And she cooked the whole meal.

 

Rosemarie and her grandmother

What impact has filming your mother had on you?

Rosemarie: I used to take for granted how good a cook she was and how good my homemade meals were. I didn't realize how good they were until I started filming her, observing, watching, and paying attention. And then that caused me to be like, "I should be learning this." 

I realized she learned from my grandmother, and there's so much already lost and so much we're trying to hold onto. Now I'm like, "Okay, let me jump in and help you so I can learn."

Pina: Yeah, because my mother never really wrote anything down.

Rosemarie: So it's really all that she remembers from her mother and mother's mother. And there's already so much lost in that word-of-mouth.

 

Pina, which of your mother's dishes have you shared on social media?

Pina: My mother used to make stuffed artichokes, and we had a lot of views on that video. She used to make it plain, and sometimes, she would put them in the sauce. That was Sunday dinner. This comes from the old days when we didn't have any meat, so they had to come up with stuff.

You stuff the artichoke and dip it in the egg, fry that part so the stuffing doesn't come out, and then put it in the sauce. The sauce takes on the flavor of the artichoke, and it's so good!

We just made eggplant rollatini, according to her recipe. Here, they stuff them with ricotta. My mother used to stuff them with cheeses, cured meat, or whatever we had on hand. She would stuff them, roll them in the sauce, and bake them.

 

When I think of my grandmother, the famous ones are the fig cookies—cuccidati—for Christmas. We film that every year because it's such an important recipe. Many people don't even do it anymore because it's a lot of work.

 

I remember her every December making Christmas cookies, and everyone was helping. She'd probably make 10 pounds. 

Rosemarie: We have made 15 pounds of Christmas cookies all by hand, from the mixing and rolling to the cutting and filling.

Pina: It's a lot of work! That's why you only do it once a year.

 

What's been most exciting or rewarding so far on this journey?

Rosemarie: Probably the level of recognition when we go to events with the community of other food influencers that we've connected with. They've been so great. And then there are people who are fans, which is so weird to say that there are fans. I am still shocked!

We're technically filming just cooking videos, but it's more than that. People write us the most beautiful messages, like, "I lost my mom when I was 13 years old, and I remember she used to do all these things, and Pina's like my mom now." 

They also remember recipes that they forgot about and that their grandmother used to make, but now she's no longer alive. And they say, "Wow, I've been looking for this recipe for 20 years!" It makes you realize that food and recipes are a connection to history, family, and culture that can be easily lost. Recipes are stories. That's probably been the most rewarding. 

Pina: You can give that kind of memory back to somebody. At first, I was nervous because nobody really wants to be judged by people. I asked, "Why will people be interested in my recipes and what I cook?" But then, when people started to really be very positive and loving it and saying how much they appreciate it, I felt that I was giving them something, which made me feel good.

 

We're doing it because now we like the community that we have. We have all those people that are following us. They're good people, and I just love it. It's making friends. 

 

What are your plans for Pina's Kitchen's future?

Rosemarie: I hope that we can grow a bigger following. We're starting this YouTube channel, and I want to create a longer format show where we could really show the recipe so it feels more real, like you're stepping into the kitchen with us. Because you only get a minute and 30 seconds on Instagram versus a 20- or 30-minute YouTube video where you feel like you're in the kitchen and cooking with us. And then, hopefully, we can kind of expand to having different guests and having people showcase their recipes and share something with other influencers or maybe just other people in our lives who show what their family used to do—even past being Italian. 

I love promoting Sicilian and Italian culture, but I think what's more important is telling the story of immigrants and showcasing everyone's culture because we're all connected in that way, and recipes are very connected. Even Sicilian food is very connected to the Middle East, Greece, and Spain. So having it expanded past just Sicilian cuisine would be cool, too. 

We're slowly working on a cookbook, and it would be great to build the brand and reach more people that way.

 

Rosemarie, you've worked on music videos. Tell us about that.

Rosemarie: So, I started in film production, and I was on this track to be like, "Okay, I want to make connections. I want to be a director. I need to be in the industry." I focused on making a documentary and growing our page. Then, I stepped away from the industry completely, and I was just in social media, working for social media marketing and working on Pina's Kitchen. I started to feel kind of low, like, "I don't know. Maybe I'm making the wrong choice. I'm out of the industry. I'm not working on films anymore or big shows, and I'm losing those connections. Maybe it's not the right choice."

Then I got this random message from Tina Baione, who owns Keep Good Company Records with her husband, Matt. She was like, "We have this artist. We want to make this music video in Italy. I want you to direct it. We'll fly you out to Italy." 

From there, I'm now working on another music video, directing that music video. 

It's not the same as it used to be. Social media is the new push forward that creatives need to get their work out there. 

 

What do you hope people will take away from your videos?

Pina: For me, it would be positivity; they could connect with their memories and families. Maybe their loved ones have passed, but they can reconnect with them spiritually. That's a beautiful thing to do. And I want people to realize we're just normal people.

Rosemarie: I think that it's kind of like a call to action. I want people to honestly get back into the kitchen with their grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, or whoever it is. Because, like I said, there are so many stories and recipes, and you don't realize how fast time goes, and you could easily lose the things that keep you connected to your heritage, culture, and family. 

I think people won't regret getting into the kitchen with their loved ones and learning those family recipes. It's just a good time to spend with your family. So I hope it inspires people to be closer to their family and to sit down for dinner together.

Pina: You're going to build so many memories just being together, sitting around the table, even if you don't say anything, and if you just eat. It's that energy of togetherness and love that vibrates around the table from your family. That is memory. It's important. 

 

 

 

 

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Dance is yet another medium to paint, sculpt, and transform spaces, says Sicilian-born choreographer Nunzio Impellizzeri. The former visual artist founded Nunzio Impellizzeri Dance Company in 2014 with a mission of offering audiences unique perspectives and experiences as well as a way to dissect and question social behavior.

 

The company's work has been internationally recognized, with performances in theaters and at international festivals in Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Chile, Spain, and North and Central America.

 

They're currently gearing up for the November 20 premiere of PINK CARPET, which explores the boundaries between reality and imagination. The piece coincides with the company's tenth-anniversary celebration.

 

I recently caught up with Nunzio to learn more about his journey to choreography and the company's productions.

 

 

Where do you live, and where are you and your family from?

I live in Zurich, Switzerland, but my roots are in Acireale, a baroque city in Sicily, where my family still lives. This keeps me very much connected to my land and its culture. I left Italy in 2003 and traveled around Europe for my dance career. In 2008, I moved to Switzerland, where, later, in 2014, I founded the Nunzio Impellizzeri Dance Company. Looking at today, Zurich is the place where I've lived the longest.

 

Can you tell us about your journey into the world of dance and choreography?

My journey started in the visual arts. I studied art history, sculpture, and costume design, but I always felt something was missing. It wasn't until I stumbled into a rehearsal and observed a choreographer working that I felt that "click"—suddenly, I knew that movement was the language I was searching for. Dance gave me a way to sculpt space with the body, to paint with motion. It opened up possibilities that static art forms couldn't.

 

In 2008, an injury—the breaking of my knee during a performance—became a turning point. That moment was pivotal because it forced me to reflect on what I really wanted. It was a hard period, but in the midst of that challenge, I saw an opportunity to pursue my dream of choreography. In 2009, I was selected for the SIWIC platform for young choreographers, and that was the confirmation I needed. By 2014, I had founded the Nunzio Impellizzeri Dance Company to explore the infinite relationship between the body and space and create a dialogue that connects us all through movement.

 

Our company now works closely with internationally renowned dancers and collaborators, and we've had the privilege of performing at theaters and festivals around the world—from Switzerland and Germany to Chile and North America. What I'm most proud of is the way our work resonates with audiences, offering them a new perspective on dance and movement.

 

How has your background in visual arts influenced your approach to choreography and dance?

Visual arts is the foundation of how I think about dance. I don't just see movement; I see structure, space, and texture. For me, choreography is like architecture in motion. The body sculpts the space it moves through, and that interaction creates a dialogue not just with the audience but with the air, the light, and the ground. Every piece I create is designed with that in mind. Lighting, set design, and costumes aren't just accessories—they're extensions of the movement itself. I often design the costumes because they're integral to the concept of the creation.

 

The body is a living canvas, constantly generating energy. That energy moves beyond the physical; it moves the soul and creates connections. Dance allows me to see beyond what is in front of me. It keeps me connected to life in a visceral way, and it shapes how I perceive others and how I relate to the world.

 

Your works often reflect social phenomena. Tell us how you choose the themes for your productions.

My inspiration often comes from everyday life—things we see but don't necessarily pay attention to. Sometimes, it's something I've ignored for a while, and then it suddenly captures my interest, almost obsessively. From there, I dig into it—researching through lectures, films, art, philosophy, mythology—until I form the framework for the piece.

 

The themes I choose often come from observing human behavior in social contexts. Dance is such a powerful way to explore identity, silence, and connection—things that deeply resonate with our current times. I believe dance can move not only the body but the mind and soul. It challenges people to reflect on the world around them and to question and see things differently. My goal is to create works that spark dialogue and inspire reflection.

 

How do you integrate elements like set design, lighting, and costumes into your choreography?

These elements are not separate from the movement; they're intertwined. The body moves, it stirs the air, it transforms the space. Set design, lighting, and costumes amplify these dynamics. For me, it's about creating a holistic experience where everything works together to heighten the audience's perception.

 

Much like an architect designs a building to interact with its surroundings, I design my sets and lighting to interact with the dancers' movements. Costumes, too, play a key role—they're not just what the dancers wear but a part of how they move and inhabit the space.

 

Tell us about more PINK CARPET.

This piece is very personal to me. It delves into the boundary between reality and imagination, inspired by my mother's experience with Alzheimer's. The carpet itself becomes a symbol—a bridge between the tangible and the intangible. It's a deeply emotional journey, both for me and, I hope, for the audience.

 

What else is on the horizon?

2024 has been very intense with many projects. I recently finished the creation of CIRCOLANDO as a guest choreographer for a Swiss dance company, and now I'm also looking forward to FLAM.ME.UM, premiering in Germany at the Anhaltischen Theater Dessau in January 2025. This piece explores the evolving concept of identity, something I feel is more relevant than ever. Both pieces reflect my ongoing exploration of how personal experiences can resonate universally, connecting us through the unpredictable flow of life.

 

Can you share a memorable moment or experience from your career that has significantly impacted you?

Creating SCH.NEE in 2022 was a turning point for me. The challenge of working with silence and minimalism forced me to push my boundaries as a choreographer. The process required a level of focus and simplicity that I hadn't explored before. Seeing how deeply it resonated with the audience reaffirmed my belief in the power of art to connect people on an emotional level. It was a moment that opened up new dimensions for me as an artist.

 

What advice would you give to aspiring choreographers and dancers?

Stay curious, stay open. Dance is about more than just movement—it's about communication, about connecting with people on a deep level. Your body is a vessel for telling stories, sharing perspectives, and moving the souls of others. Embrace the challenges, and don't be afraid of failure—it's all part of the process.

 

I work with dancers who have strong technical skills, but I also value individuality. I want performers who can bring their own unique qualities to the stage. My advice is to stay true to yourself while remaining open to collaboration. Success, both as an artist and as a person, comes from that balance. Every creation is an opportunity to grow; each experience will shape you in ways you can't predict.

 

 

 

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When speaking about Sicilian cuisine, one frequently encounters the phrase cucina povera. Beyond its literal "poor cuisine" translation, this concept speaks to working with what you have. You can also apply it to life, says award-winning author, podcaster, former executive chef, and ambassador to Milazzo, Sicily, Carmela D'Amore.

As a Sicilian Australian, Carmela grew up in Melbourne's southeastern suburbs with a foot in two different cultures. It wasn't easy. In Carmela's Cucina Povera, she details her experience and her journey to finding herself through Sicilian cooking, along with a collection of 75 recipes.

 

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Carmela, who shared her background and connection to Sicily, the challenges she faced, and what cucina povera has meant to her.

 

 

What is your background?

I was born in Australia. My parents migrated to Australia just after World War II when there was the call.

My paternal side is from Falcone, about half an hour from where my mother lived, Milazzo, in the Messina Province. My husband is from Palermo, so I've got a taste of both East and West Sicily.

 

Why did your parents move to Australia?

It was just after World War II, so most Sicilian towns were very poor. They were bombed during the war. The economy was bad; they had no food, even though they were all fishermen or had other trades. 

My father came with five of his brothers and my grandparents. They were all fishermen. My grandfather was the president of the town's fisheries and wildlife organization. But still, they couldn't foresee a future, something for their children and grandchildren. And it was something that I think war does to you: You think, "How will we get through something like this as a family or as a community?" 

Australia was calling migrants, and there was work. One of my uncles was the first to test the waters, and he said, "There's plenty of us to work all around, and we can make a future." They weren't thinking of staying for too long. 

Sicily is in us. Even though I wasn't born there, I'm very much Sicilian. So, I can imagine what that felt like. Being in a place where you don't know anybody, you don't know the language, you don't know the culture, and yet all you want to do is work. So, you really don't know how you will face the challenges.

 

They worked and settled, and one of my uncles returned to live and stay in Sicily. The other four decided to stay. 

I've struggled myself to think, "Should I go back home and stay in Sicily?" When Sicily is somewhere in your DNA, I think you are always thinking, "Where do I settle?" 

 

What challenges did you face as a Sicilian Australian?

It was tough. It was probably one of the toughest times and a time of shaping and molding. There was already a culture in the southeast suburbs of Australia. So, any new people coming in weren't easily accepted. You had to earn your way in. 

It was nothing like today, someone who doesn't fit in, we call "unique," whereas, in those days, you had to fit in with the crowd, or otherwise, you were out of it. So that causes a split in your personality, where you are one thing at home and one thing in another. I think many children today are finding that even in the cyber world that we live in, in social media, there is a need for acceptance.

 

What does cucina povera mean generally, and what does it mean to you?

Cucina povera is the staple diet, working with what you have and within the seasons where you live. Cucina povera has different shades in every region of Italy. In Sicily, we have nine provinces with nine different dialects. So, there are nine staple recipes. If you have, for example, a recipe that's tomato-based with fennel, in a different province of Sicily, it could be with wild asparagus or with wild rappi, which are rapini greens, depending on which season. It's all about preserving and utilizing your ingredients with the seasons. It's making the best of seasonal ingredients and working with fewer ingredients. 

 

I called my book Carmela's Cucina Povera because my identity is in cucina povera. It is in my DNA; it is who I am. I've been in hospitality for 50 years and an executive chef for over 45 years. I've just retired, but it still is in everything that I do.

 

People use all these different ingredients to make something delicious, but cooking is a way of expressing love. My grandparents, my mother, and all that generation never told us they loved us. They expressed it through food. Cucina povera came through them and gave me a sense of belonging, being, and knowing who I am. 

 

You're a storyteller. Tell us about a classic Sicilian dish.

What I will share is a story that I think will resonate with many people. It starts in the 1800s when we had Queen Maria Carolina and King Ferdinando of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Our queen had French chefs, so her French chefs went out and got a wild bird, called beccafico, in the region of Palermo. You can imagine all these French chefs and the contadini, the farmers that are coming in, and the women that are helping them. They're cooking and stuffing the beccafico, and they put the tail up. (The beccafico looks a bit like a robin, so it's got a beautiful tail.)

They cooked it with all the spices: saffron, lemon, and bay leaves. Then, they gave it to the queen. 

The contadini went out and talked to one another. They could not eat that because those wild birds cost a lot of money. But they did have an abundance of sardines coming from the Tyrrhenian Sea. So they decided to make a replica and create it with sardines. Today, sarde a beccafico is world-renowned.

In my mother's town, they make it with anchovies because they don't have the sardines. When Mum made the dish, she would tell me the story of how her grandmother and her grandmother's grandmother made it. Those stories become part of your life.

 

How do you hope your book and cooking will impact others?

I hope my book inspires many people. I'm 65, and I overcame these challenges 55 years ago. So, it's about the resilience of the human spirit.

 

If you really want to change and get better in anything you do, you can always do better. The sun always shines in life. There are always storms and difficulties, but you can realize that you can grow from them. Instead of being a victim, say, "How can I learn from this? What can I learn from this? How can I shape myself and be a better person from this?" 

This is what I found while writing this book. It was to help people if they've had challenges and maybe through the cracks of the pages and the recipes to find more love and concentrate on the love, not the challenges. Because we all go through challenges. We never stop going through challenges in life, but it's where we decide to focus ourselves on what's important.

