Hey everybody, it's Nancy and Sylvia once again from

Family Tree Food and Stories.

if you are a long time listener and we hope you are, and if you're new

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on in the future of family tree food and stories, because food isn't

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We know a lot of things that are going on, But we have created a survey and if

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Reader, one of my favorite shows.

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well as sharing the show with your friends, your family, and others,

because as we say, Sylvia, what is it?

Every meal is a story and every story is a feast.

And let's get on with this feast, because today we are talking mumbo, italiano,

every, everything's delicious, right?

Absolutely.

Let's go.

I'm tasting that taste.

In fact, I'm gonna do that for lunch.

Because it freezes.

Well, that's one thing.

'cause as empty nesters.

Bernie and I don't ever eat enough.

You know how Italian food is, you make huge quantities of

right.

Nobody ever comes with, a

small amount.

yeah.

So you either give it away or you freeze it and it freezes in these great

chunks and it falls out beautifully.

you go.

thing is that when you go out to dinner with friends, other

than I'm sure you only go to Azure Restaurant, but if you go someplace else.

True.

Yeah.

If you go someplace else, don't you have that conversation

like, well, what do you want to eat?

Do you want Chinese?

Do you want Japanese?

Do you want Italian?

You never typically ask, do you want American food?

That's That's right.

Although we describe ourselves as a New American, but I haven't

figured out what that is.

It's, it's high-end food but there's also comfort food mixed in there.

And then our Italian, when we have an Italian special.

A chicken parm or something like that, it goes over really well.

Or if we have a special Italian dinner, it's always full.

not so much game dinner that's probably the lowest attended.

But the Italian dinners are huge.

really interesting.

I think it just evokes where we all want to get together.

It's family, it's food,

It's comfort, and I've never had a bad Italian meal, period.

Well, I almost did, when I screwed up lasagna once.

That

you.

gotta be brilliant to put lasagna together.

I've concluded, and I'm not, but I got the entire set of ingredients

all laid out and I was putting it all together like you're supposed to.

And I realized at the end I hadn't put in the noodles.

I mean, that's

like essential.

Anyway, what I did was I tried to squish 'em in, so it was

a casserole, not a lasagna.

Well, that's because you're Irish.

You're not Italian.

There.

You.

Okay, there you go.

We have a certain kind of brilliance, but it's not that.

But anyway Italian food is what we grew up in.

America didn't come straight from Italy in the way we can imagine.

It came through immigration and adaptation memory, and quite honestly, necessity.

They came over here.

They figured out what they could have.

And I mean, these people were amazing in terms of how they adapted to

the taste of Americans in the late 19th century, early 20th century.

They started exceeding, the Irish who were coming in and droves in the late 19th and

But

It was the ingredients that they could get here, I guess.

Versus the type of ingredients that you can get there.

Now I have to say, the tomatoes in Italy at.

Least around Rome and the Amalfi coast area where I had been, are the most

delicious tomatoes I have ever tasted, except for some little tiny like grape

tomatoes that Bob and I grew one year in an apartment that we were renting, and

the front field had been a horse field.

You can imagine how rich that soil was and the tomatoes

never made it into the house.

Oh, I know.

Don't you love a tomato where you, it's like you eat it like an apple.

And it's sun soaked

and it drips down your,

face.

But yeah,

well,

hey Nancy.

Talking about Nona.

Why Nona?

I mean, isn't there something, hint, hint on Netflix or was about

gosh.

There is, if you have not seen it, we'll put , a link in the show notes.

There is a Netflix movie

Nonas, which is Italian for grandma, basically.

And it's all about this guy who works for the city of New York.

I think it's the buses and the loss of his family, his grandmother, his

mother, and I think Italian food more than any food has this connection to.

Grandmothers stir pots and I can just, I can smell it

in this movie.

It wasn't his restaurant failing.

It was failing and we don't wanna give it away, but

ultimately it is resurrected with.

A series of Nonas

Who have lost their spouses and their family, and the kitchen again becomes

a place of healing, not just for them, but for an entire community.

Honestly, I do believe that a kitchen.

Well, a home, but really especially the kitchen is the place that we

all end up gravitating to at a party or at somebody else's house.

there's something that is so comforting about the smell of cooking Sunday

sauce, as they called it, right?

Sunday sauce.

Yeah.

And

it sis a long time.

Well, I'm a grandma, but I'm not a Nona.

That would be an aspirational goal.

Okay.

But let me go on and say that one of the biggest misconceptions is

that Italy is a single, unified food tradition and it isn't.

And this is interesting.

I love doing this research because Italy is a relatively young.

Unified nation, and that only happened in the mid 18 hundreds.

I mean, they're just babies, right?

compared to the rest of Europe.

it was a patchwork of city, states, kingdoms and regions,

and they functioned individually and independently for centuries.

And food was the same way.

