"Mama Knew Best"

It’s a question I’m asked often: “Why did you become a chef?” People who’ve seen me on TV figure I do it to be famous. Or they hear about my new cookbook and think I’m in it for the money.

For me, cooking has never been about those things. My desire to be a chef goes back to something I learned from a great cook many years ago, in the small kitchen of a two-story red-and-white house on 90th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, a rough, working-class neighborhood of New York City.

Mama’s kitchen. It was a long ways from where she grew up, the small Italian village of San Nicola Baronia. There, her family prepared their meals in a pot hung over a fire pit. Mama’s mother, my nonna, worked with what she had, which wasn’t much. Yet Nonna would always make something delicious and nourishing. When Mama came here to the States at 24, she brought those culinary skills with her.

My earliest memory of watching her in the kitchen is from when I was about six. My brother and sister were much older and out hanging with their friends; my father worked all day as a carpenter, so Mama was home alone with me.

She was making her frittata, a kind of dense Italian omelet. I reached up to the counter to grab a piece, still warm from the stove. I couldn’t help myself; the delicious aromas of gooey parmesan cheese, sautéed onions and peppers and eggs wafted through the air. “No, no, Rocco,” Mama scolded me. “Don’t you touch; this is for the Rosary Society.”

That was another thing Mama brought with her from the old country—her faith. For her, cooking wasn’t only about filling stomachs. “Food is love,” she always told me, and Mama shared her food, and love, with others in our neighborhood. The Rosary Society wasn’t exactly the place a restless kid like me wanted to be, but where Mama and her food went, I went.

The smell of the frittata kept escaping the covered pan as Mama carried it to church. By the time we arrived, I was ravenous. And I wasn’t the only one. “Nicolina, did you bring your frittata?” one of the ladies asked.

“Of course,” Mama responded. But before we could eat, we had to pray. Everyone stood together and bowed their heads, reciting the prayer. It seemed to last forever. But Mama’s food was worth the wait.

“This is just like the frittata my mother used to make,” one woman exclaimed. “I need the recipe,” said another. Seeing the women smile and thank my mother showed me for the first time the power of food to bring people together. Prayer nourished the soul, food nourished your body and, when prepared with a lot of love, both could make strangers into family.