Nonna's House: Cooking and Reminiscing with the Italian Grandmothers of Enoteca Maria

By Jody Scaravella and Elisa Petrini

Now a Netflix film!

Discover the heart and soul of Italian tradition with this exquisite collection filled with mouthwatering recipes and vibrant tales from the iconic grandmothers of Enoteca Maria—a one-of-a-kind Italian restaurant where a rotating roster of nonnas take center stage as master chefs.

“If you have a choice between a three-star Michelin chef’s and Grandma’s, where are you going to eat?” asks Jody Scaravella, owner of Enoteca Maria on Staten Island. “Well, I’m going to Grandma’s. I’m going to the source.”

At Enoteca Maria, the chefs are nonne, or Italian grandmothers, whose culinary expertise comes from years of cooking for their families. Now, they invoke the food wisdom, artisanal methods, and recipes—handed down for generations—that are indigenous to their regions of Italy. Each nonna/chef creates her menu from whatever looks inspiring in her pantry—spontaneously, the way family meals evolve. Here are the recipes and stories from the kitchen at Enoteca Maria, a beautiful compendium of food and nostalgia, capturing flavors from the heart of Italy.

Nonna’s House is much more than just a cookbook; it’s a journey into the kitchens of eight Italian grandmothers who bring their regional specialties to life. From the savory to the sweet, the recipes include unique dishes like cod with cauliflower, fig and nut crostata, eggplant with chocolate, and fried chickpea flour with fennel. Classic favorites such as gnocchi, pasta, risotto, and polenta are also featured, ensuring there’s something for every palate.

The story behind Enoteca Maria is as heartwarming as the dishes themselves. Jody Scaravella’s vision of a restaurant staffed by Italian grandmothers began with a simple ad in a Staten Island newspaper. The result is a beloved dining spot that is becoming a cultural phenomenon. The book’s beautiful, four-color design, complete with full-color photographs, makes it a perfect gift for anyone who cherishes authentic Italian cuisine and the stories that come with it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781476774138

Jody Scaravella

Jody Scaravella, or “Joe,” is the creator of Enoteca Maria, which opened in 2007 on Staten Island, with its signature cooking by Italian grandmothers. The “nonnas” have captivated the media, not only in New York but nationally and abroad, and have appeared on the Today show, Rachael Ray, Fox & Friends, and CNN’s Eatocracy, among other media.

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Cover: Nonna’s House: Cooking and Reminiscing with the Italian Grandmothers of Enoteca Maria, by Jody Scaravella with Elisa Petrini. Featuring the Nonnas’ Classic Recipes.

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Nonna’s House: Cooking and Reminiscing with the Italian Grandmothers of Enoteca Maria, by Jody Scaravella with Elisa Petrini Featuring the Nonnas’ Classic Recipes. Atria Paperback. New York | Amsterdam/Antwerp | London | Toronto | Sydney/Melbourne | New Delhi.

This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to:

The memory of my Nonna Domenica, for upholding centuries of tradition and sharing them with me.

The memory of my parents, Maria and John, for giving me a solid foundation and keeping me from getting too wild.

The memory of my sister, Marianna, a wonderful cook, who left us much too soon.

My brother, John, a lover of food.

My two boys, Jesse and Jon, who endured many bad meals as I was honing my kitchen skills.

Francesca Leone, who taught me so much about food and without whom I never would have conceived the dream of the Enoteca.

I

BENVENUTI all’ENOTECA MARIA

Jody Scaravella

What connection runs deeper than food and family? The association forms the moment we’re born and then strengthens every day as we grow up. For the rest of our lives, tasting foods from childhood ignites our sense of identity, reminding us of where we came from. It reawakens feelings of being cared for and cherished, warm memories of our family’s love.

These thoughts were rattling around in my mind when I founded Enoteca Maria, a restaurant where the chefs are Italian grandmothers, or nonnas. Instead of professionals, I wanted home cooks embodying food wisdom and traditions handed down over generations. Their family recipes make me thankful for my own rich heritage, and I’ve seen the same feeling of connection and gratitude, sometimes tearful, in people of every background who’ve enjoyed a meal with us.

My nonna, sister, and mother, 1949

Today, Enoteca Maria has expanded, not in size but in vision, to feature chefs I call the Nonnas of the World. Besides the original cast of Italian nonnas—those in this book and others—we have guest-starring grandmothers from places as far-flung as Trinidad, Turkey, and even Sri Lanka. Some nights, it’s like the Tower of Babel, with Fida, our Pakistani kitchen guru, gesturing to guide new nonnas who speak tentative English. But through the universal language of food, glorious meals come together in a celebration of the wealth of cultures that make up America.