I'm sure everyone has recipes from their grandmothers. Take them, put them together, and make a little book. You don't have to publish it, but you can create something for other generations to find. I'm sure that in generations to come, someone in the family will say, "I wonder where that recipe comes from." 

We live in a world that is becoming very isolated. I don't come from that world. I come from a world where family and community are the essence of our lives. So, writing this book was important to me because I wanted to embalm the recipes, the people, and the sacrifices they made for their families. It was to honor them because who will remember them if I'm not to talk about them?  

 

>>Get Carmela's Cucina Povera here!<<

 

 

 

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When I was growing up, holiday gatherings with my Sicilian family meant that everyone brought a favorite dish to add to supper. In addition to giardiniera, bean and tomato salad, and pasta, we could always expect trays of Italian cookies. A favorite was the tetú, a dense, chewy chocolate cookie with a light glaze. 

 

Traditionally served on All Saints' Day in Sicily, these so-called "sweets of the dead" are a hit any time of the year. Our family includes them on Christmas cookie platters, and they frequently show up on Sicilian wedding cookie tables.

 

I was thrilled to find a recipe for this classic Italian cookie on Alexa Peduzzi's Fooduzzi.com. Alexa's recipe is inspired by her Nana's. Her twist? They are plant-based. 

 

Alexa and I discussed her background and the significance of the tetú (or, as Alexa says, "to to"). 

 

 

Tell me about your background. Where is your family from?

We're from all over the boot! One of my great-grandpas was from L'Aquila, my great-grandma was from Calabria, and I had some family up in Schignano on Lake Como. 

 

What does your heritage mean to you?

When I was a kid, I actually thought everyone was Italian because celebrating that part of my heritage happened all of the time and just seemed so normal and universal.

 

I'm really proud to be Italian, largely because we're a big food family. So being Italian (to me and my family) means black olives on our fingers at dinnertime, homemade pasta swirled into savory sauces, and simple desserts like these to tos.

Walking into an Italian grocery store (like Penn Mac in the Strip District in Pittsburgh) is always the best sensory experience for me; the scent of cheese, olives, and oils smells like my childhood!

 

What are to tos, and how/when are they typically served?

At their core, to tos are chocolate cookies with a simple vanilla icing. They're crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. I think there's a similar version of these cookies floating around called "meatball cookies," which is very accurate given their look before they're iced.

I'm from Pittsburgh, and the "wedding cookie table" is a very important part of our culture here. So, I saw them a lot at weddings growing up. Now, we mostly have them at Christmas, and I look forward to them every single year.

 

What is the significance of this recipe for you?

These are, hands down, my favorite cookies. 

Yes, they're delicious, but this recipe is one that I always consider "our family recipe." I've never really seen to tos anywhere else, but I always look forward to them at family gatherings. 

To tos are a simple chocolate cookie, but they're so much more than that. When I bite into them, I'm always taken back to the weddings I attended, the birthday get-togethers we had, and the visits with family that included these cookies.

They're as much a memory as they are a recipe.

 

How is this recipe different from the traditional version?

My Nana's version of this recipe is very similar to mine; mine uses vegan butter instead of regular butter. I tried to keep my version as close to the original as possible, considering the original has been my favorite treat for over 30 years! 

I'm not really sure that my Nana would have really understood my desire to make to tos plant-based, but making this recipe always makes me feel close to her, even with my tweaks. 

 

What do you hope at-home cooks and bakers will take away from your recipes?

I hope they're able to take one of my recipes and say, "Wow, this tastes great, and it's plant-based," rather than something like, "This tastes great for a plant-based recipe." 

I'm plant-based because I love animals, and I figure if I can satisfy my body with foods that don't require them, I should. 

I don't believe that there's one universal way of eating for every person, but I hope my recipes show people who are interested in plant-based options how simple, tasty, and uncomplicated they can be. 

 

What is your goal with Fooduzzi?

My goals have changed so much over the years! I started Fooduzzi almost 10 years ago, and when I first started, my goal was to take it full-time and work for myself.

That said, I soon realized that I'm a terrible boss for myself! So, it's very much a hobby and a hub where I share the recipes that I love at the moment. I'm not actively creating new recipes; I'm now sharing more of the recipes I've started making and truly love.

 

 

 

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Stop. Before you toss those jack-o-lantern scraps, consider saving them for a classic Sicilian pumpkin recipe. Believed to have originated in Palermo's popular Vucciria market, zucca in agrodolce (sweet and sour pumpkin) is a simple seasonal side dish that's sure to impress your most discerning supper guests. 

Blogger Sarah Kearney of White Almond Sicily has a lovely rendition of this flavorful pumpkin recipe. 

We chatted about her connection to Sicily, what inspired this dish, how to select the perfect pumpkin, and excellent zucca in agrodolce pairings. 

 

 

Tell me about your background. What is your connection to Sicily?

My parents were English, and I was born in the UK and grew up in an area in South London where there were a lot of Italian families. I went to school with many Italian-descendant children, and their birthday parties and invitations to their homes were always so fascinating and fun. I just loved sitting around the big family table eating pizza, pasta, and gelato, receiving lots of Italian warmth and hospitality. As I grew up, I knew that I wanted to visit Italy. Whilst other children my age were filling scrapbooks with photos of their favorite pop stars, I would be dragging my parents to our local travel agent to pick up travel brochures so I could cut out the photos of Italy and create my own Italy travel brochure. 

In 2005, I read a travel article in a fashion magazine about Taormina in Sicily. With my love of all things Italian and my husband's love of The Godfather movies, Sicily seemed like our kind of destination. So, after some research, I booked a weekend getaway to Taormina, and as soon as we saw the volcano Mount Etna from our airplane window, we knew we had already fallen in love with the island. Two years later, we bought our Sicilian home in Giardini Naxos, a seaside town nestled between the slopes of Etna, Taormina, and the Ionian Sea. 

 

How did your life change?

Coming from London, we are used to a fast-paced life, and over the past 17 years, we have learned to live life the way the Sicilians do. We learned to shop more locally at our local butchers, fish shops, and bakeries instead of using supermarkets and buying our fruit and vegetables from markets. Our taste buds changed with the fresh produce we were buying. 

We joined the evening passeggiata along our seafront with our dogs. In the beginning, we used to zoom along, overtaking the locals, but now we take our time like the Sicilians and maybe stop at a bar for an aperitif or coffee or sit on the seawall eating a gelato. A five-minute walk to the seafront can turn into an hour's walk with locals stopping to talk to us. In Sicily, we have made more friends than we ever have in London, and we have been adopted by many Sicilian families, who see us as one of them now. 

 

What inspired you to share the recipe for Sicilian sweet and sour pumpkin?

In 2014, I started to write my blog, "White Almond Sicily," and a friend from London came to stay with us. It was his first visit to the island, and we discussed how not many English people visit Sicily or know much about its beauty, food, and culture. Thereafter, I started writing about our new life in Sicily, the places we visited, and the people we met. I decided to also share recipes for popular Sicilian dishes that our new Sicilian friends had made for us. 

We now divide our time between London and Giardini Naxos, and my favorite seasons are spring and autumn when the island boasts an abundance of delicious fruit and vegetables. Autumn is a wonderful time of year to stay in Sicily with the grape harvest to make new wine, olives are harvested to make olive oil, trees are heavy with apples, prickly pears are in season, and there are food festivals that celebrate hazelnuts and walnuts. It is also the season for hearty meals like stews and risotto, with the most popular use being seasonal vegetables like pumpkins. 

You will see pumpkins at markets or on the roadside piled up by local farmers on their three-wheeled Ape vehicles, a bit like what you see with watermelons in summer. I love Halloween, so I always like to carve a pumpkin into a lantern, which gives me the perfect excuse to use the leftover flesh to make Sicilian sweet and sour pumpkin. 

 

Can you tell us more about the historical and cultural significance of this dish in Sicily?

Like a lot of vegetable dishes in Sicily, pumpkins were used in poor times to replace meat, and the pumpkin was used as an equivalent to liver. The dish is thought to have originated in Palermo in the famous Vucciria market. 

The rich aristocratic families would buy expensive liver, which would be fried and marinated in a sweet and sour way and then garnished with fresh mint. The poor could not afford the meat, so instead, they bought slices of pumpkin, which was cheap, and cooked it in the same way. 

The dish was known locally as o ficatu ri setti cannola (the liver of the seven taps), which refers to seven taps at the seven fountains located near the market where the street vendors selling the pumpkins would be daily. 

 

Do you have any personal stories associated with making or eating sweet and sour pumpkin?

We usually drive from London to Sicily with our dogs, and after three days of traveling, on our first day back home in our Sicilian house, our neighbors always visit bearing gifts, usually food. It is quite often that we will return home and have a delivery from what we call "the lemon fairy" and find a bag full of lemons hooked onto the door knob of our front door. Last year, a neighbor gave us a crate of persimmons, which I made into a delicious jam, and of course, he was given a jar, much to his delight. 

I can remember the father of one of our friends, who owns a big plot of land on Etna, arriving at our house with the biggest pumpkin I had ever seen. I could hardly carry it. Of course, I used it to carve a Halloween pumpkin and made a sweet and sour Pumpkin with the remains. There was so much that I was able to preserve it in empty jars to bring back home to London. 

I first tried this dish in a Sicilian restaurant in London, which was owned at the time by Enzo Oliveri, a well-known Sicilian chef from Palermo who now lives in the UK. It was Enzo who first told me how to make the dish in a similar way to another popular Sicilian dish, caponata. 

 

What tips do you have for selecting the best pumpkin for this recipe?

In Sicily, I always trust the vendor to choose the best pumpkin for me, but when in London, I always look for firm and smooth pumpkins that feel heavy for their size. Then, I know that there is plenty of flesh inside, and I avoid any pumpkins with cracks or bruises. We do not get pumpkins in London like those in Sicily; the ones in Sicily have a unique taste from being grown on fertile volcanic soil. 

 

How do you balance the sweet and sour flavors in this dish to achieve the perfect taste?

I use one tablespoon of sugar and two tablespoons of vinegar for the agrodolce (sweet and sour) taste. Sicilians tend to use white vinegar for this dish, but I like to use red wine vinegar. It gives the pumpkin a ruby-colored hue that makes the dish look a bit more exotic and gleam like Sicilian jewels. 

 

What other traditional Sicilian dishes would you suggest pairing with sweet and sour pumpkin?

In Sicily, this dish is usually regarded as a side dish or used as part of antipasti paired with other delicacies like caponata or melanzana parmigiana, together with local cured meats, cheeses, olives, and sun-dried tomatoes. As a side dish, we enjoy it with grilled meats or salsiccia, a Sicilian sausage made with coarsely chopped pork and usually containing fennel seeds. 

 

Can you share any common mistakes to avoid when preparing this dish?

It is all about getting the balance of the sweet and sour correct. Too much vinegar and the dish can become acidic. Too much sugar will make it hard to savor all the other flavors. Always leave the ingredients to mingle. You also need to add finely chopped fresh mint to garnish, as this brings out the flavors like a tastebud explosion in your mouth. Mint is a very typical ingredient in Sicilian cuisine from when the island was under Arab rule. 

 

What feedback have you received from readers who have tried this recipe?

This recipe is mostly viewed in autumn months, and most of my blog followers love that it is a lesser-known Sicilian dish to create and try. It is particularly great for children as all kids enjoy carving a Halloween pumpkin, so it is a great way to introduce this vegetable into their diet. 

 

What do you hope readers take away from your White Almond recipes?

My philosophy is to share the delights of Sicily through its culture and food using my own experience of living on and traveling around the island. I love that I can share recipes that I have learned locally with readers, who can then recreate dishes that they have tasted whilst in Sicily when they return to their own home kitchens. 

 

 >>Get Sarah's zucca in agrodolce recipe here!<<

 
Photo by Sarah Kearney

 

 

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Cooking Italian doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, some of the best dishes are among the simplest, featuring fresh, seasonal ingredients and key pantry staples. Unlike certain cuisines with complex sauces and overwhelming techniques, Italian cuisine is just as approachable as delicious.

That idea inspired Domenica Marchetti's latest cookbook, Everyday Italian, her eighth book on Italian cooking. Domenica, who has a ninth book on the way, has Abruzzese roots and a home in Abruzzo. The region formerly known as Abruzzi just so happens to have been part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, so it's no wonder many of our cooking traditions are shared. 

Domenica took time out of her busy schedule of writing, teaching, and leading culinary tours to chat with me about her influences, favorite techniques, must-have staples, and what she hopes readers will take away.

 

 

Tell us about your background.

I am based outside of Washington, D.C., in Northern Virginia. But we also have a little house in Abruzzo.

 

I grew up spending my summers in Italy on the Adriatic coast of Abruzzo. We had a beach house there for many years, and that's really where my love for Italy just grew. I was spending all that time there.

My mom was from Chieti; her mother was from the city of Atri, which is also in Abruzzo. Her dad was actually from Perugia in Umbria. Her family stayed in Abruzzo. 

On my dad's side, his parents came from Italy. His mother was from Isernia in the Molise region, which is attached to Abruzzo, and his dad was from Fondi in the Lazio region, which also includes Rome. But my main attachment is to Abruzzo because I spend a lot of time there. 

My mom was a wonderful cook. Like many Italians, she came to the U.S. in the 1950s. She was kind of in love with post-war America and ended up meeting my dad on a blind date in New York City and staying.

When she got married, she taught herself how to cook because she grew up in a family with a cook. So she didn't need to learn anything when she was growing up, but she loved cooking and was a fantastic home cook. So she's really my number-one kitchen muse.

 

How did you get into food writing?

My background is in journalism. I went to Columbia Journalism School and was a newspaper reporter before becoming a freelance writer. So, when my kids were little, I transitioned to freelance writing and reinvented myself as a food writer because that's what I was interested in doing. 

I used my connections in newspapers and magazines to start freelancing. And then that eventually led to books and cooking classes and doing book tours. More recently, with COVID, I started teaching online. I also do occasional culinary tours in Italy, which I've been doing for about a decade.

 

You've been to Sicily. Describe your experience.

It's been quite a few years, but I have been. We had family friends from Sicily who lived in Rome, but they also had places in Palermo and the coastal town of Mazara del Vallo.

It was before I was a full-time food writer. I remember walking through a citrus grove in this family's yard and just being completely enchanted.

I grew up in central New Jersey, and we didn't have those there. 

Of course, there are all the sweets and confections, the cannoli, the marzipan, the sweet ricotta, and the stuffed treats, and it's just such an incredibly flavorful cuisine.

I also remember the first time I had pasta with eggplant, which was basically pasta with tomato sauce and fried eggplant on top. I can't think of anything simpler, but it was absolutely delicious.

I was thinking about these assertive flavors in Sicilian cuisine: the fish, either dried or tinned or even fresh, the sardines, the anchovies, the swordfish, the tuna, and then the vegetables, the peppers, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, artichokes, winter squash. I mean, just all of the colors! 

One of my favorite cookbooks on the food of Sicily is this book by Anna Tasca Lanza, The Heart of Sicily. It came out in the early 1990s, and I was in Los Angeles, of all places. My husband and I were coming back from our honeymoon, and his mom lived in California. We were walking around L.A., and we happened upon this cookbook store. Anna Tasca Lanza was there signing copies of her book. This was before the cookbook craze, so nobody was there except those who worked in the bookstore. So we sat down, chatted with her, and bought this book.

Outside of my mom's cooking, this book has been such an inspiration to me because it really did introduce me to Sicilian cuisine. In the introduction, she talks about the many cultures that passed through Sicily: the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the French, and the Spanish.

She said all those conquerors and the wayfarers made an imprint on Sicilian cuisine without altering its basic character. The main element of Sicilian cooking has always been the sun. And that is so true if you think of the way they sun-dry tomatoes, the way they make the tomato paste, estratto, by spreading it out under the sun, the way they sun-dry vegetables like eggplant and zucchini and then preserve them in oil. The sun just brings out the colors and the flavors of all these vegetables and foods. And I really think that quote encapsulates Sicilian cuisine beautifully.

 

You highlight some of those techniques in Preserving Italy.

My grandmother from Abruzzo used to sun-dry sour cherries so that she would do the same thing. She would dry them in the sun until they were half-dried, not completely shriveled. She would put them in jars with brandy and sugar. She would make these boozy preserved cherries. 

