Terms for the cook

Yes, as I've mentioned my mom was Italian -- off the boat Italian -- South Philly Italian, whatever.

However, there are things in Italian restaurants and foods cooked by today's Italian cooks that we ate, but we certainly didn't call them the fancy names they have for them now -- at least not at our house.

First, let's get this clear, we never called pasta, pasta. I never heard the word pasta until several years ago where I heard the term on the cooking channel.

Here's the list of what we had in the "pasta" family:

Pastina -- we enjoyed that on Sunday night with salt and butter
Bowties (not farfalle) -- we enjoyed this occasionally with spaghetti sauce
Rigatoni was called chewfs -- don't know why it was called chewfs, except maybe it was a name given to it by one of my siblings, and it was always served with spaghetti sauce (not gravy)
Spaghetti was called Sketts
Macaroni was always elbow macaroni
Ravioli -- there were only three kinds: cheese w/spinach, meat, and plain cheese filled. No fancy ravioli filled with pumpkin or squash or any of the fancier items they're filled with today, and always served with a tomato sauce
Stuffed shells? Never heard of them.
Stuffed anything else? Never heard of them.
Lasagna was lasagna, but we very rarely had it. I think we didn't have it for two reasons: it was a lot of trouble to make it, and it was expensive. But when mom made it, she always added sausage to the meat sauce making it super special.

Minestrone -- vegetable soup!

Bruschetta -- that was not so fresh Italian bread with whatever topping my mom had handy, usually olive oil and marinara sauce (but it was called chunky spaghetti sauce)

Polenta -- I never heard of polenta until I watched cooking shows, which they all said was a staple in an Italian home -- then I figured it out...my mom called it corn meal mush -- we hated it. Yes, we ate it, but we didn't really like it.

Peppers were NEVER put into my mom's spaghetti sauce. The first time I tasted a spaghetti sauce with peppers, I spit it out. I have since become used to this variety of sauce/gravy, but I don't particularly like it, unless it's the sauce that goes with chicken cacciatore, that was something special, but it was part of the cacciatore, not part of the mom's sauce.

Desserts: As mentioned before we didn't have them often. Tiramisu? Never heard of it, but I sure do love it. Yes, we had cannoliwith the cream in the middle, but my mom never made them. My dad loved Italian cookies (the name started with a "T"), but they were too hard for me to enjoy. And I do recall that my mom put almond extract in a lot of her cookies. We did have biscotti, but we called them teeth breakers :).

Balsamic vinegar -- couldn't afford it, but we had a friend who always used it in her salads and they were so good. Mom always used wine vinegar in salad (by salad I mean a tossed salad), and white vinegar for other things like pickled beets.

Capacolla was called ca-pa-gole; prosciutto was bra zhoot.

Capreze was just plain tomato salad, our very, very, very, most favorite in the summer time. And the bottom of the bowl juice was always sopped up with Italian bread. Oh my, I'm craving that right now. Only 4 more months until we have good tomatoes for that.

Carpaccio -- a raw beef with olive oil dish. We didn't call it anything fancy, and we ate raw beef, yes, and that accounts for my love of really rare steaks, we just called it: "Mom, give me a piece of the minute steak before you cook it." Those thin slices of beef were minute steaks and when I went to the Italian deli in town, that's what I ordered, and they'd cut the frozen beef right there in the store, very thin, so that the "minute steaks" were just the right thickness to put in a cheese steak sandwich without doing all that chopping they do at Penn Station. I know this may gross some of you out, but mom and I loved this dish as a snack.

Fritatta -- that was fried potatoes with eggs. I'm trying to figure out why mom didn't use the Italian names for all these foods. We caught Italian words rarely, yet her Bible was an Italian Bible which she read faithfully each day, in the morning, while drinking her a.m. coffee.

FYI: A great glossary of Italian foods can be found at http://www.italiancookingandliving.com/food/glossary/index.html.


So that's today's offering. Tomorrow's treat? You'll have to wait and see. I have a really long list I'm working through, and I hope you readers enjoy trying them.

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