Auntie Louise & Sophia Loren make lasagna

My mother's grandfather, Nonno (Giuseppe Buccelli), was born outside of Naples in Mirabella. Nonno emigrated to America when he was around 17 years old. Nuno had lots of siblings, including many brothers. Several of Nonno's brothers came to America as well, but at least 1 remained in Italy. After Nonno's first wife (my mother's grandmother) passed away, Nonno married Nana, whom my mother dearly loved.

Mimi and Duff with Nana and Nuno

When Nonno's youngest daughter was born, he named her Louise Helena in honor of Queen Helena, the Queen of Italy (1900 to 1946).

Making gravy with Auntie Louise.

Here is Louise in the kitchen. She was an extraordinary cook, who had mastered the Italian family recipes -- all of which she made from memory. My mother and Aunt Louise were very close; As I was growing up, I was fortunate to spend a lot of time with Aunt Louise as well. Louise was a lot of fun to be around. As an adult I realized that Aunt Louise really was my grandmother. And what a wonderful grandmother she was!

 

Duff once asked me why, wherever we went, Aunt Louise was always there. I remember asking him, "Why wouldn't Aunt Louise be there? She is one of your wife's closest relatives. He then asked: "But how does she get there? She doesn't drive." 

 

In this picture, we're making sauce, or "gravy", at one of my first apartments.   

Louise always bought the freshest, highest quality ingredients to make her "recipes". Everything was made from scratch, including the pasta dough. Making the dough was a daylong project.  Louise would take handfuls of flour and make a flour mound with a well in the middle. One by one, she would drop a large egg yolk into the well, gradually incorporating the flour with the eggs, using her hands. By the time the last egg was added, the flour would be mixed with the dough --  and the entire kitchen would be covered in a light dusting of flour. 

 

Aunt Louise never wrote any of her recipes down. Years ago I found a cookbook, written by Sophia Loren, that is full of recipes that remind me of Aunt Louise's cooking.  Italian cooking is regional. Sophia grew up in Pozzuoli, a small town outside Naples that is right next to the town where Louise's father was born. In her cookbook, Sophia Loren's Recipes and Memories cookbook, Sophia writes:

"Learn the rules of the kitchen well by doing. For the true cook is born when, having assimilated the rules, he or she begins to improvise, to move among the ingredients with a sense of freedom and imagination. Don't be a slave to recipes, to weights and measures, but let your convictions, and above all, love, guide you. In other words, you must be convinced that cooking is an act of love, a gift, a way of sharing with others the little secrets - piccoli segreti - that are simmering on the burners."

Although Sophia may have hired a talented ghost writer to write these words, I recognize the sentiment -- cooking as an act of love and a gift --  it's something that was shared by my Aunt Louise and all the other wonderful cooks I've known throughout the years.

Here's Sofia's recipe for pasta dough:

Fresh Pasta Dough

4 Cups all purpose flour

6 large egg yolks

salt

Note: Use flour milled with hard wheat. Pasta made from other types of wheat becomes mushy and limp when cooked and sometimes cooks unevenly.

1. Make a mound of flour on a work surface. Make a well in the center and drop egg yolks in, one at a time, gradually incorporating the flour. Add a pinch of salt. By the time the final egg has been added, all or almost all the flour should have been incorporated.
2. Flour your hands and knead the dough until a smooth solid, uniform mass is formed. Maintain a steady rythym and be patient; the process may take 15 to 20 minutes depending on the pressure you exert and other conditions, including weather. If the dough seems too moist, add a bit of flour. Or, if it is too dry, add a tablespoon of water.
3. Cover the dough and allow it to rest for about 30 minutes. Place the dough on a floured table and knead it again for a few minutes. Divide the dough into two pieces and, using your hands, stretch it a bit. You can then use a rolling pin to roll it out to the appropriate thickness for the type of pasta you will be making. Or you can use a pasta machine, preferably a manual one.
4. If you are using a pasta machine, pass the dough through the widest setting 10 or 12 times. Then, beginning again with the widest, continue to pass the dough through, narrowing the setting each time. Finally, cut the pasta into the desired shape on the machine or by hand.

Storing your noodles

To roll out her “noodles”, Aunt Louise had a cast iron pasta maker that screwed onto the side of her kitchen table like a carpenter's vise.  Once she rolled out her noodles to the desired thickness, she would gently place them in Filene's dress boxes lined with waxed paper. The dress boxes were kept in the refrigerator. Whenever she came to visit us, Aunt Louise always walked in the door with Filene's boxes full of pasta. and her delicious cookies. If she arrived without any noodles, or for an extended visit, her cast iron pasta maker would be crooked under her arm like a favorite handbag.