That really was the impetus for Preserving Italy because I wanted to recreate those sour cherries. In the introduction, I tell how when my sister and I were little after our grandmother passed away, there were still a few jars of those cherries in the pantry. My mom and her sisters—she had three sisters—were very, very parsimonious about doling out those cherries. And they made them last for years.

The only way we could ever get cherries was if we told them we had cramps. When we had cramps, we were allowed to have a little spoonful of these really alcoholic, boozy, sour cherries. And then they were gone. 

Years later, the more I started getting into Italian food, the more I thought about the foods I grew up with. So, I wanted to recreate those cherries. 

Living in northern Virginia, it's very humid, so I can't sun-dry anything without it turning into mold. So, I did a version of oven-drying the cherries and then giving them a long marinating in spiced, sweetened alcohol.

There are other things like candied citrus peel, which is one of my favorite things to make. I always make it for the holidays because it's got so many uses. For one thing, it just makes your kitchen smell wonderful when you're cooking down orange peel and then cooking it in syrup until it thickens and nicely coats the fruit. You let it dry, then roll it in sugar, and you've got this wonderful confection that you can dip in chocolate or mince and put into cakes and cookies or use as a garnish for cannoli.

 

All these wonderful traditions are preserved throughout Italy. I mean, Italy has so many foods that grow well, such as hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, and vegetables. There are just countless ways of preserving them.

 

Abruzzo was part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, so there are likely shared food traditions.

I think that's absolutely true. What's interesting about Abruzzo is that it is central, but because it was part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, it is identified with the South, and a lot of its cuisine is associated with the South. 

I liken it to the Missouri of Italy. Missouri is kind of the gateway to the Midwest, but you think of it a little bit like the South. It's kind of in the middle of the country, but it's a little bit west if you think of Kansas City, Missouri. So it's got all these different cultural influences.

I feel like Abruzzo is the same thing. But yes, because it was part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, I do believe it does have strong ties with southern Italy. So, some of the same foods are prepared in similar ways, like peppers. The cover recipe for Preserving Italy is peppers preserved in olive oil, which I absolutely love. They basically get a bath and sweet and sour vinegar brine with capers and garlic, and then you drain them after they've marinated a good long while in this sweet and sour brine, and then you top them off with olive oil and just pop them in the fridge. You don't even have to can them. And they're just such a wonderful thing to have around either to put on pizza or crostini or as a side to roast chicken. 

 

That's a very Sicilian thing, actually, this idea of sweet and sour, they love their agrodolce. They do it with fish; they do it with vegetables. One of my favorite treatments for agrodolce is winter squash, the zucca agrodolce, which is a Sicilian dish. It's thinly sliced pumpkin or winter squash, fried with olive oil, and then just sort of plunged into a sweet and sour vinegar dressing or brine and other vegetables. You can do that with eggplant with caponata, but I really love it with the winter squash.

 

My mom used to make that when I was growing up. It was a Sicilian dish, but she really liked it, so she used to make it, and that remains one of my favorite dishes. A couple of years ago, I ended up making a winter squash version of caponata instead of eggplant, but with the celery and the tomato, and it was so good. 

I really love the sweet-and-sour tradition of Sicilian cuisine. One of the things that Anna Tasca Lanza points out in her book is that the Arabs who came over introduced the planting of sugarcane to Sicily. Ever since then, Sicilians have had a sweet tooth. So they like the sweet and sour, and also all of the sweets and confections, too. I think they can thank history for their sweet tooth.

 

In Everyday Italian, you share must-have Italian staples. Which are specific to Sicilian cuisine?

When I think of Sicilian cuisine, the first thing that comes to mind is nuts. They have the wonderful Sicilian almonds from Noto. And if you've not tasted a Sicilian almond side by side with, say, a California almond, you might not even know there's a difference. But there's a real difference. If you taste a good Sicilian almond, you understand almond extract all of a sudden because some people don't necessarily like almond extract; they find it bitter and strong in flavor. But if you taste a Sicilian almond, you will taste a tiny bit of that aroma from almond extract, and you understand what almond extract is. It really has that almond flavor. 

I occasionally splurge on Sicilian almonds. I buy them online. Last year, my daughter used Sicilian almonds to make these almond crescent cookies for Christmas. She's not as big a fan of the almond flavor as I am, so she doesn't ever use almond extract, but she used these Sicilian almonds.

 

We tasted the cookies fresh from the oven, and I asked, "Did you put almond extract in these?"

She said no. And it's because she used these Sicilian almonds.

Pistachios, too. If you take the time to peel them, they have this incredible green color. And that rich, nutty, sweet pistachio flavor or pine nuts, which are very Sicilian and buttery. 

For other ingredients, I think of capers, capers and caper leaves, brined capers, and salted capers with those punchy flavors.

Then there are anchovies, bottarga (the dried tuna roe), and colatura (the liquid from preserving the anchovies). All of these really strong flavors contribute to the richness of Sicilian cuisine.

There's vinegar, of course, and herbs. When I think of Sicilian cooking, I immediately think of mint. We were talking about winter squash and agrodolce; mint is the herb you sprinkle in that. 

 

What advice would you give to home cooks?

I would just say that it's pretty easy. Italian food is all about ingredients. And I know people have said this before, but it's not like trying to master fancy French sauces or overly manipulated food or trying to transform one thing into another. It's really about giving ingredients the best expression you can give them so that their own flavors shine. 

I would say the most important thing is to choose good ingredients that are the best you can afford. It's worth it because you really understand Italian cuisine. It doesn't have to be overly complicated. 

I mentioned pasta with eggplant. It's really just a simple tomato sauce made with either fresh or canned tomatoes, fried seasoned eggplant, and good-quality pasta. When you're buying pasta, buy the best you can afford. The same goes for good olive oil.

Be open to different ingredients and flavors. You will be successful if you work with high-quality ingredients and have reliable recipes. 

For example, maybe you don't know too much about artichokes and think it takes a lot of work to peel them. Once you've done it, it's like anything. You just roll up your sleeves and do it, and it becomes easier. So, if you happen to find good whole artichokes in the market, don't shy away from them. Buy them. Find either a video or a description. You'll see that the more you do it, the better you get at it. It's just a process, a learning process, and don't be daunted because Italian cuisine and its essence really is simple.

 

>>Get your copy of Everyday Italian here!<<

 

 

 

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It was a sunny afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, and my mother, sister, niece, husband, and I stumbled on a building called the Italian Hall. There, we saw a sign for the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA). As we are all Italian Americans, we found this fortuitous. So, we popped in and toured the museum's collection, an eclectic mix of fun facts and fascinating exhibits connected to Italian heritage.

 

As a Los Angeles transplant from Milwaukee, I don't often encounter such connections. Sure, there are some fabulous Italian restaurants, and Venice has canals. But I rarely have the opportunity to celebrate my Italian roots in the City of Angels.

Thanks to places like the IAMLA, I now know that Los Angeles is home to the fifth-largest Italian American population in the United States. 

Awareness of such lesser-known facts and her interest in her own Italian-American identity led the IAMLA Executive Director and historian Marianna Gatto to co-found the museum, which opened its doors in 2016.

 

"When I started working on this project twenty years ago, people would say things like, 'There are Italians in Los Angeles? Los Angeles had a Little Italy?'" Marianna says. "Now, I hear people saying, 'Italians helped shape Los Angeles.'"

 

Marianna, author of the recently published The Italian Americans of Los Angeles: A History, shared with me what inspired the founding of the IAMLA, her approach to curation and research, challenges she's faced, where she sees the museum headed, and advice for those who wish to pursue a museum career. 

What is your connection to Sicily?

My Sicilian family came to the United States in 1897. They were from Lucca Sicula in the Province of Agrigento. Like many Sicilians, they came following Italy's unification as the economic situation in the Mezzogiorno (Italy's south) worsened. Following the American Civil War, there was a labor shortage in the southern United States, and Sicilians were recruited to work in the fields and fisheries. My great-grandfather, his son, and scores of others from Lucca Sicula were among them. 

 

What inspired you to co-found the IAMLA?

There were two key events that served as a catalyst for my work with the museum. My earliest inspiration can be traced to my childhood. From a very young age, I was aware that I was Italian American, but growing up in an exceptionally diverse part of Los Angeles where Italian Americans were a small minority, I had to search far and wide for a mirror. The opportunities to explore my italianità were few. I began to question, what is my place in Los Angeles and what is my place among Italian Americans? Do I have one?  

To answer that question, I began devouring any book I could find on Italian American history. There were none about Italians in Los Angeles. I remember going through the indexes of volumes on Italian American history in search of 'Los Angeles' and in books about Los Angeles in search of 'Italians.' I sought answers from my father, but the information he shared often left me with more questions. Unlike most of the Italian Americans I read about, our family did not enter the U.S. through Ellis Island. My Sicilian side came through New Orleans and worked as agricultural laborers before continuing west to Colorado. At my grandmother's urging, they moved to Los Angeles, which was then still a suburban Eden, in 1948. I was thoroughly confused. What kind of Italians were we? 

When I was an undergraduate in college I learned about the Italian Hall, a building on the edge of downtown Los Angeles that had been constructed in 1908 and had served as a gathering place for Italian Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. I was floored. Italian Hall demonstrated that Los Angeles did indeed have an Italian American history with roots that stretched deep into its soil. A group known as the Historic Italian Hall Foundation was raising funds to rehabilitate the building, portions of which had languished after being vacant for decades, with the goal of resurrecting it as an Italian American community center. When I visited the building for the first time, my heart skipped a beat. I said aloud to the building's ghosts, to the pigeons nesting in the rafters, "This needs to be a museum, and I want to be the director." Well, years would pass before that dream materialized, but it did.

So, you could say that my second inspiration was the building itself, Italian Hall, and the history it speaks to, that of the two-hundred-year history of Italian Americans in Southern California. The building was my muse, the impetus for my research. After visiting it that day, I set out to discover and document the Italian Americans of Los Angeles, a group whose influence and contributions are felt throughout the region yet, until recently, received little recognition. The idea that a community so integral to the Los Angeles metropolis could be forgotten absolutely baffled me.

 

What are some highlights from your involvement with the museum?

Next year marks my twentieth working on the museum project, and there have been many high points, low points, and in-between points. Opening our doors was a huge milestone. Witnessing how our work has brought people together and enriched so many lives has been really rewarding, as has meeting some truly special people. Last year, the IAMLA won a prestigious award for Woven Lives, one of the temporary exhibitions I wrote and curated that explores the experiences of Italian American women told through needlework. This exhibition is slated to travel to the East Coast.

The IAMLA has also dramatically expanded its free public programming, and seeing how the arts and educational experiences we offer enrich resource-starved communities is also incredibly rewarding. Many of our youth visitors have never been to a museum or attended a live theatrical performance before. There have been other times when we have rejoiced after receiving an important grant or donation. 

 

How do you approach curating exhibitions representing the Italian American experience in Los Angeles and the West?

Our visitors are incredibly diverse; over 80 percent are not of Italian extraction. Our goal is to make history engaging, relatable, and relevant to all who step through our doors or access content online. We are cognizant of how we present information in order to appeal to different learning styles, educational levels, and age groups, and heavily utilize technology, interactive experiences, and storytelling. On any given day, you will see K-12 field trips, families, and senior and special needs groups visiting, and we want all of them to walk away having learned something. We emphasize universal themes, attempt to make connections with current events, and encourage visitors to draw upon their personal experiences. 

We follow the same approach with our temporary exhibitions. The IAMLA presents two new and original temporary exhibitions each year. They cover a variety of topics, from Italian American inventors to Pinocchio as a cultural icon. Each exhibition is accompanied by a variety of free educational programming, and it's through these events that we create a dynamic space that keeps people coming back. 

 

You recently published The Italian Americans of Los Angeles: A History. Tell us about the research that went into that book.

The research for the book brought me to archives and to cemeteries, to people's homes and businesses; I poured over volumes of documents, scrutinized endnotes, and hunted down unpublished manuscripts. The book is a survey of Italian Americans in Greater Los Angeles from the time of the first Italian settler's arrival in 1827, before there was an Italy and before California was a state.

This is the first comprehensive auto-history of Italian Americans in the City of Angels. It looks at subjects ranging from Italian pioneers and foodways to faith, entertainment history, anti-Italianism, and the arts. It includes many rare images, and like the museum's exhibitions, it is designed to be accessible and relatable, whether or not you are of Italian extraction or hail from Southern California.  

 

What challenges have you faced in preserving and promoting Italian American history, and how have you overcome them?

In the early days of the museum project, there was a crisis in awareness. Italian American history is often conceived as primarily an East Coast phenomenon, and numerically speaking, the majority of Italians did indeed settle in New York and Northeastern and Midwestern urban areas, but there are a number of other Italian American communities that are also worth studying and understanding. Los Angeles has an Italian American history that dates back nearly two centuries, but it has seldom been examined by Los Angeles historians or Italian American historians.

Many Italian Americans were struggling to achieve upward mobility during a time when the emphasis in America was on consensus and assimilation. The decades during which laws passed to prohibit Italians from coming to the United States and when Italians were portrayed as radicals and anarchists were followed by World War II years when the United States was at war with Italy. Italian Americans—Italo Angelenos—stopped speaking Italian and deemphasized their Italian-ness. The older generation was often reluctant to speak about their experiences, and if history and culture are not transmitted, what happens? It is often lost. My work as a historian has centered around unearthing this history.

There have been a number of challenges over the past two decades, but we have kept going. Perseverance has been an essential part of overcoming. 

 

How do you see the museum evolving, and what projects or exhibitions are you most excited about?

In the years that follow, I see the IAMLA continuing to expand in our physical location and our reach. Long before the pandemic, before virtual offerings became more commonplace, we presented considerable content online. We are also collaborating with other institutions to bring exhibitions and programs to various parts of the country. I see the IAMLA expanding its direct services to the public. Many of the people who visit the IAMLA come from resource-starved communities. Admission to the museum is free, and the overwhelming majority of museum programs—concerts, workshops, and other events—are also free. Serving as a resource for communities that often lack access to arts and cultural experiences gives me tremendous pride. The IAMLA is a museum and it is also a vehicle for bringing together communities and helping narrow the opportunity gap. 

On the heels of the IAMLA's very successful exhibition about Italian American jazzman Louis Prima, we will be opening a new and original exhibition on Italian American inventors and innovators that I'm particularly excited about. The exhibition examines the work of nearly one hundred inventors, from Enrico Fermi's work on the nuclear reactor and Robert Gallo, who discovered HIV as the cause of AIDS, to Teressa Bellissimo, who created the Buffalo chicken wing and Bernard Castro, who devised the convertible sofa. We will be presenting some great programming in conjunction with the exhibition.

 

What advice would you give someone pursuing a career like yours?

Prepare yourself for a lot of ups and downs, and try not to get discouraged during the downs. It's all part of the process. Strive to be a lifelong learner. The world changes more quickly than ever, it seems, and adaptability is key.

 

What do you hope people will take away from a visit to the museum?

In recent years, some of our leaders have determined that history—as well as the arts and other subjects—are "non-essential." The results are frightening. I hope people will take with them a greater understanding of the many people that make up the American mosaic and that these little blocks of knowledge will foster the development of a more informed and compassionate nation.

 

 

 

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New Orleans is renowned for its cuisine. But when it comes to several of its most iconic dishes, some credit should go to the area's Sicilian transplants, says Louisiana historian Laura Guccione. 

"If you think about something like shrimp creole with tomatoes in it, a lot of people have said that it definitely has a Sicilian influence," says Laura. "And if you go to a restaurant here, a lot of places have stuffed artichokes on the menu. That's definitely directly from Sicily."

Curious about the Sicilian origins of Louisiana's plants and foods, the Delgado Culinary School graduate pursued a master's in urban studies at the University of New Orleans. Her graduate thesis evolved into two New Orleans history book manuscripts, one on St. Joseph's Day and the other on Sicilians and Creole Cuisine, both currently under peer review by LSU Press. 

I caught up with Laura to learn more about how Sicilians colored New Orleans's rich history. She shared some of the more surprising food contributions and how Sicilian corner stores promoted what's become known as New Orleans cuisine.

 

 

What is your background?

I'm a native New Orleanian but grew up in the suburbs. My father's a hundred percent Sicilian. His story is interesting because his father was born in Louisiana, but in Lettsworth, Louisiana, which is north of Baton Rouge and sugar cane country. His grandfather did not like it here, so they went back to Sicily. So, my grandfather was an American citizen. He was born here but was raised in Sicily. He came back as a teenager at 17 and then lived in New Orleans. I still have direct cousins in Sicily because his brother stayed in Sicily.

