Cooking with Capone

Cooking with Capone is a twisted gastronomic look at the links between the American Underworld (1890-1959) and traditional Italian cooking. Olindo has taken family recipes and, incredibly, tied each and every one of them to an event in the history of Organized Crime in New York and Chicago. The style is sharp, the commentary acerbic, and the edge acidic. You don't even have to enjoy cooking to love this book; the historical accounts of these mobsters and thugs are enough in itself. The book is hilarious; in fact, an entire section (Dead at the Table) is devoted to Maifa Dons who were assassinated while eating dinner; so he includes the account of the killing, the players, the menu, and then the recipes. Some of these recipes include 'Al Capone's Minestrone', 'The Moll's Broad Beans', 'Zuta's Ziti' and 'The Dancing Don's Lemon Risotto'.There's even more, the book is packed with Mob trivia from some of the most famous players of all, including Dutch Schultz, Joey Gallo, Joe Adonis and Tony Salerno, to the more colorful and obscure characters such as Cornbread Bruchell, Midnight Rose, Jimmy E. Coli and Cheesebox Callahan. Chiocca has also included a 'Goomba Appetite Scale (GAS)', 'Jimmy E. Coli's Foodsafe Cooking Tips', 'Mobster Profiles', 'Uninvited Dinner Guest Scenarios', and a 'Rogue's Gallery' which is jammed with over forty-nine short biographies of the most noble of crooks. There are 16 sections in all including 'Sleeping With the Fishes', 'Hell's Kitchen', 'Fat Tony's Pizza Connection' and 'Hitting the Mattresses' (for a midnight snack). Over 165 recipes, 200 mob vignettes and an endless number of quotes all compressed onto 330+ bullet proof pages. This book is a lot of fun!