Food, as you will find out in Eat! You’ll Get Hungry, A Family Food Saga, has always been important in my family. Whether it was a routine weekday dinner, a holiday feast, or a post-funeral lunch, food was the glue that held everything and everybody together. One of the biggest meals in my memory was provided to my immediate family by aunts and cousins after returning from my father’s funeral. It was as if the volume of food was designed to ease the hurt.
Anna Gugino, my mother, believed that if you were healthy, you ate. If you didn’t eat, you were sick or dead. So, for her the denial of food to anyone was cruel and unusual punishment. On those rare occasions when a guest – usually a non-Italian – would say they weren’t hungry, her instant response was “Eat! You’ll get hungry.”
This combination of death and eating is not uncommon with Italians. I have noticed, for example, that many Mafia chieftains, like Paul Castellano, Carmine Galante, and Joey
“Crazy Joe” Gallo, have been gunned down in or outside restaurants. This, I believe, is the Italian equivalent of a Viking dying with a sword in his hand so that he may enter the kingdom of Valhalla.
Recipes from Eat! You’ll Get Hungry.
Here are three recipes from the book. We normally ate the olive salad with cold cuts or leftovers after a big afternoon holiday meal. The Sicilian lamb stew is great on a chilly winter evening, especially if you’ve got a leftover ham bone. The giuggiuleni are one of my Aunt Sandy’s many great cookies.
Where to buy Eat! You’ll get Hungry.
- Barnes & Noble (ebook and print)
- Apple (ebook)
- Kobo (ebook)
- Books-a-Million (print)
- Amazon (print)