Lindsay Marie Morris

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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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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