So it was hyperlocal, extremely local.

And that'd be like from one.

Village to the next.

It was shaped by geography, not by recipes.

Mountain communities cooked differently than coastal ones.

Inland islands and some of them are relied on pork grains preserved foods.

Coastal towns leaned into seafood.

What could be traded and what could be preserved, determined what the people

ate, not cookbooks and not trends.

And I think that's so important from the storytelling aspect

that, we hear a. Of families passing down the history of the recipes and what

happened in their households because Nonas didn't just cook from recipes

she created from instinct and memory

like her mother did.

Now I don't, I didn't have a Nona either.

My grandmother, I don't even remember her cooking 'cause she was in a wheelchair.

I remember her brilliant smile and every time I saw her she

just lit up like the sun.

I look back at my grandma, we called her Grammy, and I just

see this big grin and curly hair

Nice.

so it's a different type of grandma.

But you have two kinds of, Italian grandmothers from the regions with

the same kind of name like the Nonas but they create with different

things and different dishes.

Garlic and tomatoes to those that barely touch them.

And meat, like you said, in different ways.

Honestly, I think here in the United States that there

is something similar North,

Mm-hmm.

east, west,

and you end up, but for some reason we think of it as an Italian thing,

And meat was expensive in Italy, but meat was expensive here, which

is I guess why, well, my sister has cattle, so they butcher and

was like, I'm not going to eat.

Betty Joe, the cow.

I know I'm a weenie like that too.

Give me, don't tell me where it came from.

But a bones create soup and specials and, small pieces of

panachetta and just the sausage.

The other day we were talking sausage with neighbors and although it's not

Italian, we ate oh, I'm trying to think, drawing a blank on, but it was

a spicy kind of sausage that we had bought at a local butcher figuring,

oh, let's try what they've made there.

It wasn't very good.

It was

dry and

Not something that I really would've enjoyed.

And Kathy, our local neighbor, said oh, it was chorizo.

That's what it was.

It was chorizo sausage.

And I loved it up north when it's more dried.

This was, yeah, not too good.

But she says, oh, we don't cook with that, and we won't eat that.

We cook with it.

So it's a flavoring.

Which is kind Like the Italian thing, right?

You have the flavor of little, tiny pieces of meat that add to

the stew that make it so rich, and it's about a restraint in balance.

I love that.. , I'm gonna make your mouth water.

Okay.

I had to look this up because I just frankly didn't know the difference.

What is panchetta?

Bacon and prosciutto.

I'll give you a quick primer on that.

Okay.

The panchetta is salt cured.

Not smoked.

And it's from the bottom of the pig.

you can eat it raw, by the way.

The

I think of that fatty pieces

Yeah, the

like, like, a lot of fat.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you move to bacon.

Now, bacon, you cannot eat raw.

It's cured and it's smoked, and it must be in the curing

process if you're salt cured.

I mean, I'm no expert at that list, but it would be a preservation thing.

Now, prochuteo

but smoking in the south, you, your

yeah.

Oh, absolutely.

The smokehouse, I grew up going to my mother grandmother's house

and they had the smokehouse where they kept all of those

good juicy pigs.

Like maybe, so the Irish probably, whatever.

Prosciutto though.

it's off the hind leg

Ah,

of the pig and it's dry cured and it takes a year.

to do that prosciutto and you can eat it raw.

In fact, that is the preferred way to eat it.

It is frequently on charcuterie plates, for

yeah, I've never heard of cooking that, but I absolutely adore it.

I could eat about.

Yeah.

that

I know, and I try not to, but

yeah, it's

so anyway, getting back, I just wanted to make your mouth water Okay.

On that.

So getting back to talking about Italian food because, seasonality

mattered in Italy and you ate tomatoes and again, like you said.

This is happening here too.

A lot of people won't eat tomatoes now that are out of season.

' cause I go into my

local grocery store and it's like they taste like cardboard.

But you know, one of the most interesting things that I read once cannot swear that

it's true, but it was a long time ago that they did an experiment at , university

of Florida, where they fed kids, hot house tomatoes versus freshly grown.

They preferred the hot house ones.

Really?

taste buds have changed, but I think they're changing back.

. So anyway that's a background of Italian food and then how it became Americanized.

I.

Well in Americanized, There was big flavors and big traditions, and

it just became like an overabundance and.

Meat was less expensive than it was over there.

and flour was plentiful, and tomatoes, especially canned, were

all available everywhere else.

And it changed how people cooked.

So I like the meatballs, that were like mumbo meatballs.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

meatballs and the Saturday Night Live meatball story.

But we, well, I'll maybe I'll put the link in that one too.

Oh, I'm intrigued.

too many Schwety there there was a different kind

of flavor that we moved into.

When things are large, I don't think of flavor as much.

I think of flavor in smaller, tinier little pieces.