My mother's family is from the very beginning of New Orleans. They're a Creole family, also Scots-Irish. 

I grew up here, worked in the service industry for about 30 years, tending bar, and then decided to go back to school after Hurricane Katrina. 

I went to culinary school, but I soon realized that as much as I loved restaurants, food, and cooking, I was really more interested in history. So, a few years later, I went back to get my master's degree from the University of New Orleans.

 

How did the challenges Sicilian immigrants faced influence their culinary contributions?

Sicilians assimilated quicker than most places, so I think it's harder to see what they've done. They immediately spread all over the city, including on the West Bank, uptown, downtown, and outside of New Orleans, because many of them came to work the sugarcane fields. 

They were basically migrant workers. They would come here, spend time in Louisiana, then go to Chicago and go up to where other things were being harvested. 

They went back and forth, which contributed to agriculture. Many Sicilians had small farms outside of New Orleans, almost within the city limits. 

What happened with the Sicilians is that they contributed a lot to Creole cuisine. It's not as obvious as an actual dish, with the exception of the muffuletta and a few other things that are obviously Sicilian.

They were changing cuisine here because what they were growing was what they were familiar with. They were coming back and forth so they could bring seeds and plants. They were going into the field of producing, growing, producing, and distributing fruits, vegetables, and even oysters and fish. 

In the history of recipes, you can see that as more and more Sicilians come here, you see a change in what's being used. For example, everybody talks about the trinity [onions, bell peppers, and celery]. Paul Prudhomme was the first one to start using that. I talked to his sous chef recently, and he said Paul only really cooked with celery once he got here. Where does celery come from? It comes from Sicily.

 

A lot of old gumbo recipes barely have anything in them. Through the years, you see more onions; you see more celery and peppers. Because what do they eat in Sicily more than anything? Peppers, onions, celery, and tomatoes.

 

What's a surprising Sicilian contribution to New Orleans cuisine?

If you look at the history of the poor boy, it was created by the Martin Brothers. But they went to their Sicilian baker neighbor to have the bread made. 

Baguettes from France are long and skinny with pointy ends. They went to their neighbor and said, "We need to change this because we want to make these sandwiches, but we don't want to lose that end. We want something rounder and wider."

So Sicilians and the Martin Brothers created this loaf of bread that is now synonymous with the city.  And what do people come here for? Poor boys.

 

Another contribution is the muffuletta. Can you describe its creation?

No one will probably be able to prove how it really started. There's Central Grocery and a place a couple of doors down called Progress. They both said that they created the muffuletta. Progress is gone, so it's pretty much accepted that it was created at Central Grocery. 

The story goes that Central Grocery sold the bread, which, if you go to Sicily, the muffuletta is just a round bread. Sometimes, people would serve it hot with olive oil and fennel seeds on it, but it's just bread. It's not a sandwich in Sicily.

Central Grocery had the bread and all the pieces; they would sell the salami, cheese, and olives in the big barrels and bundle up stuff for the men to go to work. 

One day, they said, "Why don't we just put it all together and make this easier?"

 

That's an example of a Sicilian-owned grocery store having an impact. What is the history of these stores?

At one point, probably in the early 1900s, maybe even heading into the mid-1900s, most of the grocery stores were owned by Sicilians or their children. They tended to be on a corner, and you didn't have a major grocery store, so that's where you probably got everything. You probably knew the people. And then there are lots of stories where the Sicilian families would let people buy on credit. So, there was definitely dependence upon the neighborhood, and the neighborhood depended on the grocers, who sold everything from flour to clothes.

Mandina's Restaurant and Napoleon House both started off as grocery stores. Most of these places started off as grocery stores, became bars, and then became restaurants. 

The story with Napoleon House is that the owner at the time said, "We'll make some sandwiches." And then it just evolved from there. Now, it's probably one of the most famous restaurants in the world.

 

What is your goal in writing about Sicilian-New Orleans cuisine and culture?

I really just want to shine a light on what I feel is a somewhat neglected history. I want something that could be used as a reference later. It's like all this work I'm doing is not just for me but for posterity. 

 

 

 

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Sicilian folk music, ranging from lullabies to harvest songs, has served as a cultural backbone for centuries. A fusion of Greek and Byzantine hymns, Arabic Maqam, and Spanish styles, the island's unique sounds were recorded and cataloged by American musicologist Alan Lomax as part of his Italian Treasury: Sicily.

 

Lomax recorded the voices of peasants, shepherds, salt and sulfur miners, cart drivers, and fishermen and uncovered music related to festivals, dance, religion, and storytelling. In doing so, he also introduced the sounds of Sicily's traditional musical instruments, many of which I highlight along with video performances below.

Ciaramedda

Native to rural Sicily and Calabria, particularly in the province of Messina in Sicily, the ciaramedda or ciaramèddha consists of a goatskin bag, a blowpipe that inflates the bag, two chanters (the part of the bagpipe used to create the melody) that are typically made of fruit wood or heather wood, and two or three drones, which provide the harmony.

 

 

Friscaletto

Once commonly played by shepherds, the fiscaletto or friscalettu is similar in appearance to the recorder that most American schoolchildren are taught to play. But instead of plastic, it's typically made of cane, featuring a hollow cylinder with seven holes in the front and two holes in the rear.

 

Marranzano

Colloquially referred to as the "jaw harp," a name that originates from jeu-trompe, the French word for trumpet, the marranzano or marranzanu is similar to instruments found throughout Asia. Italy's first marranzani can be traced to the 16th century, and there's evidence of its use in Sicily and Sardinia in the 18th century. Giuseppe Pitrè's Canti popolari Siciliani (Sicilian Folk Songs) was published in 1870. Since then, this circular metal instrument has become a part of Sicilian folk tradition.

 

 

Tamborello

Whether it originated in western Africa, the Middle East, Greece, or India, most scholars believe that the tambourine was one of the first instruments created by humans. It dates as far back as 1700 BC, roughly within the New Stone Age or Neolithic Period. Called the tamborello in Italy, this percussion instrument was traditionally made of stretched skin over a wooden frame. In Sicily, it's typically played during tarantella dances.

 

 

Organetto

A diatonic-button accordion (not to be confused with the piano accordion), the organetto is played throughout Italy, particularly along with the saltarello dance.

 

 

 

Putipù

The putipù or cupa cupa is a friction drum composed of three key parts: a bamboo reed, a drum membrane, and a cylindrical sound box. The sound is made by rubbing a wet hand on the reed, which vibrates the membrane. Drum tones vary based on the size of the sound box and the thickness of the membrane.

 

 

 

 

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Sundays of my youth were spent with my Sicilian grandparents. We'd gather in the kitchen to enjoy Nonna's afternoon supper. And at the center of the table, we could always look forward to her fresh-baked bread. Typical of Sicily, this bread was made with semolina, coarsely ground durum flour. She'd roll her loaves in sesame seeds, which added depth to the already nutty flavor. 

 

As a bread-baker myself, I have attempted to recreate Nonna's recipe, but apparently, I hadn't found the right recipe. My bread was too flat. 

 

That was before I stumbled on a semolina bread recipe on Marcellina in Cucina. This pane Siciliano was gorgeous, golden, and looked just like Nonna's. I just had to reach out to blogger Marcella Cantatore to learn more. 

 

 

Tell us about your background.

I'm the owner of Marcellina in Cucina and the second child of Italian immigrants Anna and Enzo. My mother, Anna, was from Reggio Calabria, Calabria, and my dad was from Piacenza, Emilia Romagna. I grew up in a traditional Italian immigrant family. We grew a lot of our food and cooked everything from scratch. I learned to cook by just watching my mother and father in the kitchen. There were no recipes, but I wanted to record our family recipes and those of others, so I started my blog.

 

How often do you travel to Italy, and have you been to Sicily?

I have traveled to Italy three times, and I plan another trip in the next year or two. I've been to Sicily, but not extensively. It's a beautiful place, and I will spend more time there next time.

 

What is your connection to this recipe?

This recipe is a traditional Sicilian bread but also very similar to the bread in my mother's hometown, Reggio Calabria. Reggio Calabria has many similarities to Sicily due to its proximity. At home, I wanted to recreate the bread I ate there, so I searched for recipes and tested them until I adapted this bread from Carol Field's book The Italian Baker.

 

Why semolina and why sesame seeds?

This is a traditional Sicilian bread that you'll find in all Sicilian bakeries and many southern Italian bakeries. Semolina is hardier and resistant to spoilage, so it was the flour used for bread for the common people who were poor and couldn't afford bread made with soft white flour. Semolina flour lends a beautiful yellow color and delicious flavor to the bread. Sesame seeds are much loved in Sicily and add extra flavor to bread. Plus, I adore sesame seeds!

 

Can you tell me about the shape of this bread and others?

The shape I have used in this recipe is called occhi, which means eyes and looks a little like eyeglasses. Another shape that you'll find this bread in is mafalda, which is like a snake zig-zagged back and forth, with the remaining length of dough laid over the top of the zig-zag. Sometimes, the dough is just zig-zagged without the extra dough laid over the top. In this case, it's known as scaletta or little ladder. 

 

What is the connection to Santa Lucia?

Santa Lucia is the patron saint of eyes. The swirled S shape, which is a little like eyeglasses, is a traditional bread shape made to commemorate Santa Lucia (Saint Lucy). However, this is not the bread eaten on the Feast of Santa Lucia in Italy; it's a whole other story!

 

When is this bread served, and what are some popular Sicilian recipe pairings?

This bread can be served with any meal. Its flavor goes particularly well with cheese, sausage, and salami.

 

Tell me what you hope readers will take away from this recipe.

I hope readers learn a little about Italian and Sicilian culture and enjoy this deliciously different bread. 

 

>>Get Marcella Cantatore's pane Siciliana recipe here!<<

 

 

 

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Among the cornerstones of rural life in Sicily was the tradition of using and maintaining a public oven. It was a practice born from necessity. Because few rural people had their own ovens throughout Italy's history, communities would rely on one that was communally shared. 

 

Ancient Rome once hosted a vast network of at least 500 public ovens, which spread throughout Europe from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Citizens would bring dough to bake bread together in the community oven, which was a place where the rich and poor would bake side-by-side, stories would be swapped, and relationships would blossom.

 

It lasted until after World War II when most people purchased their own ranges and baked in their own homes. Much was gained in convenience, but was something lost in shedding this ancient practice?

 

Several people have asked that question, which has led to the creation of community ovens across the United States.

 

Vermont art teacher and former librarian Jen Burton and her friend Mark Woodward, a former state legislator, founded the Johnson Community Oven in 2017.

 

A family-friendly place where locals have gathered to communally dine on fresh-baked pizzas, the oven is primarily supported by donations and grants. Elmore Mountain Bread, Jasper Hill Farm, and Foote Brook Farm have all contributed food. And residents have donated building materials and wood. The oven has served as a glue, further connecting people in this town of just over 3,000 people.

 

Jen and I recently sat down to chat about how she and Mark got started, what goes into running a community oven, how it's used, and how the Johnson Community Oven ties to public oven tradition.

 

 

What exactly is a community oven?

I guess it doesn't have to be the same thing everywhere, but in Johnson, it's an oven that sits on town property and is available for anyone in the community to use. You need to sign up with the town, fill out a form, and say when you'll use it. Hopefully, you will get a little bit of training from an oven volunteer. Often, people will reach out to someone on the oven committee, and committee members will run the oven for their event.

 

There's a community pizza night that happens for about eight weeks each summer. The oven committee, along with other volunteers, organizes and hosts it. The pizza is free—by donation—and the committee often gets grants and other donations to supplement the cost. 

 

Tell us how you got started.

My stepmom and her partner built an oven in their backyard, and they sometimes fire it up and invite people in the neighborhood to bring their own baked goods, like bread and other things, to bake. I knew about that, and then I heard a piece on Vermont Public Radio about an oven in Norwich, VT. It had been there for a long time, and somebody had just started using it to bake bread once a week. People would sign up for a loaf of bread.

 

Mark and I both independently heard that story. He kept talking about how he wanted a bread oven in town, and I decided to take action.  

I did the groundwork to get the approval from the town. I had to defend the idea at a select board meeting, where everybody grilled me with questions for an hour. A big question was where to put it; there was a lot of conversation about that.

 

Once we had the approval, we hired a local mason to build it. People contributed stones and other items to be built into it, which added another aspect of community involvement. That was Mark's idea and turned out to be pretty cool.

Describe the oven and the space where it's located.

It's a big stone wood-burning oven, probably about six feet across each side, and it sits in a 12 x 16 structure. It's on a green in town next to an elementary school. In the summer, we have a Tuesday night live concert series there. So, the oven is kind of an extenuation of how we use that space in town.
 

How many pizzas can you fit in there at a time?

About three pizzas can be cooked at once. On a good night, they've made up to 90 pizzas for people in just a few hours, so they really crank out the pizzas. They do a great job.

 

How else is the oven used?

It's been used for birthday parties, retirement parties, and a few fundraising events. The library has started to collaborate with the oven committee on pizza nights. They've been providing some activities and music.

 

How has the use of the Johnson community oven changed?

It was built in the fall of 2017. We didn't use it much that winter, but we started to use it more the next summer. Initially, it was a free-for-all, with everybody bringing toppings and everybody making pizza, including kids. It was nice—messy but nice.

 

Then COVID happened, so we couldn't really do it that way anymore. The committee worked together to formulate a new plan in which just a few people made the pizzas, and nobody else was around. A pickup system was developed where we would tell people online what would be available that day, and they would come to pick them up.

We started to give people whole pizzas in boxes, and they would pick them up and leave instead of hanging around the field. Once COVID started to abate, people started to come onto the field again and spend more time with their neighbors. We had more volunteers helping with the baking, but this core group of people was still doing all the work, like making and cooking the pizzas.

 

Just this year, they started to open it up again and have more people come in, with more people bringing ingredients. And now it's a bit back to being more of a community-involved event.

 

I think people like it to be more participatory, and I think the people running it appreciate not having all the pressure on them. Also, there tend to be just one or two people who cook the whole time because that is more of a skill, but I think a wider range of people are coming in, bringing things in, and making the pizzas.

 

You talked about pizza. What other dishes can be made in the oven?

Richard Miscovich's book From the Wood-Fired Oven is a really great resource. I took a class from him to learn more about using ovens, which was really helpful.

 

I still love his onion recipe. He just put onions in a pot and put them in the oven; they're one of the best things that comes out of the oven.

 

But I've made bread, cookies, and garlic knots in that oven. The nice thing about the oven is that after the high temperatures of the pizza cooking, you can use the lower temperatures to do other things in it. So there's a cycle to it where you can cook at the high heat with certain things and then cook other things at the lower heat. People don't take advantage of it in that way as much as they could.

 

How does this oven tie to public oven tradition?

NPR's Shankar Vedantam has talked about how food really brings people together, so a lot of the reasoning behind doing it was based on that. It just felt like there needed to be something to bring different factions of the town together.

 

It's something that has been a central component of a community for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. Some towns only had one oven, where people would come to cook, so everybody would see each other there and have to cooperate.

 

So, part of the foundation for wanting to build it was to build something that would bring people together and make them work together toward a common goal.

 

In Vermont, we have Town Meeting Day. It's a cultural phenomenon. It's one day when people come to vote on their town budgets. It's an interesting thing that I don't think many other states, if any, have.

 

We have a potluck on Town Meeting Day. The oven is right next to the elementary school, where the town meeting is held. Over the past few years, people have made pizza for the potluck.

 

How would you describe the experience?

Overall, it's been a positive experience for the town. I think a lot of people really do like it. It's a very positive, family-friendly experience.

 

 

 

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A favorite among Sicilians but lesser known in the U.S., the artichoke's celery-resembling cousin, the cardoon (also known as artichoke thistle), is typically harvested after the first frost. That's when the otherwise bitter leafy green vegetable stalks are at their sweetest, says Westfield, Massachusetts, gardener Chrissy Saraceno.

 

She and her husband, Greg Russian, tend to a half-acre garden and run the Galaxy Gardens YouTube channel to educate aspiring gardeners and homesteaders.

Chrissy was inspired by her grandparents, who came to the U.S. from Melilli, Sicily, in the 1960s. Both had green thumbs and her grandmother gardens to this day. 

Chrissy sees growing cardoons as a way to connect with her Sicilian roots, and she shared more about growing and cooking this unique, tasty vegetable with me.

