La Cucina di Carmela: A Sicilian American Cookbook

(Don't buy this version! There is a new, expanded edition, with a green cover. Better!)Until her recent death at 93, Carmela Cusumano was a cook of a vanishing breed. Daughter of Sicilian immigrants, Carmela took to her roles in the kitchen as chief cook, devoted wife to a husband (also son of Sicilian immigrants), and mother to ten children with a passion befitting a "performing" artist. In her eighties, Carmela, already a grandmother and great-grandmother nearly fifty times, decided to gather the recipes for her ever-growing family, including the traditional dishes they recalled with nostalgia and also the many baked goods Carmela loved to treat family and friends to. Carmela published those recipes in a spiral-bound book, La Cucina di Carmela. After Carmela's death, November 19, 2015, her ten children decided to re-publish her book and make it available for anyone who loves to cook and to make simple good food. This is a cookbook of Sicilian and American fare. As the children point out in the Foreword, Carmela, who studied home economics at an American high school where she graduated in the late 1930s, honed her skills in her Sicilian and American household of the 1940s through the 1960s. The recipes reflect her Sicilian heritage and the time and place (New Jersey) where she raised her family. Thus the recipes weave Carmela's simple fare that she had to stretch to feed her large family with her passion later in life for collecting new recipes from everyone, from her Hungarian sister-in-law to a Texas chef. You will find recipes for homemade pasta, sausage, and eggplant appetizer, for Hungarian cakes and cookies, and that Texan chef's crab claw appetizer. There are recipes for classics, like Wedding Soup and Sicilian cannoli and pizza and Carmela's treasured discoveries like strawberry cream cake and pineapple pie.