To my amazement, my Staten Island passion project has not only survived but has now fired the imagination of Hollywood. Madison Wells and Matador Content, with screenwriter Liz Maccie, created a romantic comedy, Nonnas, inspired by my life and the restaurant. Directed by Stephen Chbosky, the film boasts a mind-blowing array of stars: Susan Sarandon, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro, Linda Cardellini, Drea de Matteo, Joe Manganiello, Michael Rispoli, Campbell Scott, and more. I’m humbled to be the movie’s leading man, portrayed, with heart and humor, by Vince Vaughn.

What an honor for a tiny restaurant that sprung from the darkest days of my life, aided by a dose of serendipity.

For fifty years, I lived in Brooklyn on the block where I grew up, with my parents and my sister right across the street. My brother moved away, and other losses soon followed: first my grandfather and father died, then my grandmother and mother, and finally my sister, in a fairly short time. Bereaved and deeply depressed, I felt like the last man standing, and I’d inherited a little bit of money.

I’d heard that waterfront land was a great investment, which drew me to Staten Island. The realtor handling coastal property offered to show me a place—just for fun—with the best view in the borough. But as we drove there, I told her, Stop the car!

We’d passed a little Dutch colonial home with a FOR SALE sign out front. It proved to be a hundred years old. It, too, had a phenomenal view, but what grabbed me was its dining room, ringed with an old-fashioned picture rail molding, about a foot down from the ceiling. Having inherited a cache of my mother’s beloved Norman Rockwell plates, I could just see them displayed on that picture rail. To me, that felt like destiny. That very day, I bought the house.

My new house was walking distance from the Staten Island Ferry dock. Amid the shops there, I saw a vacant storefront next door to a majestic restored theater. On weekends, the theater drew hundreds of concertgoers from all over, but especially from Manhattan. On a Saturday night, what could be more romantic than riding the ferry under the stars to see a show on Staten Island?

That was a huge plus, but even the space itself seduced me. It just felt like a cozy Italian restaurant. I realize now that I was trying to fill a hole in my heart, to recapture the vanishing world of my close-knit Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, to recover the embrace of the family I’d lost. The restaurant, Enoteca Maria, named for my mother, has succeeded at least partly because, in our disconnected lives, so many of us have the same holes and the same longing for families and communities that are gone.

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What did I know about running a restaurant? Nothing. By day I worked as a materials forecaster for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, stockpiling subway parts. But I did grow up just four blocks from my Sicilian grandmother, Domenica. She and my mother, her daughter, were both stellar cooks and great lovers of food.

When I’d visit Nonna Domenica, she’d always ask, Are you hungry? By the time I answered, she’d have her old aluminum pot full of water on the stove, plus a chicken and some vegetables on her cutting board. She’d start chopping, ignite the burner, and before too long, ladle out the best chicken soup you can imagine.

Though she coddled her grandkids, Nonna Domenica had that Old World flintiness. She’d shop at the Eighty-Sixth Street Italian markets, which are Asian now. When I went with her, I’d marvel at the tumult—the vendors all shouting, vying for customers. Pushing her shopping cart, my nonna would patrol the stands, examining the produce. If she bit into a plum that didn’t pass muster, she’d throw it to the ground and move on. No one ever dared to protest or challenge her.

My grandmother’s backbone also showed in the way she helped support the family, supplementing my grandfather’s income as a barber by working in a sewing mill—a sweatshop—and by finishing garments at night on her old treadle machine. Thanks to her earnings, my grandparents could buy their own home. Nonna Domenica died just a few months shy of one hundred years old.

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While Nonna Domenica and my mother taught me to appreciate food, my real culinary education came from my longtime girlfriend, Francesca Leone. Growing up in Calabria, she’d been schooled in all the traditional arts—cooking and baking, winemaking, preserving vegetables and fruits, and curing meats like capocollo and soppressata. Through her, I was exposed to an incredible wealth of time-honored rituals.

In our house in Brooklyn, I dug out a room under the back porch to use as a cold cellar and smokehouse. To make the hard Italian sausage soppressata, Francesca and I would pick up fifty pounds of meat, a combination of pork butt (the shoulder) and ham (the haunch). We’d put half the meat through the grinder on a very coarse setting and cube the other half with a knife to get the right texture. Piling the meat in a giant tub, we’d add a pound of salt, a few cups of paprika for color, and, because Francesca is a spice-craving Calabrese, a few cups of hot red pepper.

Then the real work began: mixing the meat and seasonings by hand, without stopping, for a solid hour. The blended meat would rest for an hour while we readied the casing, pig’s intestine, by washing and then soaking it in lemon water. We’d stuff the intestine with the meat mixture, tie it with twine, and prick the sausage all over. Then we’d coil it in a basket, under dish towels and a heavy weight to squeeze out air—the pressing implied in the name soppressata—and let it flatten in the cold room overnight.