 

 

Tell us about Galaxy Gardens.

Galaxy Gardens came up through the pandemic. Because I do a lot of gardening, my family kept asking me questions. Eventually, I was like, "You know what? I'm going to put it all in one spot for you, so if you have questions, I have some videos to refer you to so I don't have to keep repeating myself." 

I really enjoy providing free education, so I've continued it. I'd really love to get into consulting in the future.

 

Describe your garden.

We're on about half an acre. Our main raised garden bed area is about 20 feet by 40 feet large. We have 16 raised beds. They're each six feet by three feet and about 11 inches deep. And then we have since foodscaped the rest of our property. So, right around our house, we have horseradishes, gooseberries, and valerian. We've added a couple more beds, and we're about at capacity for our property right now. But it's been really nice since we purchased a home to be able to actually foodscape our property. We have a small orchard in the back as well, and we have some chickens, too. It's been a very involved project the last few years, but now we're fully set up and really just have to worry about maintaining nutrient levels. 

 

What is a cardoon?

A cardoon is in the artichoke family. However, it grows in stalks rather than producing the flower head that you harvest with artichokes. It loves nitrogen; it's a very slow grower. It tends to stay very small until about August or so, and then it'll go through a big growth spurt. So you'll get three- or four-foot tall plants that just keep going until it gets too cold out. And if you wait for the first frost to come and harvest, they tend to be a bit sweeter and slightly less bitter than if you harvest it when it's still warm. 

 

Full-size cardoons. Photo by Galaxy Gardens

 

How did you start growing cardoons?

I really wanted to push our gardening zone limits on our property, which is in a Zone 6B area. Obviously, we get snow here in Massachusetts, but different parts of the property tend to stay warmer than others. 

Over the years, my goal has been to experiment with all these different types of foods and just see what grows best here. I originally wanted to grow artichokes, but artichokes just don't last. Sometimes, we get early falls and a cold snap in September, and cardoons are a little hardier.

 

Why do you like growing them?

Honestly, the easiest, lowest-risk, and highest-reward thing you can grow is garlic. And second to that, now that I've grown it for several seasons, are cardoons. 

If you try lettuce, you can look at it the wrong way when it's a seedling, and it will wilt on you. Cardoons are hardier. They're more forgiving. You just set them and forget them.

They are great if you just want something that's passively growing on the side, and you don't need to give it too much attention until it gets around harvest season. And it's a beautiful landscaping plant. My brother and his wife have it right on the corner of their house. It's this huge, sprawling bunch right now.

You can use the plant not only for landscaping purposes but also so that at the end of the year when you're going to be taking out or cutting down your landscaping plants anyway, you have food for your table.

 

How do you grow and harvest this vegetable?

You can start them inside in April, move them outside, and they'll grow all summer. I harvest them around October or November, and they do okay, even on frosty mornings. 

 

You harvest it like you do celery, where you can cut them at the bottom.

 

We grow the spineless variety. When you harvest it and clean it up, it's very stringy. So it's kind of like stringing beans: You just need to pull the one big string off of it. 

The spineless variety is more tender. After you clean up all the leaves, you just need to prepare it to eat, and you don't have to worry about any really tough textures on it. 

 

Preparing cardoons post-harvest. Photo by Galaxy Gardens

 

What part do you eat?

The main stalk. When you finish processing, it looks like celery. It will grow in bunches, and as you separate the stalks from each other, you just go to the point where it's still thick and malleable, and you can remove the leaves. It has a fuzzy coating, but you can peel that off very easily. So then you'll end up with a four-foot plant with about a foot to a foot and a half stalk in the entire bunch. We grew about 12 plants last year. After processing, we ended up with two gallons of stalks to use. 

 

Can cardoons be eaten raw?

I wouldn't recommend it! To be safe, once you have them harvested and processed, you would just boil them for about 15 to 20 minutes with some lemon juice and salt added to the water. And then, of course, blanch them and add some ice water to stop the cooking process. You can use them from there.

 

Boiling cardoons. Photo by Galaxy Gardens

 

What do they taste like?

The stalks taste like the most tender artichoke you've had. It's just a different texture that you're dealing with. They're sweet and almost a little bit nutty. Pine nuts would go very well with them. 

When you cook cardoons, they really maintain that sweet flavor. It really comes through in anything that you make with them.

 

Blanched cardoons. Photo by Galaxy Gardens

 

What are your favorite ways to prepare them?

I actually have some left over from last year. I was hoping to make a leek-style soup with them, but my go-to is just to batter them. You could bake or fry them and make a nice dip to go with them. It's a really good appetizer. 

 

What advice do you have for someone new to growing cardoons?

Start them inside. It depends on where you live. I have tried directly sowing them, and they actually like more water than you might expect. Cardoons do best in very fluffy and moist soil. By the time they come up, we have chipmunks and squirrels stealing them. So we start them inside. They're very easy. You can directly sow them in a cup, and they sprout within a day or so. We use LED lights that keep things pretty warm. They'll sprout in a couple of days and usually get between six and eight inches tall. But the plants themselves, once they get between two and four leaves, tend to stay there for even a month or two when you start them inside. By the time they're ready to go outside, they're pretty easy to transplant. You don't have to worry about breaking the roots. They're pretty hardy. 

Once you transplant them, you can see where the stalks are already starting to come out. Just stick them so they are standing straight up in the ground and make sure they're well watered. They may wilt slightly in the sun if you are too fast with transitioning them outside. But once they're transplanted, they take a week or so to get established, and they'll grow a little bit more over the next month. They pretty much stay there until about August or September. Then, they decide to take off and continue with most of their growth. 

 

What do you hope people take away from your gardening videos?

Gardening is a lot of work, but it's only as difficult as you make it for yourself. I think a lot of people lack the confidence to experiment with what they're growing. I hope they can see that we are just two regular people. There's nothing too special about the process that we're doing. They can try that at home.

 

 

 

 

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Round-shaped ricotta-cream pastries topped with a nipple-like cherry, the minne di Sant'Agata take the cake among Sicily's most sensuous sweets. But within these so-called breasts of Saint Agatha, you'll find not only chocolate and candied orange peel but also a tragic story.

 

The cakes are named after Agatha of Sicily, who lived and died as a martyr in third-century Catania. At 15, Agatha took a vow of chastity. When she rejected the advances of Roman prefect Quintianus, he had her reported as a Christian, for which she was tortured. Men stretched her on a rack and tore her flesh with iron hooks, burned her with torches, and whipped her. As if that weren't enough, her breasts were torn off with tongs. She survived because, as tradition tells us, St. Peter the Apostle appeared to heal her wounds. Eventually, Quintianus ordered his men to burn her over hot coals. Today, Agatha is honored as the patron saint of rape victims, wet nurses, and breast cancer patients with a February 5 feast day. 

"When people see these cakes and how they look like breasts, or they see breasts in the name, they laugh," says South Carolina baker Patrizia Boscia. "When I explain the story, they stop smiling or laughing, and they become curious and listen. I want to show them that it's not just a funny, pornographic pastry that Italians created; it's a celebration of martyrdom."

Patrizia came to the U.S. from Castellammare del Golfo about 40 years ago and got her Ph.D. in sociology. She taught in New York, Florida, and South Carolina, where she eventually retired from teaching and reinvented herself as a baker. In 2018, she launched Sweet Bites of Italy, taking orders online, catering, and selling at farmers markets.

The minne di Sant'Agata is one of Patrizia's more popular sweet treats. It has special significance to her, which we discussed along with the pastry's origins.

 

 

Describe these cakes and their historical significance.

The cakes are dome pastries, and there are two versions. One is made with pastry dough, and the other with Italian sponge cake. Inside is a very nice filling made with ricotta, candied orange peel, and chocolate chips. Then, they are covered with a thick icing layer—all white. Inside, they are very soft. They're very tasty.

 

They are related to St. Agatha. There is a mixture of history and traditions (or fantasy, in a way). St. Agatha came from a rich family, and it was around 200 years after Christ, a period of very ferocious Christian persecution.

 

A prefect had come to force the population to return to the pagan state and forget their Christianity. He saw this young girl who wanted to become a nun, and he fell in love with her. He tried to convince her to marry him or have a relationship with him. She refused. So, the situation escalated. He became increasingly violent, and he asked his men to take her, and she was put in prison, and then she was tortured.

 

The minne di Sant'Agata are not the original anatomical sweet typical of Italy or Spain. The Greeks created this kind of anatomical breast in honor of a goddess for a particular feast, and they made it with sesame seed and honey.

It is unclear when this anatomical sweet got translated into the religious feast of Saint Agatha. But it is not really so strange because, in Italian—especially Sicilian—pastries, there is often this strange mixture of sensuality—pornography in a way—and religion. If we think of the cannoli, they were a symbol of man's virility.

The strange thing is that these pastries were made by nuns in the convent. Nuns were the ones who really developed Sicilian pastry cuisine. They sold pastries to support themselves and their orphans.

 

But the breast in Italy is not a symbol of sexuality as much as we consider it today. Breasts are a symbol of fertility, motherhood, and nutrition. 

 

What does this cake mean to you personally?

I had never seen them in the part of Sicily where I lived, but when I started to research them and what they represented, I associated them more with the victimization of women. Even though the martyrdom of St. Agatha was not expressed in terms of gender violence, they are associated with the victimization of women and the courage of this lady who, despite everything, refused to bend to the advances of this guy because she wanted to maintain her dignity and she wanted to become a nun. So, in a way, for me, it's a symbol of women's resistance and courage. And that's what I emphasize every time I serve them.

 

What do you hope people take away from these pastries?

I want them to realize that there is a story behind Italian cuisine, especially traditional cuisine.

When we talk about traditional Italian pastries, sometimes it's confusing. Traditional doesn't mean that I need this amount of flour, for instance, or that I must strictly follow a recipe. It's not so much related to the menu as to what Italian cuisine is still attached: a ritualistic nature, a different nature, and a diversity of different regions. This is what traditional is to me.

I want them to understand what makes Italian cuisine different, the fact that it's still attached to events, the history of Italy, and the religion of Italy. 

 

 

 

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Autumn is pumpkin season, even in Sicily, where you can find several savory and sweet recipes. One of these is pizzuliato, a creamy pumpkin soup perfect for chilly fall evenings. 

 

I caught up with Carmen Pricone of The Heirloom Chronicles blog, whose twist on the classic recipe was inspired by her Sicilian mother-in-law. 

 

 

Tell us about your background.

I'm an Italo-Australian with a deep love for traditions and Italian food, and I am the author behind The Heirloom Chronicles blog. I'm passionate about cooking, gardening, and sharing recipes, along with the family memories that come with them.

 

The blog is really a blend of the regions that shaped me: my husband's family was from Sicily, my family is from Basilicata, and I was born in Piedmont before we moved to Australia in 1970—all tied together by the thread of tradition.

 

Many migrants to Australia, like my in-laws who arrived in the 50s and my family in the 70s from regions in southern Italy, brought with them many traditional recipes, all rooted in the seasons. If you had a patch of land in the garden, whether at the back or front, every square meter would be converted into a vegetable patch. Seasonal crops translated to hearty meals, most coming together ingeniously and without a written recipe.

 

What is your approach to recipes?

The idea of taking humble, seasonal ingredients and transforming them into tasty dishes perfectly captures my approach to cooking. I remember growing up spending hours in the garden with my parents. I had a fascination with what was planted after weeks of germination from seeds, knowing this would eventually form part of our meals. 

 

Creating seasonal dishes using the fruits and vegetables we grew is a way of life that resonates with me and many of my readers. Today, I strive to live more sustainably by cultivating my own little garden using seeds saved from my parents' crops, learning from their way of preserving abundance, and being a strong advocate for locally sourced produce.

 

What influence has your mother-in-law had on your approach to recipes like this one?

While my parents inspired me to grow my own fruits and vegetables and keep meals simple, my mother-in-law taught me the art of ingredient composition. This comforting pumpkin soup recipe, called pizzuliati, uses basic ingredients, but the way they come together creates a rich blend of flavors. Each ingredient plays its role, elevating the others. Thought, care, and love went into making her dishes, and that is a part I will always treasure and try to replicate in my cooking.

 

What did this pumpkin soup represent for your husband's Sicilian family tradition?

Everything was prepared with love, likely around the kitchen table, with family and casual conversations. So when my late husband would request this dish, I knew it carried with it a deep sense of nostalgia. As you read through the recipe, there are snippets of memories told.

 

How have you modernized this recipe?

Pizzuliato is a Sicilian dialect name that comes from the word pizzico (pinch), which describes how the small granules are formed using semolina and water. When I'm time-poor, I have been known to use risoni pasta, which would be considered a more modern substitute. I have also made it using rice.

 

Are there regional variations of pumpkin soup in Italy?

Yes, Italy, including Sicily, has a number of regional variations of pumpkin soup, each with its own local twist and name. While pizzuliati is specific and not widely known, pumpkin soups are popular in different areas, often influenced by local ingredients and traditions. A few regional variations include:

• Zuppa di Zucca Siciliana: In Sicily, pumpkin soup might feature local ingredients like wild fennel, almonds, and sometimes even seafood like shrimp, reflecting the island's Mediterranean influence. It often has a slightly sweet and savory flavor profile due to the combination of pumpkin and a touch of sugar or honey.
• Zuppa di Zucca alla Toscana: In Tuscany, pumpkin soup is often combined with cannellini beans and rosemary, giving it an earthy and hearty quality. The soup is usually quite thick, with a drizzle of high-quality extra virgin olive oil.
• Crema di Zucca alla Veneta: In the Veneto region, pumpkin soup tends to be creamy. It sometimes includes potatoes for extra thickness and Parmesan cheese for richness. It's often flavored with nutmeg or cinnamon for a warm, aromatic touch.
• Minestra di Zucca: In Lombardy, the soup is more rustic and simple. It is often made with sautéed onions, garlic, and a bit of sage. It might include rice or even small pasta, making it a comforting dish for colder weather.
  
  

Each region of Italy puts its own spin on pumpkin soup, incorporating local produce, herbs, and traditional cooking methods that make the soups unique to that area. My mother-in-law's pumpkin soup is steeped in tradition, most likely from her town of Vittoria, in the province of Ragusa, Sicily.

 

What specific memories or stories do you associate with making or eating this soup with your family?

I never made this soup with my mother-in-law but learned her recipe through her recounts. This labor-of-love meal would have taken her a good part of her afternoon. It was a dish she knew we all cherished, including her young grandchildren at the time, and a weekly draw card during those winter months.

 

Can vegans or lactose-intolerant people omit the ricotta?

Yes, this dish can be modified to suit vegans or lactose-intolerant people. The ricotta does add creaminess, but it is just as flavourful without. I have known to process a cup of chickpeas, adding that creaminess and thickening the soup.

 

What do you recommend serving with the soup?

This pumpkin soup is a complete meal on its own due to its substance; however, some garlic or herbed crostini would complement it well.

 

What do you hope at-home cooks will take away from this recipe?

With a recipe like pizzuliati, I hope at-home cooks will take away an appreciation for simplicity and the deep flavors that can come from fresh, local ingredients. Traditional Italian recipes like this one are about respecting what's in season, highlighting the natural taste of each component, and enjoying the act of cooking itself.

Pizzuliati, and other rustic dishes like it, are less about following strict rules and more about connecting with the ingredients—adjusting seasoning to taste and adding your own twists based on what you have on hand. It's also about creating a meal that brings comfort and can be shared with loved ones, embodying the spirit of Italian home cooking: a celebration of food, family, and community.

 

>>Get Carmen's pizzuliati recipe here!<<

 

 

 

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Bulbous and green with antennae-like leaves, the kohlrabi almost resembles a cartoon alien rather than the brassica vegetable that it is. Also called German turnip or turnip cabbage, this cultivar of wild cabbage is not typically found in supermarkets. Instead, it shows up at specialty grocers or farmers markets. 

 

Kohlrabi, which ranges in color from pale green to purple, can be eaten raw or cooked, from its broad leaves to its hearty stems and bulbs. My Sicilian grandmother used the whole vegetable in soups and stews; she ate it frequently in Sicily.

 

Kohlrabi has been eaten in Italy since at least 1554, when Siena-born botanist Pietro Adrea Mattioli wrote that the vegetable had "come lately into Italy." Not long after, kohlrabi spread to North Europe and was being grown in England, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Tripoli, and parts of the eastern Mediterranean.

