It\u2019s a question I\u2019m asked often: \u201cWhy did you become a chef?\u201d People who\u2019ve seen me on TV figure I do it to be famous. Or they hear about my new cookbook and think I\u2019m in it for the money.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Mama\u2019s 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\u2019s mother, my nonna, worked with what she had, which wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t help myself; the delicious aromas of gooey parmesan cheese, saut\u00e9ed onions and peppers and eggs wafted through the air. \u201cNo, no, Rocco,\u201d Mama scolded me. \u201cDon\u2019t you touch; this is for the Rosary Society.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was another thing Mama brought with her from the old country\u2014her faith. For her, cooking wasn\u2019t only about filling stomachs. \u201cFood is love,\u201d she always told me, and Mama shared her food, and love, with others in our neighborhood. The Rosary Society wasn\u2019t exactly the place a restless kid like me wanted to be, but where Mama and her food went, I went.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t the only one. \u201cNicolina, did you bring your frittata?\u201d one of the ladies asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course,\u201d 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\u2019s food was worth the wait.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is just like the frittata my mother used to make,\u201d one woman exclaimed. \u201cI need the recipe,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
I began to spend more time in Mama\u2019s kitchen. My first \u201cdish\u201d was a simple one. Mama handed me a little rolled-out piece of dough and showed me how to fry it up in a skillet. When it was golden brown, we\u2019d drizzle some honey on it and top it off with a sprinkle of sugar. Pizza fritta, she called it. She\u2019d make them into shapes like her mama used to do.<\/p>\n
Those little pieces of crispy dough seemed so easy to make. Until I tried to make them by myself one day and set the hot pan down on the wooden counter. My heart sank when I picked the pan back up to find a large black circle burned into the surface beneath it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat have you done?\u201d Mama yelled when she saw the damage. But she forgave me. She was grateful I\u2019d found something that held my interest, because, in our neighborhood, there were a lot of distractions.<\/p>\n
Few kids in our neighborhood went to college or got good jobs. A lot of them sought out cheap thrills and easy scores. More than once, I got shaken down for money by drug addicts and dealers on my walk back from school. Mama wouldn\u2019t let me fall into the quicksand that claimed so many kids.<\/p>\n
When I was 11, there was a record I really wanted to buy, so I asked for a raise in my allowance. Mama looked at me like I was crazy. \u201cYou need to get a job,\u201d she told me. \u201cYou must work for what you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mama knew a thing or two about that. The very day she came off the boat from Italy, she went straight to work at an uncle\u2019s tailor shop and worked for the next nine hours. For three years she was a seamstress. After marrying my father, she took a part-time job knitting sweaters\u2014getting seventy-five cents for every dozen she made. Yet she saved enough money to help bring our whole extended family to America.<\/p>\n
So I got work at a pizzeria\u2014thirty dollars a week sweating in front of a hot oven, covered in sauce and grease. I loved it. Here was my chance to do what Mama did, make people happy with my food\u2014even if it was just pizza.<\/p>\n
We moved to Long Island a few years later, and Mama got a job as a school lunch lady\u2014appropriate, I thought, for a woman who loved cooking for her kids.<\/p>\n
I moved on from making pizza. At 15, I went to work for the New Hyde Park Inn, an award-winning restaurant, and I started to think seriously about culinary school. Mama had never gone to college, and still couldn\u2019t speak English that well, but she encouraged me.<\/p>\n
At 19, after graduating culinary school, I traveled to Paris. I struggled for a while, working at a burger joint and sleeping at a friend\u2019s place, but eventually I landed my dream job working under a Michelin-starred chef. Success there led me back to New York, where I became head chef at a restaurant called Union Pacific and started getting great reviews. Then NBC offered me a reality show that would chronicle the creation of my own restaurant, Rocco\u2019s.<\/p>\n
I knew my restaurant had to be a place that served my family\u2019s food. Who better to help me than my own family? I hired my uncle to make the wine and the sausages, my aunt to make the fresh pasta. There was never any doubt that Mama would be involved. She was retired when I made her the offer to be Rocco\u2019s meatball maker. I worried it might be too much for her, at 77.<\/p>\n
Mama became the star of The Restaurant, both in the kitchen and on TV. Fans stopped her in the street and asked her for autographs. It was like that scene I\u2019d witnessed as a little kid at the Rosary Society\u2014people finding joy in Mama\u2019s cooking. It may have been my name on the sign, but Mama was the place\u2019s heart and soul.<\/p>\n
When the restaurant closed, I think Mama was more disappointed than I was. \u201cAren\u2019t you happy to be able to retire?\u201d I asked her.<\/p>\n
She just shook her head. \u201cAt my age, I\u2019m happy to be able to get up in the morning and do something for people.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year, Mama turned 83, and she\u2019s still my greatest teacher. She was given a great talent, one that she passed along to me. She also passed along the important duty that comes with any of God\u2019s gifts to us\u2014to share them. It\u2019s why she cooked that frittata for her Rosary group. Why she worked as a lunch lady. Why she even gave away her secret meatball recipe in one of my cookbooks. It\u2019s why I became a chef. I\u2019m just following her lead. <\/p>\n