Baked Lasagna

Here's Aunt Louise's baked lasagna recipe. It's very rich. The tomato sauce or “gravy” as Louise always called it, is a Ragu alla Napoletana.

This recipe is very heavy...literally. You’ll need a pretty big lasagna pan. When my sister Mary got married, Aunt Louise gave her an industrial lasagna pan that was so big it didn't fit in Mary's oven. 

In front of the cooktop in my mother's kitchen with Aunt Louise and my sister Mary

 Here's Mimi's recipe for sauce:

Tomato Meat Sauce

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 clove garlic (or more!)
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• handful of fresh chopped parsley
• 1/2 pound of beef and pork (which may be substituted with 1 pound of Italian chicken sausages)
• 1 28 oz can Italian tomatoes (I like to use Muir Glen fire roasted)
• 6 oz tomato paste
• 1 cup good red wine
• 1 tsp of salt
• 1 tsp of sugar (to reduce the acidity of the tomatoes
• 1/2 tsp white pepper
• 1/2 tsp chopped basil
• 1 bay leaf

Heat olive oil in a saucepan. Add meat, garlic, onion, parsley, and brown slowly. Stir to prevent burning. Remove garlic when brown. Add tomato paste and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, add tomatoes, wine, salt, pepper and sugar, and simmer for 1 hour. Add basil and cook a few minutes longer. If sauce becomes too thick while simmering add 1/4 to 1/2 cup water.

If the thought of making lasagna is too overwhelming (yes), or just too rich (yes, but I don't care), as an alternative you could make Sophia Loren's Baked Pasta with your Tomato Meat Sauce.

Wellesley Coffee Cake

Here’s a recipe for Wellesley Coffee Cake from Mary Bevilacqua. This coffee cake is delicious. After you bake it, let it cool and, if you plan to give it away, wrap it in plastic wrap and cover it with aluminum foil.

Mary started the Wellesley Cookie Exchange 30 years ago, inviting friends and neighbors to her house in December to celebrate the holidays and trade cookies and baked goods. I've included a link to an article that appeared in Yankee magazine a few years back that describes the Cookie Exchange and includes a few recipes. There's one for a Pistachio Cranberry Ice Box Cookie that I'd like to try.

Icebox cookie dough is made ahead of time and frozen or refrigerated until it's time to make the cookies. Ice box cookies are perfect for me since making the dough is enough of a baking enterprise for one day.

There's a site called WiseGEEK which has some interesting cookie information, including substitutions to make cookies "healthier".

 

What's for dinner?

In this photo, Mimi and I are relaxing and reading newspapers -- an obsessive family pastime. I know it’s after dinner because I am wearing my pajamas. We are waiting for my dad to come home from work....or maybe not. My dad may have taken this picture.

Relaxing with the newspapers after dinner

When we were very small, my mother would prepare an early meal for my sister, my brother and me. After dinner, we’d take our baths and get ready for bed. When my dad came home, we’d spend a little time with him before being tucked in…usually by 7:00 p.m. My parents would then have a quiet dinner together. My mother continued this tradition as long as she could get away with it.

With three children, my mother had very little time for cooking. She planned her meals ahead of time, choosing ingredients that were in season and reasonably priced.  Her meals were easy to prepare, tasty, and always made the kitchen smell wonderful. If she was running late (something that happened often), Mimi was not adverse to putting an onion in the oven so that it the house would at least smell like something good was cooking in the oven. 

 

One of Mimi's "old favorite" chicken recipes still appears on the Campbells Kitchen website. It's now called Campbells Tasty 2-StepChicken. It's a great standby recipe when you are in a rush to get dinner on the table. The sauce is very creamy. You can add white wine or milk to the soup.

Here's a chicken recipe that was in the Seattle Times that I'd like to try. This Spiced Chicken recipe is from a book called “Gourmet Today”.

 

 

 

Turkey tetrazzini and fruitcake

Although I was originally going to write about turkey leftovers, instead of posting a recipe for turkey tetrazzini, I'm writing about fruitcake.

Here's a wonderful recipe from my friend Lisa Dobbs. This is her mother's recipe, which she believes is from the makers of None Such mincemeat. Ideally it's best to make fruitcakes several weeks before you plan to serve them or give them away as gifts.

Mom's Fruitcake

• 2 1/2 cups sifted flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 2 2/3 cups (28 oz.) jar mince meat
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk
• 2 cups (1 lb) jar mixed, candied fruit
• 1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped 

1. Butter a spring form or 9" tube pan.
2. Sift flour and soda.
3. Combine eggs, mincemeat and condensed milk, fruit and nuts.
4. Fold in dry ingredients. Pour into pan.
5. Bake in 350 oven (or slower) for 2 hours or until center springs back when touched and top in golden. Cool. Turn out.
6. To keep: wrap in cheesecloth soaked with run, then wrap in aluminum foil, then store in a plastic bag. Keep in fridge.