I recently stumbled on a blog post by Marisa Raniolo Wilkins of All Things Sicilian and More about the ways kohlrabi is eaten in Sicily. 

 

I reached out to Marisa, who is based in Australia, to learn more about her background and experience with this vegetable. She shared her reflections on kohlrabi's significance in Sicilian cuisine and her favorite kohlrabi recipes. 

 

 

Where is your family from in Sicily, and how did you end up in Australia?

My Sicilian background is a blend of two Sicilian regions—Catania and Ragusa—and enriched my very different life in Trieste. My mother was born in Catania but moved to Trieste when she was just five years old. When she was fourteen, life for my mother changed when my grandfather died, prompting part of her family to return to Sicily, primarily to Augusta, while she chose to stay with her eldest brother and his wife in Trieste. One other brother also remained in Trieste.

 

My father met my mother while stationed in Trieste during World War II. They traveled briefly to Sicily, where they married in Catania before returning to Trieste. Although the war had ended, Trieste remained in political and military turmoil through what was, for all intents and purposes, a civil war. And during her pregnancy, my mother felt unsafe. So, in the last weeks of her pregnancy, my parents caught a train to Sicily, and I was born in my paternal grandparents' home in Ragusa. A few weeks later, they caught the train home to Trieste, where I grew up, and remained until we came to Australia.

 

Our family was deeply connected to our Sicilian roots, spending summers in Sicily and welcoming relatives who visited us in Trieste. My maternal grandmother would stay with us for a month, filling our home with the scents and flavors of her Catanese cooking, especially seafood. My mother's family has always been tied to the sea, whether in Catania, Trieste, or Augusta, and much of my culinary knowledge about fish comes from her family. My fondness for eating fish partly contributed to my book Sicilian Seafood Cooking (now out of print).

 

When I was eight, we sailed to Australia, driven by my father's spirit of exploration. We went directly to Adelaide, which was chosen as a city reminiscent of Trieste's size rather than a larger city like Sydney or Melbourne. Despite our new life, we continued to make regular trips back to Italy, both to Trieste and Sicily, further deepening my appreciation of my heritage. As an adult, I made regular trips to Italy and explored many other regions—and other countries.

 

I feel fortunate to have been exposed to regional Italian and Sicilian cuisines with all their variations. Traveling to different countries and living in Australia have exposed me to the wealth of multicultural cuisines that are evident in this country. My knowledge, experiences, and opportunities to make connections between cuisines have enriched my understanding and appreciation of Sicilian cooking and its flavors. Sicilian cuisine remains unique due to its historical influences, ingredients, and methods of cooking. 

 

What inspired you to write about kohlrabi's role in Sicilian cuisine?

My inspiration to write about kohlrabi and its role in Sicilian cuisine stems from the memorable family tradition of cooking this vegetable in Ragusa, my father's hometown. 

 

The significance of kohlrabi in his family went beyond cooking this vegetable. Kohlrabi was a centerpiece of family feasts that brought everyone together, including the buying of the vegetables, the preparation, and the sharing of the cooked meal with the family. 

 

Regarding the purchasing of the vegetable, my father's two sisters (my two aunts) and one cousin who lived on different floors of the same building purchased their vegetables and fruit from a trusted local traveling ortalano (seller of fruit vegetables), who came around every morning—excluding Sunday—with his van. Each time I visited my Sicilian aunts in Ragusa, I had this unique experience where the squawk of the ortolano was heard from the street below their apartments, announcing his arrival. When it was in season, the leafy bunches of kohlrabi were such prized produce.

 

Out would come their purses and their baskets tied to the end of a rope, and they'd go to their balconies where they questioned the ortolano in detail about the quality of his produce. If satisfied, they lowered their baskets, which he filled. They hauled them back up, examined the contents, and only then, if convinced, lowered their basket once again with the money tucked inside it. Then, the aunties would make special requests for the next day, entreating him to visit them first so that they had the best produce. Sometimes, they traveled down to the van in their slippers and dressing gowns.

 

Then, there was the preparation of the kohlrabi. I have particularly fond memories of one of the Ragusa aunts, a remarkable cook who implemented the cooking and eating of this special dish. She is a champion pasta maker and ensured there was fresh pasta for family gatherings. The kohlrabi dish always featured a distinctive pasta known as causunnedda, the regional Sicilian name for this short pasta shape. The atmosphere of these family gatherings was gratifying. There was laughter, stories, fondness for the family, and the pleasures associated with sharing the meal and eating something delicious.

Kohlrabi are called cavoli in Sicily; in Italian, it is known as cavolo rapa. Cavolo is the generic term for some of the brassicas; for example, cavolo verza is a cabbage, cavolo nero is Tuscan cabbage, cavolo rosso is red cabbage, and in Italian, cavoli are cauliflowers. (Just to confuse things even further, Sicilians call cauliflowers broccoli.)

 
In the Ragusa family, they referred to the whole dish as causunnedda. I am assuming this was the abbreviation of causunnedda chi cavoli (Sicilian), causunnedda with kohlrabi.

 

How can one forget and not celebrate these memories?

 

The Ragusani are known for their straightforward, flavorful dishes, which focus on local produce, rich meats—especially pork—and seasonal vegetables. This emphasis on simplicity has profoundly shaped my understanding of cooking, showing me that the best meals often come from the freshest ingredients and heartfelt traditions.

 

Spending time with my father's family, particularly with this aunt, has further deepened my passion for Sicilian cooking. She has been a treasure trove of knowledge, eager to share recipes and techniques, knowing how much I cherished my heritage. Through her stories and guidance, I've come to appreciate the intricate web of flavors, customs, and memories that define Sicilian cuisine—making kohlrabi not just a vegetable but a symbol of family connection and culinary history.

 

How significant is kohlrabi in Sicilian cuisine compared to other vegetables?

Kohlrabi's significance in Sicilian cuisine may be modest compared to more popular common vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, or green leafy vegetables (this includes wild greens). 

What is unique in the cooking of this vegetable is the emphasis placed on the kohlrabi leaves, often considered more valuable than the bulb itself. They are sold in bunches; the bulbs are smaller than I have found in Australia, and there are many leaves. There are purple-colored kohlrabi and light green. What I experienced in Ragusa were the light green ones, whereas in Syracuse, they were an attractive purple with some green. In Australia, at least in Melbourne, where I live, I have only seen green ones.

 

Purple kohlrabi. Photo by Marisa Raniolo Wilkins

 

How does kohlrabi use vary regionally?

While my mother's side of the family excelled in their own culinary traditions, I didn't encounter kohlrabi in her family. Instead, it was in Ragusa that I truly came to appreciate its significance.

In Sicily, as in other parts of Italy, kohlrabi is often simply boiled, drained, and then presented as a cooked salad, dressed with a generous drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, a sprinkle of salt, and either lemon juice or vinegar. This method, while straightforward, showcases the humble quality of the ingredients.  

In the fertile region of Acireale, just north of Catania and rich with the volcanic soil of Mount Etna, kohlrabi takes on a different role. Here, it's not just a simple side dish but a flavorful dressing for pasta. The vegetables (bulb and leaves) are boiled and drained, and the cooking water is preserved to cook the pasta. The drained vegetables are sautéed in hot oil with garlic and chili that creates a vibrant dish that might also include a splash of tomato for added depth. I recently contacted my cousin in Augusta, just south of Catania, who said that she follows a similar method but enriches the depth of flavor with anchovies during the sautéing process, illustrating the creativity inherent in Sicilian cooking.

What sets Ragusa apart is how the Ragusani relatives have a distinct way of cooking it. They use homemade causunnedda, but they also add fresh pork rind to the water while cooking the kohlrabi, infusing it with the rich flavor of the homemade broth. 

The causunnedda is then cooked in this flavorful broth, which transforms it into something delicious, turning a humble vegetable into a celebration of local flavors and family heritage.

In my mother's family, broth is typically made with chicken, veal, or beef—never fresh pork. This stark contrast highlights how regional traditions shape our understanding of food. These traditional methods and unique techniques not only enrich the dish, but also weave a narrative of family, community and culture. 

 

What is your favorite way to prepare and enjoy kohlrabi?

My favorite way to prepare and enjoy kohlrabi is a blend of tradition and creativity inspired by both my Sicilian roots and modern culinary trends. Here in Australia, kohlrabi has sparse green leaves, which is a departure from the leafy bunches I remember from Sicily. When I do come across kohlrabi with its leafy greens intact, it becomes a richer experience.

 

I treat the leaves much like I would cook cime di rapa or broccoli in a classic pasta dish with the greens and bulb sautéed with garlic and a little chili. Often, I have had to buy bunches of kale to increase the number of green leaves. Recently, my cousin in Augusta shared a brilliant tip of also adding anchovies while sautéing the vegetables. I do this often when I am preparing other vegetables, and it makes sense to do this with kohlrabi. I am looking forward to trying this.

 

Of course, I've also embraced contemporary ways of preparing kohlrabi, especially with exposure to how it is prepared in other countries. I like it in crisp salads or rich soups, showcasing its versatility. But there's something profoundly satisfying about returning to those old Sicilian traditions, reminding me of family meals where ingredients and preparation were cherished. Each preparation tells a story—of the past, family, and the flavors that unite us across time and distance.

 

What do you hope readers will take away from your recipes?

What I hope readers will take away from my recipes is a rich tapestry of connection, nostalgia, and inspiration. For those who have traveled to Sicily, I would like them to remember their culinary adventures and the vibrancy and beauty of Sicily.

 

For readers unfamiliar with Sicilian cooking, I hope to introduce them to its unique flavors and traditions, exemplifying how it diverges from the more commonly known Italian cuisine and its regions.

 

Many of my readers are second-generation Sicilian Americans who cherish the recipes and stories that connect them to their heritage. I hope my recipes spark memories of family gatherings, the aromas in their grandparents' kitchens, and the warmth of shared meals. Sharing these recipes would be very rewarding if they not only valued those memories, cooked those recipes, and also passed on the traditions to the next generation.

 

Cooking becomes more than just a task; it transforms into a celebration of culture and history. Therefore, most of all, I would like to inspire curiosity about Sicilian cuisine and to motivate them to explore its diverse ingredients and techniques. Cooking Sicilian recipes should increase understanding of the broader regional variations within the cuisine of Italy. 

 

>>Get Marisa's wet pasta dish with kohlrabi recipe here!<<

 

 

 

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Following a Mediterranean diet is associated with a lower risk of heart failure, particularly in women. So says a recent review published by a group of European scientists, including researchers at Sicily's University of Palermo and Kore University of Enna. 

The results suggest following such a diet could benefit women, who research shows tend to develop heart failure later in life than men. They are also more likely to experience heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (otherwise known as diastolic heart failure). 

While women with heart failure tend to live longer than men, they experience lower quality of life during those extended years. Perhaps eating more fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and vegetable oils (and fewer meat and dairy products) can help women reduce their risk and avoid unnecessary suffering. 

For more information, I reached out to Saint Camillus International University of Health Sciences Associate Professor of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine Nicola Veronese. 

In his previous role as Senior Researcher of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine at the University of Palermo, Dr. Veronese was part of the team that performed this latest systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of the Mediterranean diet on the incidence of heart failure. He shared more about heart failure and which components of the diet contribute to its heart-healthy benefits. 

 

 

Why did you and your colleagues embark on this review?

Heart failure is among the most common causes of hospitalization, particularly, but not only in older people. We have in mind other cardiovascular diseases, but very little is known about heart failure, particularly in terms of prevention. So, we started with the idea that the Mediterranean diet has a protective effect on several medical conditions. But, the knowledge of its effect on heart failure was limited, so we decided to do this work.

 

What is heart failure?

Heart failure is a common condition where your heart has difficulties regulating normal blood pressure or blood for your system and organs. It is a common cause of hospitalization. There are better medications compared to some years ago, but they're not able to solve the problem; they are only able to reduce the symptoms of heart failure.

 

How does heart failure affect women and men differently?

Our research tried to highlight this important topic because gender differences are highly supported in cardiovascular research. We don't have any reason for these epidemiological findings. You are told about this without being able to find a precise mechanism. However, the research suggests that, for example, the Mediterranean diet's effect was stronger in women than in men. This is probably due to hormonal changes or differences mediating the interaction between a Mediterranean diet and the risk of heart failure.

 

Women may also adhere to the Mediterranean diet more than men because, in Europe, they cook more frequently than men, particularly in families. They're probably better positioned to tailor foods to be more Mediterranean. 

 

What components of the Mediterranean diet contribute to its heart-health benefits?

First, olive oil is like gold in Italian kitchens. It has a lot of anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Second is the fact that you limit practically all animal fats. Fish offers strong cardiovascular heart disease protection compared to meats like beef. Finally, the Mediterranean diet is a spiritual attitude to follow with your family. This is very important to decrease anxiety, depression, and your risk of heart failure or other cardiovascular diseases. 

 

What were the limitations of your review?

They are observational studies, so we did not put an intervention of, for example, one group with a randomized diet and the other with low fat. There is also somewhat of a selection bias. First, you are including people who are not adhering to your reality. Second, we observed that the Mediterranean diet sometimes was not reported. It is somewhat unrealistic to think that today, you'll have practically the same diet in 10 years. Maybe today, you will eat animals, and in 10 years, you will become vegan. This is an important limitation, of course, but it is related to the fact that these are observational studies. 

 

What do you hope people will take away from these findings?

I hope they gain some knowledge about how important the Mediterranean diet is for this disease. Unfortunately, heart failure is less known compared to other cardiovascular diseases, metabolic disease, or diabetes. However, it is a very important condition. Knowing that the Mediterranean diet can decrease your risk of heart failure is important not only from an epidemiological point of view but also as an attempt to try at least to follow a Mediterranean diet. 

 

 

 

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A classic Italian soup, traditionally made from vegetable scraps and paired with beans and sometimes pasta, minestrone is the perfect first course for a Sicilian supper. There are a variety of ways to prepare this meal starter, but I was drawn to a recipe by Nadia Fazio of Mangia Bedda.

 

Nadia's blog reflects her quest to transcribe all of her mother's classic recipes. It has an even deeper meaning for her now that their mother has passed. 

 

I sat down with Nadia to discuss her Sicilian-Canadian upbringing, the origin of Mangia Bedda (and its name), the right way to make minestrone, and the art of shelling your own beans.  

 

 

What's your background?

I'm Italian-Canadian. Both my parents, however, were born in Sicily. They are actually from the same little town in Sicily (Naso in the province of Messina). My father emigrated to Canada in 1954. My mom, after they got married, came here and joined in 1959.

 

What was it like growing up Sicilian Canadian?

My siblings and I grew up with all the typical Italian traditions that they brought over from Sicily. It's interesting because it appears that when people came here from Sicily, it was sort of like time froze. They maintained the exact same traditions, with regard to food and family, that they practiced in Sicily. 

 

I grew up with the typical Sicilian foods, all the traditional foods, all homemade from scratch, especially at this time of the year, all of the preserving, making the tomato sauce and all the different vegetables, the beans, and roasting the peppers and the eggplants and all of that.

 

I grew up surrounded by that, and I think my memories of my childhood and my parents are all, for the most part, actually centered around food, and I didn't appreciate it at the time. I really did not appreciate it.

 

I remember being dragged to a local farmers market in Montreal, and I found it so drab. I mean, I was a kid. It was boring, and it's one of my favorite places today.

 

Another memory that stands out is going to a farm outside of the city to get fresh milk (probably unpasteurized at the time) so that my mom could come home and make ricotta with it.

 

Tell us about your project, Mangia Bedda.

I started this blog almost 10 years ago as a little part-time hobby. It slowly grew and evolved, and I realized that my mission was really to transcribe all of my mom's recipes so that they wouldn't be lost. Most importantly, I wanted to write them down and get the correct quantities of ingredients because whenever you speak to an Italian nonna about how much flour goes into a recipe, it's as much as needed.

 

I started going to my mom's home to prepare one recipe at a time, watching her make it and stopping her at every step. "Wait, Mom, I've got to measure. I've got to weigh; I've got to write down how much it is." So that's what I did because I wanted to make sure that I had my favorite recipes. And that's even more dear to me now. I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to do that.

 

I lost my mom a year ago, actually. So I am ever so grateful that I had that opportunity to do that because I have the recipes, not only for me, but I see how much they're appreciated by the types of comments and feedback I get from my readers, who are so happy that I took the time to document them. They share these memories of growing up with these recipes and are so happy that there's a place where they can get them.