Maybe I'm wrong.

What do you think

Oh, I, think there is a real revolution in meat.

Now, let me go back the other way, because of the new food.

Table, or whatever you wanna call it, the pyramid at trying

to encourage people to eat more meat because of the protein craze.

I actually am trying to cut back on it and putting things together and

going back to that old way of thinking.

and one of the things about in Italy, and I've not been there, but it's, and

I've heard about this, you have three, I gave a primo second, and they're

small portions and an ending plate.

And America, our dishes are full of all at the same time.

We do a lot of the layered things, more layered things than they did in Old Italy.

And I think.

That is interesting and I've also went down the rabbit hole with sauce.

You have tomato sauce, which is thinner and takes a long, cooking marinara

sauce, which is cooking for a short time.

And let me see here.

And Sunday sauce with meat.

So is those three different sauces and I'm not sure I could attest to knowing

exactly, because I don't cook enough.

Do you know that I a difference in those three things

yeah , I didn't know they actually had different names, but I

have to say, I am a meat sauce person.

Don't give me

Oh, I do too.

tomato on, on pasta sauce without meat in it and, yeah.

No, that's the way I grew up.

Mom was not Italian.

She was.

From English, English, heritage, and my dad was, English German American.

So yeah, that's

you ate meat.

Yeah.

Tomatoes.

Tomatoes seem to be the thing that brings everything together in at least in the

opinion of American Italian, right?

There's tomato sauce on pizza.

There's tomato sauce on chicken parm.

There's tomato sauce on, unless it's just oil and vinegar or butter and vinegar and

then, or butter, I shouldn't say butter

beer, but it's really an oil and garlic and a lighter sauce.

But it's those two and so if you're listening in, you're true Italian.

I apologize for my ignorance on this,

but,

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let us know if we're being ignorant.

We'd love to hear from you.

But I was in this grocery store, a local sprouts grocery store,

and I can't help but hear this guy talk.

He has a very New York accent,

Strong Italian well that maybe that's not a strong Italian accent, but it

was a very New York accent clipped and strong, and he was so instructional

in explaining how this particular brand of canned tomato was the best.

He swore by Cento, C-E-N-T-O.

And then I asked him, so what is this?

But then he also heard the mutti, the MUTI and Valfuta,

V-A-L-F-R-U-T-A are the brands.

He said, but he preferred cento because they all, well, all of

them specialize in the San Marzano

From Italy and years back.

Now this goes years back.

I had been introduced to a fellow who I actually got a call, from the FBI

on, which is another story about how the tomatoes are selected.

And this other guy who I got the call on, he was involved in some sort of

nefarious acts, which I was not involved in, and I didn't even know it at the time.

But he was an expert that searched these tomatoes in Italy for the

right tomatoes for the particular.

Company, that he was working with.

And not the company and the individual have anything to do with, don't Call Me.

Yeah.

But it was fascinating to hear how they had to be certified

San Marzano tomatoes in order to be included in these particular

brands.

Yep.

remember that.

Valfuta is known to be a hundred percent Italian grown

tomatoes using steamed cooked process to put them in the cans, and the

cento is known for the certified San Marzano tomatoes grown in.

Sarnai NATO area, if I'm correct, it's probably nato.

' cause C is hard in Italy.

, And then the Pomo Dore, which was also another brand that uses

a cherry tomato that sweetens it up a little bit, which I can see.

But go and look at the cans and see what kind of tomato they

are and where they're from.

Very much like , olive oil.

yes, of course olive

If you don't look at the country of origin on the back of the

olive

oil.

You have to be careful.

'cause it could not be original Italian olive oil.

It could be from, the Middle East or someplace else.

And

I had some olive oil that was

really nasty.

It was from the wrong region.

Infused with something it can go bad and you

don't wanna do that, but yeah.

Before we take a break, I wanted to also say a couple of things.

One, uniquely American dishes include things like chicken parm.

Again, we're talking baked, layered baked zdi lasagna.

They just.

Make them differently here because we tend to layer things and you eat

everything all in, one fell swoop.

I guess it's a convenience thing that's a US kind of thing too.

But I did wanna mention there's also pasta in the wheat in Italy and Europe.

Is at least rumored to be of a better quality.

It has less gluten.

There's less additives because it's more highly regulated as

far as what can go into it.

And thus it is better for digestion.

And I just hear this over and over, Nancy about how European wheat differs

from ours and it tastes better.

I don't know.

what do you use when you go to, the grocery store?

let's take a break because I wanna introduce that concept and that

conversation that I've had with a fellow that I grew up with who now manufactures

and produces and has an invented pasta machines, large commercial pasta machines.

So we'll be right back.

Okay, Sylvia, we are back and we're talking pasta and flour and the

important things in making Italian food.

Well, not that all Italian food has pasta, but a little bit more rich.

