566 South Clinton Street: Recipes and Memories of Growing up Italian

2018 Judith A. Melillo, PhD. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/25/2019

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5422-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5423-2 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5424-9 (hc)

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Introduction

I was born during World War II in Newark, New Jersey. My dad was a navigator/bombardier in the US Eighth Army Air Corps. He and Mom met at a train station in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, where they each had weekend plans with friends. Mom and her girlfriends hung out with Dad and his boyfriends for the weekend, but Mom did not like Daddy at all. He was set to leave for basic training in a few weeks, and Mommy’s girlfriends encouraged her to go out with him since it would probably be a first and last date.

Daddy returned home after that weekend and told his mother he had met the girl he was going to marry. Dad was persistent, and he won Mom over. For the next two years, they courted through the mail. They were married at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. Daddy returned from a tour of duty in England and was retraining for the Pacific theater when they canceled his leave to return to New Jersey for the wedding. Mom got on a train with her mother, and they were married the following day—in between Dad’s flight training schedule—at the base’s chapel.

Mom and Dad lived in a tiny bungalow off base for four months, and then Mom returned to New Jersey—pregnant with me. Dad wasn’t there for my birth, so I went home with my mom and my Sicilian grandparents. They took care of me until Daddy was discharged, almost nine months later. We all lived in the same house, and my grandparents had a great influence on me growing up, especially Nanny. I have two sisters. Janice is eighteen months younger, and Charlene is twelve years younger.

Mom and Dad’s

Wedding photo

We always lived in an Italian neighborhood, went to an Italian Catholic church (in those days, you were Irish Catholic, Slavic Catholic, or Italian Catholic, etc.), and marched with the saints (really, a statue carried on a pallet) for all the feast days. As we reached school age, we attended an Italian Catholic grammar school that was taught by an order of Italian nuns. My friends all had Italian last names: Pisapia, Salzano, DiGaudio, Gamba, Confalone, Giarletta, Russo, Funicello, Massa.

Growing up, I never had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread. Our bread came from the East Orange Bakery via a delivery guy who brought it up the back stairs of our three-family house (still hot) on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday! Our sandwiches were made from a long slice, hand cut, of crusty Italian bread and filled with eggplant, peppers and eggs, or prosciutto. We had a vegetable garden in the back of the house, a fig tree that was my grandmother’s pride and joy, and an assortment of weird hot peppers and fragrant herbs. At the end of the summer, it all wound up in the room called the drying cellar.

In our cellar (and it was a cellar, not a basement), we also had a full kitchen and a cold room dedicated to pickling and canning. White ceramic jars lined the floor of the cold cellar. They were filled with pickled veggies, vinegar peppers, and olives. The shelves in the room were stacked with glass jars of plum tomatoes. August was canning month, and the cellar kitchen was a busy place for Mom, Aunt Jeannie (who lived on the third floor with Uncle Ron and my cousins Barbara and Nancy), and Nanny. When my sisters and I got older, we helped, mostly turning the food mill that ground up the tomatoes and separated the skins. My grandfathers (both sides) made their own wine, red of course, which also sat in the cold room.

Food in our house was a religious experience—cooking it, serving it, eating it, and sharing it. In our Italian household, every day was a celebration of family around the dinner table. But nothing was more special than Sundays. Grandma and Mommy got up early and started the gravy (Sunday sauce). Then it was off to Saint Joseph’s for Mass as a family. Unless the weather was bad, we walked the seven blocks to Tremont Avenue for nine o’clock Mass.

On the way home, I remember the wonderful smells of sauce cooking as we passed the houses in our Italian neighborhood. When we did arrive at 566, the smell was always the best. As most Italians will profess, My mother’s sauce is the best.

Before Vatican II, Catholics had to fast from midnight if they wanted to receive Holy Communion, and by the time we got home from church, we were ready for our Sunday-morning breakfast of meatballs, sometimes on a crusty roll and sometimes just in a bowl with lots of sauce and cheese. I cannot remember a single Sunday during my entire childhood that did not include the main meal (at one o’clock in the afternoon) of macaroni and meatballs, gravy meats, wonderful pork and veal bones, homemade sausages, stuffed braciole`, crusty bread, and a salad of iceberg lettuce, red onions, and black olives dressed with vinegar and enough oil to slide down your throat without chewing. We never ate dessert after a meal. It was always reserved for evening when we either went to visit Grandma and Grandpa Lipuma or aunts and uncles came to visit us. Sunday was family day, and my sisters and I never thought of making plans with friends or boyfriends on a Sunday.