 

Where does the name of your blog come from?

Bedda means my pretty one or beautiful one. And that's of significance to me because when I was little, I only met my nonna twice in my lifetime. She lived in Sicily, but I remember I was two years old when I met her, and apparently, I didn't want to eat. She always said those words to me, "Mangia, bedda," to coax me to eat.  

 

What does this minestrone remind you of?

The first thing that comes to mind is memories of this time of year, specifically because this was when my mom made huge batches of minestrone, and she had all the vegetables from my dad's garden. So, if I look at all the ingredients and the recipe, the celery came from the garden. The tomatoes came from the garden. The zucchini and the green beans came from the garden. Oh, and some of the greens, I put in fresh spinach that's easily accessible, but you can use any greens in the garden.

 

I remember my mom making huge batches. She would freeze it before adding pasta and put it into freezer bags. She had a freezer full; we used to have the deep-chest freezer that we had in the garage at the time. She would take out a bag at a time and cook it up for us.

 

So, what exactly is minestrone?

It's an Italian vegetable and bean soup. The key component is that it's vegetables and beans. The beans are always present. Usually, they're Romano beans, but they could be white beans. It's just a medley of vegetables cooked down with these beans. There's a tomato base, and in my mom's case, it was always fresh tomatoes from the garden.

 

Usually, pasta is added to it as well. It's usually a small shape, like a ditalini. It could be small shells or elbow macaroni. Another typical addition would be taking spaghetti and breaking it up into small pieces. We call this spaghetti "sminuzzati." That was very, very common. In fact, sometimes, my mom might've even mixed pasta.  

 

How do you flavor your minestrone?

Most minestrone soups are made with plain water, which is the classic way. But you could use chicken stock or vegetable broth if you want.

 

The herbs are also important—fresh basil, parsley, and thyme. You could add flavor with bay leaves. In just about any soup, I always add a couple of bay leaves.

 

I also add Parmesan rind. I think that makes such a big difference. If you want to stick to using plain water and not some kind of broth, just throw in a Parmesan rind, and I think it's fantastic. It gives a lot of flavor. And, of course, I always serve it with Parmesan cheese. Having minestrone or anything with pasta without cheese is hard for me.

 

Another thing you could add just before serving is a nice drizzle of olive oil. Olive oil on top adds tons of flavor.

 

What did your mother add that was unique to this recipe?

In our house, it was always made with freshly picked vegetables from our garden because, as I said, my mom made large batches. At this time of year, my parents often headed out to local farms and picked their own vegetables to supplement what we had. We could get more tomatoes, more zucchini, and so on.

 

I should add that the beans used were not dried beans that you just bought and soaked from the grocery store. They would always go out and get fresh beans. I actually did this recently. I went to a local farmers market and got a huge 20-pound bag of beans in their pods.

 

There was a lot of time spent shelling these beans at this time of year. They were the beans that we shelled ourselves. She also froze bags full of these beans to make pasta fagioli as well during the winter months.

 

What do you get out of that experience of shelling your own beans?

Oh, it connects me to my mom. When I was a kid, I was always trying to find a way to get away from these tasks. And my mom didn't force me. She let me go out and play and wouldn't hold me to these tasks. But for the last few years, I made sure to head out with my mom every year to get those beans. So we spent time the last few years sitting here, actually in my backyard, bonding while we were shelling the beans and chitchatting and talking about family and so on. So it's really special. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to do that. And now I do that with my husband and my daughter. It's just continuing that tradition.

 

What do you hope readers will take away from your recipe?

What I hope readers will take away is a few things. I think, first of all, the importance of preparing a simple, healthy meal from scratch with fresh ingredients for themselves and their family. I want to show them that it's really not that difficult to do so. Also, the importance of preserving family food traditions and passing them on to the next generation.

>>Get Nadia Fazio's minestrone recipe here.<<

 

 

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It was late afternoon when our bus rolled into Catania. After checking into our hotel, we wandered over to a cafe across the street, which proudly advertised "Sicilian Bruschetta." 

 

My Sicilian family never served bruschetta. Growing up in Wisconsin, it was just something I'd find at a hip trattoria. So I assumed this menu item was geared toward American tourists, who pronounce it "broo-shetta" instead of the Italian "broo-sketta." 

 

Still, I was intrigued. What made this bruschetta Sicilian?

We ordered a plate, and it was delightful: sweet Sicilian tomatoes, fresh basil, crunchy caper berries, roasted garlic, and just the right amount of olive oil and vinegar. It was a celebration of Sicilian culture on crunchy, toasted bread.

 

But I wondered. Was bruschetta really Italian? Where did it come from?

 

For one thing, it probably didn't originate in Sicily. There are some who say that the Etruscans invented bruschetta; it was a way of dressing stale, saltless bread. Or perhaps it was the Ancient Romans. Either way, the appetizer has likely existed nearly as long as olive oil, according to the late James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement winner and Italian cooking writer Marcella Hazan, who wrote about bruschetta in The Classic Italian Cookbook. As for the name, she explained, "bruschetta comes from bruscare, which means 'to roast over coals.'"

 

I recently stumbled on a YouTube video of another Sicilian bruschetta recipe. Produced by Francesco Elia, aka Tortellino, this recipe starts with good-quality bread: a fresh-baked pane nero di Castelvetrano loaf made from tumminia durum, which, like bruschetta, has ties to Ancient Rome. According to Francesco, this was also the go-to bread during World War II when other flours were harder to come by. 

 

Francesco mixes his toppings—tomato, basil, garlic, salt, and pepper—with extra virgin olive oil and vinegar. He lets the mixture sit and marinate for several minutes to let the flavors blend. During that time, he bakes the slices until the edges are golden but not too crispy. 

 

I contacted Francesco, a Sicilian born in Catania who now lives in the United Kingdom, to chat about this popular antipasti offering. 

 

 

What is Sicilian bruschetta?

It can be as simple as olive oil, oregano, and pepper or as sophisticated as looking almost like a pizza. It doesn't really matter. But the fundamental basis is the way you cook the bread. 

As long as the olive oil is good, especially if it's new, that is a form of bruschetta. You can have hot bread, bread under the grill, or sometimes even bread on the barbecue. You get a lovely charcoal and smoky flavor.

People add oregano, for example, to give a little bit of a pizza flavor, along with garlic, tomatoes, and mozzarella. It's a bit like a pizza to an extent.

I also included some balsamic drizzle in my recipe, which is incredibly tasty. I did that because that's what I was used to doing here in Sicily. So I'm calling it a Sicilian bruschetta because that's how we used to eat in my house. It's generally an appetizer as well. It's a form of a starter. 

You can dip it with olives and sun-dried tomatoes on the side. And that is more cultural nowadays, of course. But in the past, it was very much about survival because it was something you could do very easily, and you could get by just by eating bread, olive oil, and tomatoes.

Is there a proper way to prepare the basil?

I think basil is okay as long as you don't cook it. Basil is an incredible herb. I always put it at the end of my dishes. If it's a hot ragù, for example, you will see me adding the basil at the end because it releases lots of flavors. I do that with most of my herbs.

 

It doesn't matter if you crush it, chop it with a knife, or do it with your hands. People say that if you chop with a knife, it loses its properties. I think it's rubbish. Personally, it's so minimal. The whole thing doesn't matter. The most important thing is to leave it to marinade because if you leave it for 20 minutes or 30 minutes to marinade with the olive oil, you will see that it will release its lovely flavors and taste incredible. That is an ingredient that is not in the original bruschetta. It is part of the evolution of bruschetta because basil obviously goes really well with most things, especially with tomatoes.

 

How do you ensure that your bread will be crispy rather than soggy when adding the toppings?

What I do is I put mine under the grill, and I do not put the mix until I'm ready to eat it. Generally, I tend to serve it hot. So if I am entertaining, for example, and I've got guests coming, I will do the bruschetta bread under the grill and then call everybody at the table. They sit at the table, and I'll get it out of the oven, and it's hot and crispy. Then, I'll have the little pot of my marinade in the middle. Then people can help themselves and then eat it straight away. And because between putting it on the bread and eating, it's pretty much a couple of minutes, it stays crispy. However, if you were to do it earlier and leave it on the bread, it would get soggy because the bread would absorb the olive oil. It will taste okay but not the same because you will lose the crunchiness. So, if you want to retain the crunchiness between spreading the marinade and eating it, just a few seconds.

What is the traditional serving of bruschetta?

There isn't one really. I think in Sicily, you have the bread in the middle of the table, and you help yourselves. That is generally how food is consumed in Sicily. It's more about the warmth and the family fun of fitting together rather than the etiquette of having to have it on a plate that becomes very un-Sicilian, so to say. I'm sure some people do that, but it's not how people generally eat in a household; in a family, you put the food in the middle of the table, and people help themselves.

 

What makes a recipe Sicilian?

What makes it really Sicilian is ingenuity and making it do with what you have. Sicilians are very good at using their imagination to make anything they have in the fridge. That is why Sicilians have come up with so many different recipes: because their imagination is really great, and from very little, they can make something very, very big. And the best thing is that Sicilian food is the simplest food. And that's why bruschetta is so great because it's very, very simple. You will find that even the most acclaimed pasta dishes in Sicily have only a few ingredients but are incredibly delicious. The same applies to a lot of pasta, for example. There are only a few ingredients, maybe three, four, or five. 

The reason is that the fewer ingredients you have, the more you can taste what the meal is about. And so if it's about the mozzarella, then you can taste the mozzarella. If it's about the tomato in a recipe, then you taste the tomato. 

The true Italian and Sicilian dish is simple cuisine where you can eat something, identify what is in it, and appreciate a blend of flavors without something being overpowering. A lot of Sicilian food also has garlic, but I will only put one little clove because I don't want it to be overpowering. 

And that is where Sicilians are good at making something work from very, very little.

 

Sicilian bruschetta recipe

 

 

Preserving Sicily's Bread-Making Tradition

 

 

 

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Director and food stylist Victoria Granof is well aware of America's love affair with Italy. It's something she shares, but one region of Italy particularly inspires her—and it's not the one at the tip of your tongue.

 

"I get so frustrated when people start talking about Tuscany," she says. "I mean, Tuscany is really nice—really nice. But Sicily is more my style; it's so different from any other part of Italy. People just think it's mafia, mafia, mafia. And it's so much more than that. I am on this mission to show people the Sicily that I love and that it's fabulous and different from the rest of Italy."

 

One of Victoria's obsessions is the aesthetic beauty of Sicily's famous sweets, which inspired her latest project, Sicily, My Sweet: Love Notes to an Island, with Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Puddings, and Preserves.

Victoria and I recently sat down for a conversation where she shared her surprising Sicilian connection, her favorite recipes, what she learned working with photographer Irving Penn, the fascinating and sustainable way Sicilians make cannoli, and what she hopes book readers will take away. 

 

 

Tell us about your background and connection to Sicily.

My father's side of the family is northern Italian, and on my mother's side of the family were Sephardic Jews from Spain before the Spanish Inquisition.

We always thought we originated in Spain and landed in Turkey for the last 400 years. But the language, dialect, and food that we took with us, as well as a lot of the traditions, were not Turkish. 

When I went looking for my roots and to feel a connection, I went to Turkey, and it was like, "Oh, this is nice, but this is not home."

It wasn't until I read an article about Maria Grammatico, who owns a pastry shop in Erice. She said she was getting older and was afraid that none of the younger generation wanted to keep the tradition of Sicilian pastry alive because it was just dying off. All they wanted to do was move to a big city or out of Sicily and do something else.

I was really drawn to this because I was a pastry chef then, and I thought, okay, I'll go, and she can teach me. So that's what first brought me there, and I felt this really strong connection as soon as I went. 

Fast-forward to maybe five years ago, when all my family did our DNA and found out that we're Sicilian—57% Sicilian. Then I started really researching it. 

Spain wasn't Spain as we know it now at that time. It was the Spanish empire, which included a lot of South and Central America and from Naples down through Sicily. 

That's where we started from, who knows how long ago, but we were in the Sicily of Spain. And so there are still traces of the dialect in what we brought from 500 years ago, just like Sicilian Americans whose families came here a hundred years ago or 200 years ago with that same dialect, they will be speaking that same dialect for another 300 years. That's what they brought with them, and that's what gets passed down through the family. 

 

Is there a recipe in this book that has special personal significance?

I think everybody's grandmother makes biscotti Regina, the cookies with the sesame seeds. I remember my grandmother had a cookie tin of those on top of her refrigerator. Honestly, now that I think about it, it was kind of rusty inside. Those cookies probably took years off our lives!

When she died, I remember taking the cookies off the top of the refrigerator and thinking, "These are the last ones she's ever going to make with her hands."

I had one in my freezer for the longest time. Then we had a power outage last summer, and everything had to go. I forgot that the cookie was in there, so it went with it. It's very heartbreaking. 

 

You were a pastry chef and now a food stylist. How did that influence this book?

I had to go against all of my pastry-chef training, make it approachable and easy, and simplify it for home cooks. So, that part didn't come into it other than I love making pastries. 

The book's aesthetics were really important. In the end, two publishers were interested in it. (There were others, but these were the two that I was considering.) I went with Hardie Grant Publishing because they were willing and eager to have me not only design the book but also guide its aesthetics. 

I worked with a designer in Sydney, Australia, on the book design. When I saw her very first designs, I was like, "Oh my God. I love this so much."

Then they went through a couple of iterations, but just the colors! It was really important for me to have those colors in the book and on the book. It wasn't those earth-tony Tuscan things, so people would really understand that Sicily is different from the rest of Italy, period, and why it's so fabulously different. So the color had a lot to do with it—the graphics, the photographs, everything. 

 

Describe those colors.

I used pinks and greens and oranges and blues: the colors in the tile work and those on houses. There are pink houses in Sicily and raspberry-colored houses in the country. And I just love that color. So a lot of that; not millennial pink, but a lot of that kind of Sicilian country house/raspberry pink and the green of pistachios, I really leaned into that. And the orange of orange peel and yellow of lemons—just the colors in the ingredients, really. 

 

You worked with the late Irving Penn. How did he influence you?

I worked with him for 10 years. The funny thing was that I met the Vogue photo editor at a party, and it was a very short, cordial conversation. I handed him my card, and that was it. 

Then, a few months later, he called me and said, "Mr. Penn is looking for a collaborator. And I remember meeting you at the party, and you were very reserved and quiet, and that's what he likes. That's the vibe he likes, so I think it would be a good match."

So, for 10 years, I had to keep my mouth shut and not chat. It was a little bit torturous from that point of view. But you know what? I learned the economy of everything. There was nothing extra in anything. None of his output, none of his persona, none of his words, none of his anything were extra. Everything was essential. So he never had superfluous anything anywhere around him. 

I learned what is important in a picture and what is not necessary. I learned when to stop because several times, he would set up the shot, do a Polaroid, and take a picture. He would do a Polaroid first; if he liked it, he would take the picture, and then we would leave.

We'd be done before lunch. And it was never like, "Alright, let's do some variations," or "Let's do five more just in case," or "Let's see; do we think we have it?" No, after many years, he knew what it took to get a good picture and how to recognize it when he got it. And that was huge. 

It's a practice and a discipline. I'm so grateful for that because I've used it in all aspects of my life, including personal relationships. It's really important to know when to stop.

 

Which Sicilian desserts should everyone experience?:

Well, anybody who hasn't had a really good cannolo is… I mean, forget it!

I learned the last time I was in Sicily that they use bamboo as cannoli-shaping tubes. It was kind of a revelation for me. If you've ever done that with the metal tubes and fried the shells, the first thing it does is sink to the bottom. And then the bottom of the shell gets a little bit darker, which nobody notices, really. And then you have to keep turning them around and everything. With the bamboo, it floats. So not only does it just float and turn around by itself, but it's porous. So it cooks from the inside out and the outside in, and it allows air bubbles to come through and make the dough lighter. It's really an amazing thing. They turn black, but they are used over and over, and it's sustainable.

 

I'm also really obsessed with St. Agatha's breast cakes. I do them a couple of different ways, but the way I really love them is just with the pastry dough, the ricotta inside, and the icing on top. I love those symbolically—and just about anything with almonds and pistachios.

 

Most of my recipes are traditional, but some of them I developed that are just in the spirit of Sicily using Sicilian ingredients. I have shortbread cookie recipes, and one has sun-dried tomatoes and anise seeds. It's treating the tomatoes like dried fruit because that's what they are. Then, the other one has dried figs and oil-cured olives in it. It's really treating the olives and the tomatoes like the fruits they actually are. And it's really, really good. You could just keep the rolls of the dough in your freezer and then slice and bake it as you need it.