And as I had mentioned, joe, a fellow that I had grown up with in high school.

I didn't know Joe too well back then, but we've reconnected

on Facebook and he corrects me when I'm wrong on Italian stuff.

So, Joe, if you're

listening, I

Joe,

hope you're listening.

help.

But the interesting thing is that , he's manufactured

these machines that are very technical designed for commercial

production of high quality pasta.

he was explaining to me at one point that really the best flour is typically.

semelina flour.

Now different weights.

So if you are doing home milling is a big thing now for flour.

So you buy the grains

that are from somewhere else that are more organic.

And I guess more original grains than they are today, at least here in the states.

Ancient grains.

Ancient grains.

Thank you.

That's what I was thinking.

Ancient grains.

But you can mill it down to a double zero which is very fine.

But I have been enjoying a brand which is in our closet, and I,

it's like a thicker or a wider noodle, and it's a grainy selina.

So I am now.

When I go buy pasta, I really make sure that it has the Salina and

the dorm wheat combination in it.

but it's it's a little bit more grainy in flavor.

It

I've heard of it.

but I have no idea where the name came from, but I wonder if

it's some region of Italy semolina

or

somewhere else.

I don't

know.

Anyway, a interesting factoid.

But making pasta from scratch is a lot of fun.

It's a

Yeah.

fun.

Well I think I will

pass

on that, but,

one.

I'll have to make some

but we do that at the restaurant.

Make it make our own pasta, but again, we also buy it from a place

that does that's our only job.

So anyway, it tastes good to me.

Alright.

So.

This is where people get hung up on authenticity.

You hear people say, that's not real Italian food, and historically that

might be true, but you know what?

Authenticity isn't only about accuracy.

It's about meaning Italian American food isn't a diluted version of Italian food.

It's a new cuisine brought out by specific moment in history.

And again, just going back to what we said before, it points to the

adaptation and, utter brilliance of the immigrants who came over and

adapted their style and created in the meantime a whole new cuisine.

It's truly an American.

combination,

So the food didn't become less meaningful, it became layered,

and those layers are exactly what make it worth talking about and sharing.

And that's what Italian American food is.

It is something unto itself.

And it's about stories.

So before we go, I have this little story.

There was an Italian barber Angelo that Bob used to go to in.

New Rochelle New York and Bob would make his homemade wine with blends of things.

Now we're talking Italian wine, not necessarily with a barber.

It's Italian wine

with us, one day Angelo comes in and says Bob, you have to have some of my wine.

So he gives us this bottle of wine that he makes in his garage.

Oh my God.

We were talking about it yesterday.

He said, you could almost chew this wine.

It

Really?

I mean, was

thick.

I mean, No,

so so I guess that, blast through the idea that all Italian food,

whether it be wine or food, is good,

Mm.

not necessarily

There you go.

the myth.

And I have to say that some of the worst food that I've had

on my travels have been in Italy.

So

I love that.

I love that.

But let's eat Italian.

Oh, I mean, I'm about as far from looking Italian as you could get, but I love it.

Yeah, and I think the whole thing about Italian food and

families in general getting together, especially if there's some Italian

influence, is the banter that goes on at the table and the kitchen and the

And no, you don't do it that way.

Nona didn't do that way.

Yes, you did do it that way.

No, you didn't do it.

Let me show you how to do it.

it's.

It is all about the stories and the love and the connection

Yes.

and ultimately at the end, everything tastes good

because you're with people that you love and you care about.

Even my messy lasagna tasted just fine.

I can taste it right now.

Although, you know what?

Something you taught me you forgot you taught me this.

Put some wine, red wine in your

Oh.

sauce, right?

I have to tell you, lots of red wine.

In fact, I made some, the other day.

I made spaghetti sauce with meat.

Of course, I won't do it without meat, and about a half

a bottle of wine went in there.

And if that

cooks down,

yeah, I'm gonna do that.

Gives me an excuse to make some more.

I wanna do that.

Yeah, at New Year's we, I made a big plate or a

big, you can't do lasagna small

so I'm making a big tray of lasagna and I brought it over and knowing I am

not Italian, and somebody said, this is like the best lasagna I've ever had.

Is there wine in it

like That's how much wine I put in it.

I'm trying to limit my wine drinking, so if

I eat wine, it doesn't count.

Right.

You can chew your wine just like Angelo's and.

All right.

Well this has been great.

If you have a story to share about Italian memories,

Italian food, whether it be pasta or not, please come along and share

your stories with us at Podcast.

Family Tree, food and Stories.

There's a little button at the top that says, connect or share

your stories and let us know.

In the meantime, please share your stories with your friends and your families.

And share this show with them as well, because we'd love to have them

at our table too, every meal has a story and every story is a feast.

We'll see you soon.

We'll hear you soon.

And happy cooking, happy memories and manja.

Bye-bye chow.