Instead of making a full size fruitcake, you can make mini fruitcakes in little loaf time tins (approx 6" x 3"). Wrap them up and give them to your fruitcake and rum loving friends. 

Each Christmas Mimi baked 12 mini fruit cakes, wrapping each one in aluminum foil and tying ribbons around each little cake. She also baked 1 pound fruitcakes in loaf pans for the neighbors next door, as well as a 2 pound fruitcake to mail to my Aunt Wyn in Chicago. She might have made one for the "family" too (aka Mimi, the biggest fruitcake lover of all).

A recipe for Light Old Fashioned Fruitcake from Mimi's cookbook.

The Trappist Monks make a beautiful 2-pound Assumption Abbey Trappist 2# Rum Fruitcake. Not too long ago, I ordered fruitcakes from the Trappists and had them shipped to Mimi and a few friends for Christmas. Mimi called to thank me when her fruitcakes arrived, saying it was going to take her a while to eat all of them. By mistake, the monks had shipped her the entire order.

 

Mimi and Duff

Here are my parent's on their wedding day. They were married at Sacred Heart Parish in Newton Centre, Mass. on a beautiful day in early September. The wedding reception was held at Longfellow's Wayside Inn in Sudbury. The Maid of Honor is my mother's cousin Ann, my Aunt Louise's daughter. Though my mother looks nervous in the earlier photos, you can see how delighted she is to be marrying my dad in the photo where they are dancing. Note Duff's 5:00 shadow, something he was always self-conscious about. In those days men were always supposed to be clean shaven. Though my dad always shaved before he went out at night, since it was his wedding day, he may not have had time for a second shave.

My mother was a fabulous story teller. She was also a very expressive writer. She had a lot of energy, interests and opinions.  Sitting still and writing things down was not one of her strengths. I had offered to set up a blog to help her get started writing down some of her memories. Of course, like my mother, I was never able to get around to it. In my defense, I never understood why Mimi  needed an official blog to write her stories down. In any event, here we are. It's now up to me to do the writing.

We were a very close family. My mother and I spent a lot of time together over the years (some would say too much, and I'm included in that some).

Though my mother's not physically here to help me with  my blog, doing all the things a mother likes to do -- taking over, correcting my posts, telling me I'm posting the wrong recipes, etc -- writing about things my mother taught me about cooking and life in general makes it feel, at least for a moment, that my mother's still here with me...just like she always was. And that makes me smile.

Days of punch and casseroles





Here's a photo from what looks to be Thanksgiving. I'm the one about to drink the scary looking punch. As you can see the photo was taken back before Red Dye #2 food recalls. My Dad is standing at the other end of the table, wearing glasses. We are having dinner with our neighbors who lived across the street from us. 

Dinner was always in the dining room whenever we had company

I think it's Thanksgiving because there's a turkey down at the other end of the table. With the exception of Thanksgiving, when we sat in the dining room for dinner, we usually had lamb, ham, or roast beef. Other clues...the little gravy tureen in the foreground, which sits next to a dish of cranberry sauce which is shaped like a can (my favorite since I'm not a big meat eater). There's also a centerpiece which includes a large plate of nuts with nutcrackers, something we only had on Thanksgiving.

 

Don't be fooled by the unappetizing appearance of the casseroles. My mother was a wonderful cook who loved to entertain. Here's one of her favorite casserole recipes, originally from James Beard. Be sure to add water chestnuts.

 

Mushroom Barley Casserole

• 1 1/2 C pearl barley
• 3/4 C butter
• 1/2 # firm mushrooms
• 2 medium onions chopped fine
• 3 C chicken stock

Melt 4 T butten in a skillet and saute mushrooms for 4 minutes. Remove and set aside. Melt remaining butter and saute onions till soft and wilted. Add barley and stir over medium heat until barley is beautiful brown (this is important..improves flavor and texture).

 

Saute the barley until it turns a beautiful brown for improved flavor and texture

Return mushrooms to pan and mix well with barley. Place in 2 quart casserole and add 1 1/2 C chicken stock. Cover and cook at 350 degrees for 30 minutes - add rest of chicken stock and cook another 30 minutes. Add 1/4 cup sliced celery or water chestnuts, 1/2 cup slivered almonds (without skins) and serve.

Notes: To use less butter, saute mushrooms in 4 T of butter and saute onions in 2 T olive oil.