Holidays were very much like our Sunday afternoon meals but on steroids—triple the courses and triple the food. Everything we ate was in season, homemade, and a true labor of love. Of course our favorite holiday was and still is Christmas Eve, the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Thanksgiving was an American holiday, but we put an Italian twist on turkey and mashed potatoes! Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter were very similar except for the main dish and dessert: beef on Christmas, pork on New Year’s, and lamb on Easter. Because my grandmother lived with us after Grandpa died, we also celebrated the Italian feasts of Saint Lucy and Saint Joseph, each with their own special pastas and/or pastries.

Our family didn’t do Memorial Day or Labor Day the way it is celebrated now, but I remember going to the lake for the Fourth of July. All the other families were barbequing. We staked out our own table and grill, but on our grill, there was a large pot of water and an equally large pot of sauce. No hot dogs and hamburgers for us. We had homemade sausage and pepper sandwiches to go with our pasta, and we cooked it and ate it outdoors—very American, or so we thought!

Thanksgiving Then

At South Clinton Street, we did not eat turkey. We ate capon, which is a very large chicken. We always had six or seven courses for holidays, and Thanksgiving was no exception: antipasto, soup, some type of pasta, main course with lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts, and desserts to die for.

Thanksgiving Today

Today, I make an Italian-American meal for Thanksgiving. It is not very different from my mom’s menu, but I do make a turkey. We leave out the pasta course because it is just too much food. All of these recipes are in the book:

• antipasto

• soup, which varies year to year (wedding soup, fennel soup)

• turkey with sausage stuffing

• broccoli casserole, artichoke casserole, stuffed mushrooms, mashed sweet potatoes, orange rolls, salad

• fruit and nuts

• Julie’s cheesecake, Nanny’s cream puffs, pumpkin pie

Christmas Eve Then

In the days before Christmas Eve, I would go shopping in the fish store with my grandmother for Baccalà (a dried salted cod that resembles a board). Nanny would soak it on the upstairs outdoor porch in a big tub of water for days. She would change the water two or three times a day. Now, that was dedication. It smelled really awful, but on Christmas Eve, it transformed into the most wonderful and delicious salad of fish and olives and hot peppers.

The other dish Nanny always made that we kids would never eat was eel. It looked like a snake, moved like a snake, and never passed my lips. Nanny fried smelts, made pasta with a white clam sauce, a different pasta made with shrimp in a red sauce, spaghetti with mussels in a hot spicy red sauce, calamari fried, calamari stuffed, cold calamari in a salad, and usually some kind of white fish fillet in a lemon sauce.

In our teen years, after our feast, we would all get dolled up and ready for midnight Mass. Once Janice and I were old enough to date, we were allowed to go to Mass with our boyfriends. After midnight Mass, which was at midnight, we came home to break the fast from meat. Mom would have homemade sausage with fried peppers and potatoes waiting as a snack. No one opened presents on Christmas Eve. Even today, my kids only get to open one gift, and they all know what it is: new pajamas for Christmas morning photos.

Christmas Eve Today

When my husband, Tom, and I started our family, we lived in the Philadelphia area, San Francisco, South Jersey, and Ohio. But no matter where we were, we carried on the tradition of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. For a very long time, our five children would rather be with us cooking on Christmas Eve than anywhere else.

As the kids got older, they were assigned a dish to make. Jason always made the clams casino (baked stuffed clams). Tommy did the fried calamari or crab cakes, Jamie did crabs legs, Janna did the sushi (yes, our twist on an Italian meal), and Mia did the shrimp ala Rillo. Tom’s specialty was mussels marinara, and I did the linguini with clams. For our seventh fish, we usually did the same thing as Nanny: a plain fillet of sole or halibut. If the kids really begged, we did steamed lobster. Most of the Christmas Eve recipes are in this book, and I do make them all every year.

Christmas Day Then

Breakfast on Christmas morning on South Clinton Street was simple and still is: usually Mommy’s coffee cake (the recipe is in this book). We all saved our appetites for the feast that would follow at two o’clock in the afternoon. Antipasto was the bridge between breakfast and our feast. It looked very much like the picture in this cookbook and had all the ingredients: Italian meats, pickled veggies, wonderful sharp cheeses, olives, and crusty Italian bread. It is, by far, what I have become famous for!

Dinner always started with wedding soup followed by pasta. The pasta course for a holiday was homemade ravioli, manicotti, or gnocchi. Following the pasta was always the meat plate from the sauce: meatballs, sausage, braciole, and meaty veal bones. Dishes were cleared, and a brief intermezzo led to the main course, which was usually a roast beef. Tons of wonderful vegetables like artichokes and stuffed mushrooms and string beans in sauce and asparagus frittata and cipollini onions accompanied the meat.