Nonna Domenica, me, and my mother, 1962

In the morning we’d hang the flat sausage on a rack I’d suspended from the ceiling. For the next week, once or twice a day I’d build a hardwood fire in the middle of the floor, then seal the room to let the meat cold-smoke. After smoking, the sausage had to hang on the rack to cure for thirty to forty days.

Finally, it was ready. The last step was to preserve the sausage, insulated from the air, by submerging it in casks of cooking oil. That’s the old-school method, which we abandoned when we got inspired to invest in the modern-day equivalent, a vacuum sealer.

The taste was like nothing you could ever buy in the store: earthy, salty, smoky, and spicy, with an edge of sweetness. What a tremendous gift Francesca gave me by teaching these customs of our forefathers. Or should I say foremothers? It’s the foremothers, after all, who tend to uphold the culinary traditions that are touchstones of our vanishing cultures.

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Hoping to expand on her lessons, I went looking for nonnas by placing an ad in America Oggi, the Italian-language paper. It read, in rough translation: Do you want to get out of the house? To show what you know? To share the classic dishes you feed your family?

Dazzled by the volume of replies, I picked the top prospects to interview at my house in Staten Island. My yard looked like a carnival: filled with grandmothers, husbands, and children—even grandkids—carrying plates of food. The families helped with the sales pitches: "My wife’s pasta e fagioli is the best… You’ve got to have some polenta and rabbit… Here, try some of this…"

I was looking for authenticity, to preserve Italian traditions that can be highly local, changing even from village to village. So, I tried to cast a wide net, choosing nonnas from Sicily and Campania in the south; Abruzzo in the center; and, from the north, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, and Lombardy. Nonnas from these and other regions of Italy grace our current lineup, along with grandmothers from Trinidad, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Venezuela, Belarus, Colombia, Algeria, Bangladesh, Syria, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Kazakhstan, Ecuador, Greece, Poland, and France. The mosaic is ever-changing.

They all have free rein in the kitchen. I never second-guess their choices, but tell them, Look in the refrigerator and see what you feel like making. Half the time, I never know what we’re serving on a given night. We laugh when someone calls me the boss because we all know the truth: that the nonnas are the restaurant’s true beating heart.

You see it when I bring them out of the kitchen to meet the guests, who often jump up to hug and kiss them. At closing time, guests frequently give the night’s nonna/chef a round of applause. One night, a guest eating at the bar said, I love this food, which happened to be Nigerian. I wish that I could shadow tonight’s nonna and learn to make it.

FRANCESCA LEONE

Besides soppressata, Jody and I made traditional capocollo, using the nape of a pig’s neck. We treated the back of the neck with salt for three or four days. Then we rubbed the inner surface with spices like paprika and cayenne, rolled up the meat the long way, and covered it in cheesecloth, tied with twine. After a light smoking, we hung the roll to cure in the cold room for several months. The result was different from what Americans know as capocollo, which is typically made from the loin or other common cuts of pork. It might taste good, but it’s not quite authentic. Real capocollo is a delicacy.

That inspired me to create a program called Nonnas-in-Training that’s like a one-on-one crash course in ethnic cooking. You can sign up to watch the guest nonna choose ingredients, do prep work, and develop two entrees and an appetizer to supplement our basic Italian menu. The training sessions, which are free, are wildly popular and booked well in advance. Those drawn to them have called them deeply rewarding.

Whatever your background, having a nonna in the kitchen—a matriarchal figure invoking traditions that bridge generations—is just so magically, emotionally powerful. It’s a living affirmation of those utterly primal connections of food and family and identity.

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The nonnas are the reason why a thirty-five-seat, outer-borough restaurant has gained a toehold in a city full of world-class chefs. Beyond the warmth and comfort the nonnas offer—the love they represent—Enoteca Maria empowers seniors by revering artistry that’s so often taken for granted, promotes cultural awareness with glimpses of ethnicities we’d rarely otherwise experience, and both illuminates and helps to preserve the fast-fading past. In America, we all come from somewhere else and stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. It’s been my dream—and privilege—to bring those forebearers, who are repositories of cultural knowledge, into the spotlight and out from under our feet.

II

CONSERVE

JODY SCARAVELLA Traveling with Francesca, visiting small towns like hers in Calabria, has given me insight into Italy beyond what most tourists perceive. It’s helped me understand the world of my immigrant grandparents and realize how brave they were to pioneer life in a new country.

