This week’s book
"From Mom to Daughter: The Quick Tips of Italian Cooking" by Lucia and Maria Elena Congedo (Congedo Publishing, 319 pages, $22.50)
My mother Virginia did many things I recall with fondness. In her bustling household she often took time to read books to us. And she taught me how to cook. I owe my passions for reading and for cooking to her inspiration.
Mother’s Day is a week away. I just read a book that reminded me of the special connections that mothers can forge with their children in rooms filled with warmth, savory scents, guidance, and love. The book is “From Mom to Daughter: The Quick Tips of Italian Cooking” by Lucia and Maria Elena Congedo.
The Congedos are mother and daughter. Maria Elena opens the book by describing the powerful bonds that can be formed in our kitchens: “In Italy, love passes through food. And I have always felt my mother impart it this way. Every day. Through the smells, the tastes, the colors, the textures, the sounds of our kitchen.”
This book is more than a collection of 120 recipes. Maria Elena explains that “every family in Italy has ‘its’ cuisine, made of small and big secrets, savvy and rituals, tricks of the trade acquired by generations of testing, putting food on the table, of new elements gradually introduced and tested.”
Lucia Congedo has written a number of cookbooks. In this one her daughter Maria Elena has assembled Lucia’s culinary tips acquired through the years “because cooking is not just simply following a recipe.”
They offer recipes in these categories: appetizers, pasta and rice, legumes and vegetables, eggs and omelettes, meat, fish, and desserts.
There are many photos of food being prepared and the finished meals.
The pasta and rice section begins by advising “always cook pasta one minute less than written on the box and put the cooked pasta under cold water before dressing it.” Now we are ready to prepare fettucini with Mediterranean herbs, linguine with roasted tomatoes, or spaghetti with clams.
The meat section features things like baked lamb, chicken with beer, meatloaf in crust, and sausage with onion and potatoes. The dessert section has dishes like amaretti with cream: “when cooking the creme, stir with a wooden spoon always stirring in the same direction” and tiramisu.
Maria Elena reveals that “my mother taught me that cooking is an act of love. That at the table all the feelings are conveyed: friendship, respect, joy, pain.” This is a lovely book.
When my father married my mother he got a surprise. Our mother’s mother was a formidable cook. Dad expected mom to be a whiz in the kitchen. He didn’t know that Virginia and her three sisters had not been allowed to observe their mother cooking. Banned from the kitchen, our mother didn’t know how to cook and had to learn. I’m grateful she passed along her knowledge. Her expressions of love through her cooking were wonderful things to experience.
Next week I’ll cover a book about a unique mother/daughter relationship. In “Part Swan, Part Goose: An Uncommon Memoir of Womanhood, Work and Family” Swoosie Kurtz recalls the enduring relationship she has had with her mother.
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