Dishes were cleared once more, and fresh plates were brought out for the salad. It was a simple lettuce salad with sliced red onion, olives, and maybe some celery with a garlic, olive oil, and red wine vinegar dressing, which slid off your fork into your mouth and made your tummy feel so good. Dishes were cleared one more time. Next came the nuts, fruit, and sweet anise, which is supposed to help with digestion, but I don’t know how because we sat at the table for another hour talking and picking at the goodies.

The ladies went into the kitchen, and the men went to the parlor. Once the dishes were washed, dried, and put away, it was time for dessert. Grandma started the black coffee (what we call demitasse or what you call espresso), homemade liqueurs, American coffee, and lots of Christmas cookies and pastries. From the time dinner started at two o’clock until the time we began dessert, about five hours had passed. During that time, the house filled up with aunts, uncles, and cousins—each with a white box of pastries or cakes.

Christmas Day Today

In 1971, Tom and I purchased our first house in South Jersey just outside of Philadelphia. We invited our parents to our home for Christmas dinner for the first time. The menu was crab Louis salad, she-crab soup, beef Wellington with all the trimmings, and a chocolate mousse for desert. While it was a beautiful meal, I overheard Nanny asking my mother in Italian, Where is the wedding soup? Where is the ravioli? I learned my lesson and have not altered the following menu since that day.

• antipasto

• wedding soup

• cannelloni with a Bolognese sauce (love this because you can make it two days beforehand)

• beef filet with basil sauce

• mushrooms or asparagus

• Yorkshire pudding, popovers, or garlic rolls

• vegetables similar to those at Thanksgiving

• salad such as pears and Gorgonzola cheese

• fruit and nuts

• coffee (demitasse), Christmas cookies, cream puffs, and Julie’s cheesecake to end the meal

New Year’s Day Then

Pork was, and is, the choice meat for New Year’s. Mom always bought a fresh ham complete with skin, which became crispy when roasted and was the best part of the meal! We had a first course of pasta followed by the ham, homemade applesauce, garlic potatoes, and lots of great veggies. Of course, a salad was included and was followed by nuts and fruit with demitasse coffee. Dessert was usually leftover Christmas cookies and maybe homemade cream puffs if we were lucky.

New Year’s Today

New Year’s Day in a house with three sons and two daughters who acted like sons is all about football! We eat at two o’clock in the afternoon, and I still do a pork roast or a honey-baked ham with all the trimmings. Our New Year’s dinner was streamlined due to the football games, and honestly, I was always relieved to not have to duplicate Christmas!

Easter Then and Now

Easter is all about Easter breads, Easter meat pies, and Easter ricotta pies. The main dish, usually lamb, takes a backseat for this holiday. Breakfast begins after Mass with a slice of pane di Pasqua or Easter bread. My grandmother either made one with hard-boiled eggs or one with just a sweet cake-like texture. Today, our breakfast on Easter is my ricotta pie. It is so rich and yet so light.

My Family

To understand my relationships to the people mentioned in this cookbook, here is an outline of who’s who:

My paternal grandparents were both born in Petralia Sottana, Sicily. Calogero (1879) and Maria Scarnegi (1885) had eleven children. Nine of them made it to adulthood. The surname recorded on the birth certificate for my grandfather Calogero is LiPuma, but when he went through Ellis Island, they spelled it Lipuma. When they came to the United States, they settled in the Warwick (Down Neck) section of Newark, New Jersey, and the Lipumas lived in that house until Aunt Jo died in 2011.

My maternal grandparents were both born in Nicosia, Sicily. Frances Stella (1896) and Emma (Nanny) Patania Andolino (1904) had three children, two of whom made it to adulthood. Emma came to the United States by steamer ship alone at the age of five. Emma’s marriage was arranged, and she was only thirteen on her wedding day. They eventually settled in the Fairmont Avenue section of Newark, New Jersey, where they lived until they bought the house on South Clinton Street with my dad.

Both sets of grandparents spoke Italian. My father’s parents spoke a little bit of English. My mother’s parents spoke fluent English but preferred to speak Italian. Both my parents could read, write, and speak Italian. However, it was the Sicilian dialect, which is different from the upper-class Italian that is spoken today. They spoke to their parents in Italian, but they only spoke in English to my sisters and me. They wanted us to be American, so Italian was the secret language they used when they didn’t