Francesca Leone

When I talk about my childhood, my kids can hardly believe it. I grew up in Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy, in a town of maybe three hundred people. I was the third of five children, four girls and a baby brother. Our nonna lived five minutes away. She was a tough, tiny woman, who always wore a hairnet. Back then, they had to be tough because life was hard.

Think about how she used to do laundry. She made her own soap from leftover lard. She’d lug the clothes down to a nearby stream to wash them, beating them against the rocks to get them clean. She didn’t have bleach for white things, so she’d put them in a basket, covered with a rag and topped with a mixture of water and ashes from the fireplace. After letting them sit, she’d hang them in the sun to complete the whitening process.

Making soppressata in Brooklyn, 1995

Even after she got a gas stove, my nonna liked cooking the way she was taught, in the fireplace. There was often an iron pot of white beans or chickpeas sitting in the embers, simmering all day. When the beans were soft, she’d serve them with pasta in a classic Calabrian version of pasta e fagioli or alone with a simple sauce of onions, basil, olive oil, and rosemary, dusted with cheese. If she had some pancetta or a prosciutto skin, she’d use that to flavor the sauce. In the springtime, she’d cook fresh fava beans with a piece of pigskin that had been preserved in lard all winter. Those beans were so delicious—real comfort food.

In the summer, when there was no school, I loved to help her bake bread. She’d create her own starter with yeast, flour, warm water, and salt, setting it aside for days to develop. She’d mix some starter with flour and water and knead the dough for what seemed like an hour before putting it someplace warm—like under a blanket—to rise overnight. In the morning she’d form the dough into round loaves, then let it rise again while she did chores and stoked her brick oven with wood. To test the heat, she’d slip in a pancake-size circle of dough on her long wooden paddle. If it puffed up and colored like pita bread, the oven was ready.

When my nonna got older, my mother took over the baking, and now my little brother upholds the tradition of making bread. My brother also makes lard the way we did growing up, when slaughtering a pig was an occasion for celebration. To make lard, we’d collect the scraps from butchering—the fat, skin, organs, and bones—and put it all in a big cauldron. With a cup of water and a tablespoon of salt, we’d stew the mixture over low heat so the fat would dissolve without frying. We’d wind up with a pot of clear lard, to be jarred and stored in the cold cellar. We’d save the bones and scrape out the marrow to spread on bread.

But the best part was eating the lard-poached scraps, called frittole. We’d pepper them and serve them on a big platter with orange slices. My grandfather used to sauté frittole with eggs, which today people would call a heart attack in a pan. But is cooking with lard that much worse than eating bacon? Besides, we didn’t eat meat all the time, the way Americans do, so it wasn’t likely that a little lard would kill you.

The other big difference about our meat was that the animals ate real food. We fed the pigs chestnuts, bran, and figs and the chickens watermelon rind and dried bread, along with our leftovers. That gave the meat real flavor. What we didn’t raise ourselves, my father got by hunting and fishing. When he caught anchovies, he’d gut them on the spot and rinse them in seawater. At home, we’d preserve them in salt, in earthenware crocks. Once he came home with a bag of eels, all about eighteen inches long. He told me to put them in the sink, so I did, and, being a kid, forgot them. The next thing you know, I felt something under my feet. Oh, no—there were eels all over the house! What a nightmare.

Another scary thing: My father would go hunting and bring home quail on a string. If you touched them, you’d find that some were still alive. That grossed me out. These stories may sound cruel to modern ears. But this is the way of the world, the truth behind the plastic packages in the supermarket. Doing the dirty work yourself—taking responsibility for it—gives you a different kind of gratitude and reverence for your food.

My mother’s cousin in traditional dress for Easter, 1946

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Until I got married, I’d never left my family. I met my husband when he came to our village on his yearly visit, having moved to the States when he was four years old. By the time we met, everyone our age was trying to escape their villages, heading to cities like Milan or, like me with my husband, to New York.

America was a shock—even Bensonhurst, which was all Italian, where we lived with my in-laws in their five-bedroom house. Finally we got our own apartment, which seemed so small—just a living room, bedroom, and dining room—compared with how we lived in Italy. But I adjusted. My husband and I had two kids, but sadly, the marriage didn’t last.

After we divorced I met Jody. The first time I opened the fridge at his family’s house, I was shocked to see overcooked pasta. And they were Italian. How can you eat that? I asked. It’s not al dente.

Luckily, he laughed, and that’s probably what got us cooking together. Sharing the knowledge I grew up with was fun, and it bonded us. Eventually Jody and I broke up, and I remarried a wonderful man, an angel, George Lecznar. He passed away not long ago of pancreatic cancer.

With George, I settled in Pennsylvania, not far from New York City, where I have a huge garden with every vegetable you can imagine. At the end of the season, I preserve the harvest for the winter, channeling the spirit of my nonna.