RACHAEL RAY

The fall months in Brolo, Messina, Italy were times of gathering locally grown fruits, vegetables, olives and nuts. I was a very young girl in 1955, but I remember taking a ride on horse and buggy toward the distant mountains. There we would reach my mother's property and gather olives (to make olive oil), chestnuts, almonds and much more. At home, in our back yard, we had chickens, different fruit trees and a variety of vegetables.

 

Once we arrived back home, Mom would assign each of us a task. My three older sisters would begin making the pasta, my sister Marie and I would begin peeling the chestnuts (after my mother had boiled them) and my brother would sometimes help – but most often he would just eat them as we went along. Mom gathered the broccoli, cleaned it and boiled it to the right tenderness. Everything was either homegrown or homemade, so a meal of pasta with broccoli and chestnuts brings back warm memories of those cool Sicilian fall temperatures, family unity and generous amount of love we shared within that small kitchen.

It was during that year that my father and two of my four sisters left for America. The rest of us joined my father in March of 1957.

Many years later, my mother would invite us over for lunch and cook those very same simple dishes we had grown up with. I have written a cookbook with many of those recipes, along with stories about our family once we moved to the United States. My mother and father loved this country very much, but they never forgot their roots and continued to cook, speak and recounter stories of old in Italian.

Today, both my mother and father are gone, yet I remember those days as some of the most fulfilling times of my life. With each Sicilian meal that I cook, I remember the days of my youth, when the warmth in our bellies reflected the goodness of the simple meal we had eaten.