Mangiamo!
Written By Nanette Maxim
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Chef Lidia Bastianich's grandmother had a recipe for family.
"My grandparents grew nearly everything we ate, and taught me that everything has its season," says Lidia Bastianich, owner of Manhattan restaurants Felidia and Becco, author of four cookbooks, and creator of the PBS show Lidia's Family Table."My grandmother, Nonna Rosa, was a small woman with lovely strong hands worn from working her garden" in the coastal Italian town of Busoler (now part of Croatia). "Before I was tall enough to reach the tabletop, she had me pulling up vegetables and cooking alongside her." With her grandmother's hands over hers, rolling out dough for pasta or kneading it for bread, Bastianich learned "as much through touch as through words."
During the fall olive harvest, Nonna Rosa cooked big meals twice a day for the farmworkers, andtrusted 8-year-old Lidia to carry a bowl of gnocchi piled high with chicken and sauce into the fields. At night they would eat at long tables in her grandparents' courtyard, a little girl sitting with virtual strangers. "Who's a stranger?" Nonna would say. "Over food, we're family."
Lidia moved with her parents to New York City in 1958, when she was 10. "I longed for my grandmother," Bastianich says. "So I would cook all those dishes Nonna taught me." Once she had children of her own, she took them back every two years to visit their great-grandmother, who was still weeding her garden and kneading dough.
On the set of her TV show, Lidia's son, Joe, tastes the sauce and uncorks a bottle of wine. Her 85-year-old mother chops vegetables with one of Lidia's five granddaughters. They're all joking and talking. When someone wonders if television studios are usually more businesslike, Lidia laughs. "Maybe someone else's. But this is my version of Nonna's courtyard."
