Cookbook author and teacher Rosetta Costantino was born and raised in Verbicaro, a small wine-producing hill town in Calabria, at the southern tip of the Italian peninsula.
Her father, Vincenzo Dito (who will also be coming to the meeting with her mother, Maria), a master cheesemaker and winemaker, tended the family's olive groves, vineyards and the farm's goats and sheep. Almost all their food came from their property or the nearby Mediterranean. Her mother and grandmothers knew how to live from the land, how to grow vegetables and preserve them for the winter months, and how to make bread and friselle from scratch. They knew how to make pasta with only flour and water and shape it every which way, even rolling it around a knitting needle to make the famous Calabrian fusilli.
As a child, she learned from them. Rosetta remembers taking wheat to the mill, returning home coated from head to toe in white flour. She watched them press olives into oil, and inserted strips of tomatoes into the glass bottles they used to preserve them.
The family moved to the Bay Area in California when Rosetta was 14 years old, however, they continued to grow their own produce, raise rabbits, make their own ricotta, and cure their own salsiccia Calabrese with spicy peperoncino from their garden. Even after she earned a chemical-engineering degree at the University of California Berkeley and went on to a successful career in Silicon Valley, Rosetta retained her love of her family's traditional foodways.
In 2001, as a stay-at-home mom, Rosetta returned to her roots in the kitchen, honing skills learned from her mother and grandmothers. A 2004 San Francisco Chronicle story on the Costantino family, "Calabria from Scratch -- Foods of Calabria," produced an overwhelming response that inspired her to venture into teaching the cooking of her native land. A follow-up article in October expanded on Rosetta’s family's wonderful gardens.
Her new cookbook, My Calabria, is a collection of 150 heretofore-unrecorded recipes, from antipasti to dessert, all inspired by her family's lush garden and the old ways of Calabrian cooks. Readers will encounter dishes beloved among the region's fishing and farming families, such as friselle, moistened rusks topped with tomato, basil, and garlic; pitta, pizza stuffed with chard and dill; fresh pork sausage with hot red pepper and wild fennel seeds (Salsiccia Calabrese); and a recipe for swordfish steamed with a garlicky broth that originates in Bagnara, a Calabrian fishing town. She will bring copies of the book, which will undoubtedly make great holiday presents for food lovers, Calabrese and otherwise!
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