The Food Pusher's Cookbook
Recollections & Recipes of an Italian American Tradition
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The Soups / Zuppa (ZOOP-pa)
On most weekdays, zuppa was the mainstay first course on the Melfi dinner table. It also figured prominently in dinner events that did not fall on a Thursday or Sunday, and eventually became a staple on American Holidays. Our first celebrations of Thanksgiving, for example, included a lasagna course before the stuffed roast turkey. Perhaps that one-two punch was too much for even Melfi appetites, because lasagna was finally replaced by a broth soup (brodo) that usually contained tortellini. Little pasta rings filled with cheese couldn’t be nearly as filling as lasagna, right?
Mama Melfi is a damn good soup pusher. Being as she had three courses to fill, daily soup became an art. Italian-style Chicken-in-the-pot soup with noodles, Minestrone with Ditalini pasta, Potato soup with egg noodles and Pasta Fagioli are four of her specialties, but there are another dozen of equal renown among family, friends and any visitors that might wander near the dinner table. Soup filled the void on non-pasta days, because pasta in soups technically doesn’t count as pasta. Right? Not in Mama Melfi’s rule book.
To this day, when someone asks me what my favorite things are to cook as a chef, I always say soups. I believe that the truest test of the food pusher’s art are great soups. Making soup takes the most love and care to make it right. The time, preparation of ingredients, and seasonings makes zuppa a special meal in itself. Especially in the fall and cold winter months. The smell of beef bones simmering in water, with carrots, onions, and celery melding together to evoke a sense of comfort. On our soup nights when the soup was made this way, nothing was wasted. The cooked beef bones, simmered to the point of extinction were served in a bowl along with the soup. Tender care was used to fish out the cooked carrots so that they could be divided up into everyone’s soup bowl and mashed, before the soup was ladled in.
The Potato Soup recipe is exceptional. It is simple and easy to make and will have even the most finicky soup eater coming back for seconds. This is my brother Marco’s favorite soup.
My father was a soup-bone-eating connoisseur. He would gnaw every scrape of meat and cartilage off of the cooked soup bones. He would savor sucking the bone marrow out like he was feasting on filet minion. As kids we would emulate his methods, sucking and gnawing on the soup bones. What did we know about cholesterol 40 years ago? Besides my dad never had a cholesterol problem in his life.
Soups / Zuppa
Arthur Ave Clam Chowder
Beef Bone (Marrow) Zuppa
Chicken Rice in Brodo
Cioppino
Cream of Asparagus (Asparagi)
Italian Chicken in the Pot Soup
Italian Sausage and Bean Soup
Italian Wedding Soup
Lentil Stew
Arthur Ave Clam Chowder
Marco’s Potato Soup
Minestrone with Ditalini
Navy Bean Soup
Pasta Fagioli
Split Pea with Barley
Stracciatella
Tortellini in Brodo
Tuscan Escarole Soup
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
It wasn’t until I was a student at the Culinary Institute of America in the late 1970s that I first realized that growing up as a first generation Italian-American family in the Bronx and New Jersey wasn’t as typical as I had thought. My parents and their parents were all born and raised in Italy. Throughout my youth and beyond, my father and mother referred to their five children, four boys and a girl, by the number in the order of which we were born. To this day, my mother still occasionally refers to me as “Number Two Son.” But when it came to hanging around the kitchen, I was definitely the number one pest.
I was the little punk kid always by my mother’s side as she was cooking or baking. I would jockey for position wherever my mother moved, stand on a kitchen chair up against the stove, and otherwise constantly be in her way as I tried to get a better look at whatever was being done. Same when either of the grandmothers – Nona Lisa or Grandma Melfi – or other relatives were there.
Maybe it was something in the water around Pisa, but I suspect it’s a genetic condition. For my mother, her mother, cousins, aunts and countless generations before them in this food-fueled blood line, the world revolved around the kitchen and dining room table. Life was not good unless family, friends, or anyone close to the dinner table was fed to excess, ritually seduced with course after course of delicious, abundant and temptingly presented food. This attitude seemed to pervade all branches of the family, but my inspiration and mentor was Maria Gracia Melfi, aka Mama Melfi, aka The Food Pusher.
The Food Pusher moniker was given to her by one of my friends when I was a teenager. Anyone who was anywhere near our home, at anything close to a mealtime, would have a seat at our table. Attendance was mandatory, as were second and third helpings. It seemed normal enough to my siblings and me. By the time I made my way into the world and realized that maybe this wasn’t so typical, the die was cast. My passion for food and cooking was totally ingrained, and my goal in life was to be a professional chef. But I also learned that Mama Melfi wasn’t the only one.
Over the years, I discovered that practically everyone knows a food pusher. It might be a friend, a family member, or a perfect stranger. Within moments after walking in their door – perhaps even for the first time – she will ask, “Would you like something to eat?” It’s a rhetorical question. Regardless of your answer, you will sit, and you will eat.
While food pushers know no bounds of race, creed or color, it is largely an Italian stereotype. From my personal experience, deservedly so. In the unlikely event that you don’t personally know food pushers, you’ve certainly seen them in movies. Recall the scene from the classic gangster movie Goodfellas, where the characters of DeNiro, Liotta and Joe Pesci sneak into Pesci’s mother’s house in the middle of the night to get shovels to bury the mobster they just kicked to death. The mother awakens, and within a few minutes and in spite of the men’s repeated refusals, they’re all sitting down to a huge breakfast of bread, eggs, potatoes, onions and peppers, and Italian sausage.
In the mind of the Food Pusher: If you love my food, you love me. If you don’t eat what I’ve cooked, you don’t love me. If Sigmund Freud had been born Sigmund Melfi, he would have been 150 pounds heavier and a pioneer of the gastroanalytical theory that love for pasta is the primary human motivation. But that’s as far as I’ll get into the psychology behind the Food Pusher. To accent the recipes, I will tell it as I saw it. Life with a food pusher in all its graphic, calorie-filled detail.
As of this writing, I have been a professional chef for over 30 years. For three decades I have promised my mom that I’ll cook many grand meals for her, being a chef and all, but I rarely do. It’s still hard to compete with her in the kitchen. Not so much with the recipes; As you’ll see in this cookbook, I still use many of her and Nona’s originals. But when it comes to jockeying for position at the stove, she still commands the prime spot. “You’re inna my way, Number Two.”
With this cookbook, Mama Melfi and I finally meet on neutral ground. I open the Melfi family recipe vault with the spirit of abundance and love for food with which it was invariably served. Most are my mother’s and grandmother’s original recipes – no doubt going back countless generations further – but I also include creations of my own that extend the finest Italian tradition.
Enjoy, and pass them on.About the Author
Rick Melfi has been a professional chef for over 30 years. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and has served as an advisory member to the New England Culinary Institute. He has a passion and love for food which he learned as a child growing up in an Italian American family. This love and passion has been shared with his family, co-workers and friends throughout the years. He serves as a volunteer fireman living in Andover Township New Jersey