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My Favorite Cookbooks
My Calabria
by Rosetta Costantino, Janet Fletcher
ISBN-10: 0393065162
ISBN-13: 9780393065169
ISBN-13: 9780393065169
Region: Italy
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: November, 2010
Recipe Index
Publishers Information
About My Calabria
Publisher Web Link: http://books.wwnorton.com/
At the tip of Italy’s “boot” lies Calabria. It is a beautiful, mountainous region populated by fishermen and small farmers. Rosetta Costantino grew up in this rugged landscape—her father a shepherd and wine maker and her mother his tireless assistant.
When her family immigrated to California, they re-created a little Calabria on their property, cooking with eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers from their garden, fresh ricotta made from scratch, and pasta fashioned by hand. A frugal people, Calabrians are master preservers, transforming fresh figs into jam, canning fresh tuna in oil, and sun-drying peppers for the winter. Now Rosetta shares her family’s story and introduces readers to the fiery simplicity of Calabrian food. The first cookbook of a little-known region of Italy, My Calabria celebrates the richness of the region’s landscape and the allure of its cuisine. This is a cookbook for our time: a reminder of how ingenious and resourceful cooks can create a gorgeous local cuisine.
Author Information
About Rosetta Costantino
Author Web Link: http://www.cookingwithrosetta.com/
I was born and raised in Verbicaro, a small wine-producing hill town in Calabria, at the southern tip of the Italian peninsula.
My parents shaped my connection to food and the land. My father was a master cheesemaker and winemaker, tending our family’s olive groves, vineyards and farm where we also kept goats and sheep. Almost all our food came from our property or the nearby Mediterranean. My mother and grandmothers knew how to live from the land, how to grow vegetables and preserve them for the winter months, and how to make bread and friselle from scratch. They knew how to make pasta with only flour and water and shape it every possible way, even rolling it around a knitting needle to make the famous Calabrian fusilli.
As a child, I learned from them. I took wheat to the mill, returning home coated from head to toe in white flour. I watched them press olives into oil, and inserted strips of tomatoes into the glass bottles we used to preserve them.
My parents and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was 14 years old. We quickly settled into the faster pace of life here but always kept our cooking traditions. We still grow our own produce, make our own ricotta and cure our own salsiccia calabrese. Cooking remained a large part of my life in high school, during my college years at the University of California, Berkeley, and throughout my successful career as a chemical engineer.
After 20 years of working in Silicon Valley, I retired and became a stay-at-home mom, honing the kitchen skills that I learned from my mother and grandmothers. Then, in 2004 an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Calabria from Scratch”, was written by celebrated food writer Janet Fletcher. It was about my family and how we kept all the traditions of Calabria in a small corner of Oakland, California. Working on this article with Janet inspired me to share the cooking of my native land. I offered two cooking classes at a kitchen I rented, not expecting much demand. Because of the article, 250 people called that first week. I ended up teaching a class every week for eight weeks, until we ran out of vegetables from our garden. I still can’t believe how many fusilli we made in those weeks.
My students demanded more classes, so I added classes on holiday delicacies, making ricotta, and preserving summer’s bounty, plus classes from other regions in Southern Italy: Sicily, Basilicata, Puglia, and Campania.
At the urging of my students, who believe that interest in Calabrian home-cooking would interest people far beyond my classes, I teamed up with Janet to write a book about the region’s foods and specialties, as well as everything that Calabria has to offer. The book will be published November 2010 by W.W. Norton. My dream of finally putting Calabria on the map will come true. (http://www.cookingwithrosetta.com/)
Cookbooks by Rosetta Costantino
About Janet Fletcher
Author Web Link: http://www.janetfletcher.com/
I live, cook, garden and write on a quiet street in Napa Valley. My house is not large but my kitchen is…and my sunny garden is bigger yet. Here, I develop and test recipes for cookbooks and magazine features; evaluate cheeses for my weekly San Francisco Chronicle column; and prepare dinner nightly with my winemaker husband. In my garden—a terraced landscape of roses, fruit trees and raised vegetable beds—I find inspiration for daily cooking and an antidote to deadline stress.
I discovered farmers’ markets and the pleasures of the table as a college student in Provence. Shelving plans for business school, I enrolled in cooking school instead. But it was the two years I spent as a cook at Chez Panisse that shaped my taste, honed my skills and nurtured my interest in fresh produce, small-farm issues and traditional foodways. Over almost three decades as a San Francisco Bay Area journalist—first at the Oakland Tribune, then at the San Francisco Chronicle—I have spotlighted the trends and profiled the people who make Northern California such an exhilarating place to cook, eat and work.
I continue to write about food and wine; teach cooking and cheese-appreciation classes, often for private groups; collaborate with chefs, wineries and restaurants on book projects; and undertake custom writing and recipe projects for food and wine clients. Over the years, my newspaper journalism has been honored with three James Beard Awards and the International Association of Culinary Professionals Bert Greene Award. I was also the scriptwriter on two Beard Award-winning DVDs produced by the Culinary Institute of America. In spare moments between deadlines, you can find me in the garden. (http://www.janetfletcher.com/)
