Many Beautiful Things
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Vincent Schiavelli is known to most of us as a character actor who has appeared in such films as Ghost, Man on the Moon, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Schiavelli grew up in Brooklyn, speaking both Sicilian and English at home. Some of his earliest memories are of sitting at the kitchen table while his grandparents told stories of the life and the people they had left behind in Polizzi Generosa, a small city in the Madonie Mountains of Sicily.
As Schiavelli grew older, those stories, and the city about which they were told, took on a mythic quality. When he was nearly forty he made his first trip there, and what he found was more extraordinary than the "once upon a time" fables of his childhood.
In Many Beautiful Things, Schiavelli invites readers to join him in discovering the people, culture, and food of the city that has, in essence, become his second home. Equal parts memoir and cookbook, it is the best of both. Schiavelli is an accomplished and elegant writer who evokes a foreign and often closed culture from a unique perspective: an outsider fluent in the language with still-strong familial ties.
The recipes -- which reflect the ancient influences of Greece, North Africa, and Spain -- are simple, rustic, and delicious, depending on local products and seasonal bounty. This is not your usual Southern Italian fare but a unique regional cuisine: Pumpkin Caponata, Ditali with Drowned Lettuce, Fried Ricotta Omelet, Potato Gratin with Bay Leaves, Almond Love Bites, Veal Shoulder Roasted with Marsala, and Baked Pasta with Almonds (rigatoni baked in a pork ragu with chopped toasted almonds) are just a few of the extraordinary dishes you'll find in this book, all of which can be reproduced by cooks with delectable results.
Schiavelli provides a comprehensive list of mail-order sources. And if you want to visit Polizzi Generosa, there's a guide on how to get there, where to stay, and where to eat. Illustrated with black-and-white line drawings by Polizzi's best known artist, Santo Lipani (who also happens to be an extraordinary cook), Many Beautiful Things is a feast, both culinary and literary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of Bruculinu, America returns with a sort of inside-out version of that book: this time, rather than recording the Italian-American traditions in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up, he returns to the Sicilian hometown of his grandparents. Schiavelli's personal connection renders his writing warm and affectionate and, not surprisingly, his descriptions of meals eaten and cooked are excellent, as when he recalls his first meal in Polizzi Generosa in 1988, enjoyed on what would have been his grandfather's 116th birthday. Essays cover topics such as the making of ricotta (eaten while still warm) and the Sicilian tradition of family nicknames, many of them vulgar, some derived from long-forgotten events. An essay on Schiavelli's first trip to Polizzi Generosa with his Los Angeles raised 11-year-old son is truly heartwarming without ever slipping into unwarranted sentimentality. The accompanying recipes are true to Sicilian tradition: simple and fresh and always attuned to the seasons. They include Sweet-and-Sour Meatballs made with ground almonds and a simple Fried Ricotta Omelet. Oddly, however, the recipes do not always match the dishes described in the text. For example, a chapter on winter in Sicily limns a particularly hearty meal that opened with simple chickpea soup "flavored only with salt, black pepper and wild fennel," then follows with a recipe for Chickpea Soup with Meatballs and Chard. But these are minor quibbles with what is on the whole a moving and enticing work.