 

What do you hope readers take away?

I want them to appreciate this on so many levels. I want them to open their eyes and minds and appreciate Sicily for the multicultural, fabulously weird, and delicious place that it is.

In the book's introduction, I really talk about how if you go to other parts of Italy, they look like postcards. Everybody brings the same pictures back from Rome. There I am, throwing the coin in the Trevi Fountain. There I am in front of the Coliseum. They're all the same pictures. And the takeaway is the same. You can go to those places passively. You can just observe.

But what I love to say about Sicily is if you are there, you're in the game—not just enjoying it passively. You're not just looking at it. You're experiencing it. And some of it is funky, and there's garbage on the side of the road. There's some funky stuff there. But it's worth it because being there is such a heightened sensory experience. 

After so many centuries of being dominated and controlled by all kinds of different civilizations, people, empires, and all of that, it's just turned into this really strong, strange, wonderfully mixed-up, and beautiful place. It's not in spite of having that history; it's because of the history that it's so great.

 

>>Get your copy of Sicily, My Sweet here!<<

 

 

If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to my newsletter for more content and updates!

Director and food stylist Victoria Granof is well aware of America's love affair with Italy. It's something she shares, but one region of Italy particularly inspires her—and it's not the one at the tip of your tongue.

 

"I get so frustrated when people start talking about Tuscany," she says. "I mean, Tuscany is really nice—really nice. But Sicily is more my style; it's so different from any other part of Italy. People just think it's mafia, mafia, mafia. And it's so much more than that. I am on this mission to show people the Sicily that I love and that it's fabulous and different from the rest of Italy."

One of Victoria's obsessions is the aesthetic beauty of Sicily's famous sweets, which inspired her latest project, Sicily, My Sweet: Love Notes to an Island, with Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Puddings, and Preserves.

Victoria and I recently sat down for a conversation where she shared her surprising Sicilian connection, her favorite recipes, what she learned working with photographer Irving Penn, the fascinating and sustainable way Sicilians make cannoli, and what she hopes book readers will take away. 

 

 

Tell us about your background and connection to Sicily.

My father's side of the family is northern Italian, and on my mother's side of the family were Sephardic Jews from Spain before the Spanish Inquisition.

We always thought we originated in Spain and landed in Turkey for the last 400 years. But the language, dialect, and food that we took with us, as well as a lot of the traditions, were not Turkish. 

When I went looking for my roots and to feel a connection, I went to Turkey, and it was like, "Oh, this is nice, but this is not home."

It wasn't until I read an article about Maria Grammatico, who owns a pastry shop in Erice. She said she was getting older and was afraid that none of the younger generation wanted to keep the tradition of Sicilian pastry alive because it was just dying off. All they wanted to do was move to a big city or out of Sicily and do something else.

I was really drawn to this because I was a pastry chef then, and I thought, okay, I'll go, and she can teach me. So that's what first brought me there, and I felt this really strong connection as soon as I went. 

Fast-forward to maybe five years ago, when all my family did our DNA and found out that we're Sicilian—57% Sicilian. Then I started really researching it. 

Spain wasn't Spain as we know it now at that time. It was the Spanish empire, which included a lot of South and Central America and from Naples down through Sicily. 

That's where we started from, who knows how long ago, but we were in the Sicily of Spain. And so there are still traces of the dialect in what we brought from 500 years ago, just like Sicilian Americans whose families came here a hundred years ago or 200 years ago with that same dialect, they will be speaking that same dialect for another 300 years. That's what they brought with them, and that's what gets passed down through the family. 

 

Is there a recipe in this book that has special personal significance?

I think everybody's grandmother makes biscotti Regina, the cookies with the sesame seeds. I remember my grandmother had a cookie tin of those on top of her refrigerator. Honestly, now that I think about it, it was kind of rusty inside. Those cookies probably took years off our lives!

When she died, I remember taking the cookies off the top of the refrigerator and thinking, "These are the last ones she's ever going to make with her hands."

I had one in my freezer for the longest time. Then we had a power outage last summer, and everything had to go. I forgot that the cookie was in there, so it went with it. It's very heartbreaking. 

 

You were a pastry chef and now a food stylist. How did that influence this book?

I had to go against all of my pastry-chef training, make it approachable and easy, and simplify it for home cooks. So, that part didn't come into it other than I love making pastries. 

The book's aesthetics were really important. In the end, two publishers were interested in it. (There were others, but these were the two that I was considering.) I went with Hardie Grant Publishing because they were willing and eager to have me not only design the book but also guide its aesthetics. 

I worked with a designer in Sydney, Australia, on the book design. When I saw her very first designs, I was like, "Oh my God. I love this so much."

Then they went through a couple of iterations, but just the colors! It was really important for me to have those colors in the book and on the book. It wasn't those earth-tony Tuscan things, so people would really understand that Sicily is different from the rest of Italy, period, and why it's so fabulously different. So the color had a lot to do with it—the graphics, the photographs, everything. 

 

Describe those colors.

I used pinks and greens and oranges and blues: the colors in the tile work and those on houses. There are pink houses in Sicily and raspberry-colored houses in the country. And I just love that color. So a lot of that; not millennial pink, but a lot of that kind of Sicilian country house/raspberry pink and the green of pistachios, I really leaned into that. And the orange of orange peel and yellow of lemons—just the colors in the ingredients, really. 

 

You worked with the late Irving Penn. How did he influence you?

I worked with him for 10 years. The funny thing was that I met the Vogue photo editor at a party, and it was a very short, cordial conversation. I handed him my card, and that was it. 

Then, a few months later, he called me and said, "Mr. Penn is looking for a collaborator. And I remember meeting you at the party, and you were very reserved and quiet, and that's what he likes. That's the vibe he likes, so I think it would be a good match."

So, for 10 years, I had to keep my mouth shut and not chat. It was a little bit torturous from that point of view. But you know what? I learned the economy of everything. There was nothing extra in anything. None of his output, none of his persona, none of his words, none of his anything were extra. Everything was essential. So he never had superfluous anything anywhere around him. 

I learned what is important in a picture and what is not necessary. I learned when to stop because several times, he would set up the shot, do a Polaroid, and take a picture. He would do a Polaroid first; if he liked it, he would take the picture, and then we would leave.

We'd be done before lunch. And it was never like, "Alright, let's do some variations," or "Let's do five more just in case," or "Let's see; do we think we have it?" No, after many years, he knew what it took to get a good picture and how to recognize it when he got it. And that was huge. 

It's a practice and a discipline. I'm so grateful for that because I've used it in all aspects of my life, including personal relationships. It's really important to know when to stop.

 

Which Sicilian desserts should everyone experience?:

Well, anybody who hasn't had a really good cannolo is… I mean, forget it!

I learned the last time I was in Sicily that they use bamboo as cannoli-shaping tubes. It was kind of a revelation for me. If you've ever done that with the metal tubes and fried the shells, the first thing it does is sink to the bottom. And then the bottom of the shell gets a little bit darker, which nobody notices, really. And then you have to keep turning them around and everything. With the bamboo, it floats. So not only does it just float and turn around by itself, but it's porous. So it cooks from the inside out and the outside in, and it allows air bubbles to come through and make the dough lighter. It's really an amazing thing. They turn black, but they are used over and over, and it's sustainable.

 

I'm also really obsessed with St. Agatha's breast cakes. I do them a couple of different ways, but the way I really love them is just with the pastry dough, the ricotta inside, and the icing on top. I love those symbolically—and just about anything with almonds and pistachios.

 

Most of my recipes are traditional, but some of them I developed that are just in the spirit of Sicily using Sicilian ingredients. I have shortbread cookie recipes, and one has sun-dried tomatoes and anise seeds. It's treating the tomatoes like dried fruit because that's what they are. Then, the other one has dried figs and oil-cured olives in it. It's really treating the olives and the tomatoes like the fruits they actually are. And it's really, really good. You could just keep the rolls of the dough in your freezer and then slice and bake it as you need it.

 

What do you hope readers take away?

I want them to appreciate this on so many levels. I want them to open their eyes and minds and appreciate Sicily for the multicultural, fabulously weird, and delicious place that it is.

In the book's introduction, I really talk about how if you go to other parts of Italy, they look like postcards. Everybody brings the same pictures back from Rome. There I am, throwing the coin in the Trevi Fountain. There I am in front of the Coliseum. They're all the same pictures. And the takeaway is the same. You can go to those places passively. You can just observe.

But what I love to say about Sicily is if you are there, you're in the game—not just enjoying it passively. You're not just looking at it. You're experiencing it. And some of it is funky, and there's garbage on the side of the road. There's some funky stuff there. But it's worth it because being there is such a heightened sensory experience. 

After so many centuries of being dominated and controlled by all kinds of different civilizations, people, empires, and all of that, it's just turned into this really strong, strange, wonderfully mixed-up, and beautiful place. It's not in spite of having that history; it's because of the history that is so great.

 

>>Get your copy of Sicily, My Sweet here!<<

 

 

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Dance and folk music are the heart and soul of Sicilian tradition, connecting people and introducing others to the region's rich heritage.

 

For 39 years, Amici Italiani (Italian Friends) of Rockford, Illinois, has shared and preserved culture through folk dance. With both adult and youth troupes, the group performs traditional Quadriglias, Saltarellos, Mazurcas, Tarantellas, and Codigliones, all carefully researched as members of the Italian Folk Art Federation of America.

 

I recently chatted with Amici Italiani Director Bea Giammarese Ricotta, whose family came from the Sicilian towns of Aragona and Bagheria. We discussed her start as a founding member, the memories she associates with Italian folk music and dance, her favorite dances, Amici Italiani's traditional costumes, and her most rewarding performance.

 

 

How did you get started with Amici Italiani?

I was one of the founding members. We had a wonderful person named Shirley Martignoni Fedeli, who, with her husband, Gene, decided to start the Italian dance troupe.

 

The newspaper printed a small article that said, "If you're Italian and you want to dance the Italian folk dances, call Shirley."

So, my mom saw it, and I might've just graduated from college. And she said, "You like to dance. Why don't you call?"

 

I did, and Shirley sounded really nice, so I went. That was pretty much it.

 

I have to laugh because I was such an idiot back then. On the first day of dance practice, I showed up in a legit dance skirt and tights while everybody else wore sweatpants and shorts.

 

We were the founding members, and we brought in a dance instructor from Milwaukee's dance troupe, Mario DeSantis, who has since passed.

 

He taught us a couple of dances a year, and then we went from there.

 

I was a dancer for a million years, and then I became the instructor, and I did that for a number of years. I loved that. Then I got pretty old. When you can't do a hop, that's pretty bad. Your knees don't like you anymore. When our director retired, I became the director.

My two daughters are in the troupe. One of my daughters is one of the dance instructors. We have two: a male and a female dance instructor.

 

So, it's a family thing. They grew up in the troupe. And I'm going to tell you a secret: Every time I hear this beautiful Italian folk music, I'm telling you the people I lost in my life who came from Italy and are no longer here; in those few minutes that the song is playing, they're back, and it means so much. I'll never get tired of any of that music because they're alive all over again and all the good memories and all the love is still there.

 

What memories do you associate with that music and dancing?

We had relatives who emigrated here in the early seventies, so they came later than my mom. They were all grown. Most of them had kids already. And in the summer, they would have these little get-togethers in their backyards and they had a trellis with the grapes growing over. And they hardly had any lawn in the backyard because they planted tomato plants, rows and rows of these plants.

 

I remember seeing the moon, and there were lights that they had strung above the trellis. And whenever somebody went in the house, they brought out other platters of food.

 

When I was young, we would have wonderful family gatherings. My zio, my cousins Carl, Iggy, Frank and Mr. Spoto, a close friend from down the street, played instruments. They would bring out their instruments after we'd eaten and visited, and they would sing.

 

Sometimes, the ladies would dance together. Those evenings were magical. I mean, my dad passed away when I was very young, so it was not easy. But because of all this wonderful stuff, I really feel like my childhood was enchanted.

 

Of course, at weddings, they would always play the music. And as a kid, that was amazing. You'd get out there and dance. You didn't know what you were doing, but nobody cared.

 

Tarantella dances are popular at weddings. Which is your favorite?

They're all from the southern region and Sicily. But each one has a different flavor to it. And people really loved to watch them.

 

We always call the Neapolitan the main Tarantella here. You could do it with as many or as few people as you want. We dance this as a call dance so you can follow along.

 

We have Cantania's, which I love. Catania's Tarantella is totally different.

 

Some are just crowd-pleasers, and I don't know why. Some use tambourines, some don't. There's a Tarantella that only uses five people, and the movements are very together.

 

I tell the troupe that we're not Rockettes. This is a chance to show your personality. But there are some dances where you have to be more rigid regarding doing the same thing. So those are amazing for us. 

 

How do you get the audience to participate?

We've been hired to dance at weddings just to do what we call the main Tarantella, the Neapolitan one. But we get the bride and groom in there. We get Uncle Toto. We don't know who we're dancing with.

 

The difference between that and all the others is that it's a call dance. So, we have one person who calls the dance, and if he makes a mistake or does something we haven't practiced, you just do what he says—just follow.

 

That makes it really fun. And he says he calls it Italian, so it's really beautiful to hear those words.

 

How do your troupes ensure the traditions remain?

We are really committed to the authenticity of these dances. If we change something, it would be that we can't quite make a transition with a dance step, so we add a hop or something like that. But it does not change the integrity of the dance, which is so important to me.

 

Even the costuming has a lot of tradition. We don't use nylon fabrics; we use cotton and cotton blends, which are authentic to what they used to wear. They might get a little more "wrinkly", and need to ironed more often. But it's important.

 

I saw a dance troupe with young ladies in fishnet stockings. I thought, "Oh my God, no Italian father would've let their daughter leave the house like that."

 

I don't know what they were thinking. We try to be as authentic as possible. 

 

Tell us more about your costumes.

A woman from Pittsburgh put together a book of Italian clothing. We would pick our costumes from the book and recreate everything.  

 

We would take that and find a seamstress out here who could design and sew it. Now, we have a couple of dancers who can sew, which has been very helpful. 

 

We purchase what we can. We found some companies online that like to recreate historic items. I know they're recreating things for Comic-Con or whatever. I don't know why they're making these costumes, but we can pull a shirt here or a skirt there, and it is what we want. We will hem it, and it just makes it a lot easier for our seamstresses.

 

How has the local community in Rockford responded?

They love them. I love being out somewhere where they're clapping with the music. And when we have a chance to dance with the groups and the audience, I love seeing them get up there.

 

We will do the Tarantella with them. We'll also do the Scopa (broom) dance. Everybody gets a partner except one person. It's typically one of our guys, and he has to dance with the broom. And at some point, while he is dancing, he'll yell, "Scopa!" and he'll throw it, and everyone has to switch partners.

 

We've done that with crowds, and they do a great job. When locals see us in costumes, they stop us and ask if we can pose with them.

 

What do you hope audiences take away?

When I introduce a dance, I will tell a little bit about it and the area where it originated. So, we're trying to teach them about Italy and the dances. We want to entertain them and disseminate some of our history.

 

The story of the Tarantella involves a tarantula. I used to bring a tarantula to performances so that the audience could see it. And I'm telling you, any child in that audience could probably still tell you about the Tarantella because they remember the tarantula. The adults remember, too.

 

I share the history of the dances and tell them where they come from. We have two dances from Sicily that the Moors brought over, and I love to tell people about them. The dances and music are different, but now they're Sicilian dances and songs.

 

What has been your most rewarding experience with Amici Italiani?

There have been a few, but a real favorite of mine was in 1994 when we were invited to dance at the opening ceremony of the World Cup in Chicago to represent Italy.

 

We're out there, and there are cameras all over. We're dancing. It was so exciting and wonderful.

 

It was at Soldier Field. We ended the performance on the 50-yard line.

 

I was on such a high, and then I heard that my then-husband and his relatives in Italy were watching because everybody loves soccer in Italy. And somebody said, "That's Joe's wife." Crazy. Just crazy.

 

Dancing connects us so much. Granted, they remembered me there, but it was the dancing that connected everybody.

 

My kids have been dancers since they were bambini. They did the youth troupe, and now they're in the adult troupe. They're not the only ones who have stayed in it so long. It keeps us all connected.

 

 

 

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