Feast of the Seven Fishes, A Treasury of Italian Recipes

Last week I received a gift from my dear Uncle Louis. No, it wasn’t my birthday and, of course, it’s not Christmas. The gift was a beautiful book entitled Feast of the Seven Fishes, A Brooklyn Italian’s Recipes Celebrating Food and Family, written by Daniel Paterna. I guess you could call it a “just because” gift.

After tearing open the box and removing the plastic seal wrapper on the book, I sat at my kitchen counter with a cup of coffee and a couple of pizzelles, and dived right in. I skimmed through the introduction by famed chef Michael Lomonaco and thumbed through the first few pages where the author highlighted many of the shops in the Bensonhurst neighborhood where he grew up. But then I turned to the “La Festa” chapter in the middle of the book and, as I slowly took in the photos, the recipes, and the stories, I started to cry my eyes out—as I am prone to do—so much so that when my husband came downstairs, he asked me if I was okay. Pictures of Pane de Pasqua (Easter bread), struffoli, and all the Christmas Eve seafood flooded my mind with memories of long-ago and not so long-ago holiday celebrations.

Mr. Paterna may have grown up in a different part of Brooklyn and frequented different bakeries, latticini, and pork and fish stores than I did, but we are contemporaries and his memories are my memories, his traditions are the same traditions that my family has carried down. Indeed, his grandparents met at a candy store on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook. My own grandmother had a little store on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook!

As I studied his mother’s handwriting on various index cards from her recipe box, it reminded me of my mom’s marble notebook full of her handwritten recipes and pages of handwritten recipes my dearest great-aunt Tessie mailed from her home in Park Slope to my mom in Carroll Gardens. And I was also reminded of my sister Lisa’s shower gift to me 32 years ago: she had typed out all those family recipes and bound them in a book for me. She updated that LoPorto/Agnese book of recipes again a couple of years before she passed away and both the original one and the updated one are among my most cherished possessions. Lisa’s cookbooks contain recipes of my grandmother’s struffoli, my mom’s pizza rustica, corn fritters, and cheesecake, Lisa’s vast variety of Christmas cookies, and Aunt Tessie’s lard pie crust and coconut oatmeal cookies, just to name a few.

The photos in Feast of the Seven Fishes also brought back some memories of cooking mishaps, like the only time we ever made our own Easter bread and burned the bottom. Luckily, my mom worked in two neighborhood bread stores, Caputo and the long-gone LaBarbera, so we always had an abundant supply of Easter bread, even if we didn’t make our own. Then, there was the time when my mom and I made La Pastiera di Grano (Easter Grain Pie), following my cousin Lucille’s handwritten recipe; we accidentally added the whole bottle of orange flower water and unknowingly started with uncooked grain. This caused the grain to keep growing and growing, and we were baking very fragrant pies until one in the morning!

Uncle Louis also sent copies of Feast of the Seven Fishes to my sister Cristina and brother Frankie. The day after we all received the book, the entire family had a day-long text conversation about Mafalda con Cavolfiore—also known as pasta with cauliflower. Coincidentally, my sister Cristina and I separately decided that this recipe would be the first dish we would make. We recalled how my mom made it with just a little tomato sauce and my Nana without any tomatoes at all. We debated if we should add capers or olives or anchovies, and what to do if you can’t find mafalda pasta. (I ran around the corner to Caputo’s Fine Foods and thankfully found the mafalda.) I followed Mr. Paterna’s recipe with a couple of tweaks (adding some capers and using less tomatoes—but more than my mom used to add). Not only did everyone love it, but it brought me right back to our dining room table at 222 DeGraw Street, to those first-course pasta dishes that my mom made almost every night, especially during the cold winter months, like broccoli and macaroni, beans and macaroni, chickpeas with macaroni, peas with bacon and macaroni, lentils and macaroni, escarole and beans. For my family, our memories around that table are golden and one of the very first things we will do after we are all vaccinated will be to sit around one of our tables again and share a delicious meal together.

At the end of his book, Mr. Paterna writes about his beloved mom, Anne, to whom the book is dedicated. He describes her as “living in the past” and says that he suffered from the “same joyful affliction.” I have to admit that I find myself living in the past a great deal, too. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the present (well, maybe not so much this past year), but I want to hold on to my memories from the past as best as I can. While I’m missing those people who handed their recipes down and made my memories possible, I can think of no better way to keep them alive than by sharing our enduring traditions, carried down from one generation to the next, bringing our past to the present and to the future, hopefully through our children and their children.

Last week as I was making a good old-fashioned Sunday gravy, I started humming the Italian song “Mamma,” which was one that my own mom used to hum when remembering her own mom. A few days later, I watched an episode of Buon-A-Petitti on YouTube. I was planning on making Mr. Paterna’s stuffed eggplant so I watched Nonna Gina make her own version during which she mentioned more than once that her mother had made that dish when she was growing up and she, in turn, had made it for her family. After all the cooking was done and she tasted the eggplant, she stated simply in her distinctive Italian accent that she missed her mother and broke into a stirring rendition of “Mamma.” I think it would please our mothers and grandmothers very much to be so lovingly remembered, especially through food.

Feast of the Seven Fishes is my new treasure, complete with gorgeous pictures of some of my most favorite traditional foods and some recipes I have never made but will definitely attempt in the near-future. If you have memories like ours or if you just want to learn what it was like to grow up in the Brooklyn we knew and loved, I encourage you to pick up a copy of this beautiful book. You will not be disappointed.