She’s charming. She’s enthusiastic. She
could be your mom, but she’s not. Instead, she wants your family’s
Italian-American recipes.
Cookbook author Marie Simmons moved to California "kicking
and screaming" six years ago, but she boomerangs back to
Brooklyn for Italian food whenever she gets a chance.
Simmons, 55, was in New York last month to promote the Italian
American Heritage Recipes campaign, organized jointly by Progresso
Foods and the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF), for
which she is the spokeswoman. Food is an integral part of Italian-American
life, and the campaign aims to collect and preserve authentic
Italian recipes and cooking traditions for future generations.
The recipes will be archived by the NIAF at the Immigration History
Research Center of the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis.
"My grandmother and mother both cooked," Simmons, a
third-generation Italian-American, told GO Brooklyn. "When
I was a little girl, my Saturday playdate was with grandma at
her house on the Lower East Side. She was a big influence on
me." She has continued the tradition with her own daughter
and granddaughter.
One of the NIAF board members had ties to Progresso Foods, which
Simmons said her mother and grandmother also used, so she was
a shoo-in for the recipe-collecting project.
"We want to make sure we don’t lose the recipes our grandmothers
and great-grandmothers, and in some cases, grandfathers, used,"
said NIAF Executive Director John Salamone, in a telephone interview
from his office in Washington, D.C.
"We want to capture recipes from throughout America, and
throughout Italy," said Salamone. "Many of the recipes
have been passed down by word of mouth, so we want to preserve
them. We don’t edit them. Our job is to collect recipes, so if
we get 18 recipes for lasagna we’ll include all 18. We’ll be
promoting the project over the next four or five months, but
I don’t think we’ll ever close it down."
Simmons, author of "365 Ways to Cook Pasta" (HarperCollins,
1988) and over a dozen other titles on everything from eggs to
reduced fat cooking, becomes more animated when she speaks about
food.
"I’ve always had this instinct for finding relaxation in
cooking," she said. So it made sense when she decided to
study food and nutrition at Pratt Institute in Downtown Brooklyn.
"When I was growing up, it was very important that I went
to college, that I had a career. My heart was in art, but there’s
no money in that, so I chose to go to Pratt, where I could be
in an art environment. I wanted to work at a magazine, in a test
kitchen. The course opened a lot of doors. My first job out of
college was in the test kitchen at Woman’s Day magazine."
She spent 31 years living in Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights,
starting in her college days. She married a fellow Pratt graduate,
and the couple moved to Brooklyn Heights in the late 1960s.
Simmons shared fond memories of the neighborhood.
"I used to go to the Court Pastry Shop [298 Court St. at
Degraw Street in Cobble Hill (718) 875-4820] for their pignolis
and lemon ice. Or we’d get coffee in a paper cup and drink it
on the promenade. We used to eat at Ferdinando’s [151 Union St.
at Hicks Street in the Columbia Street Waterfront District, (718)
855-1545], where they had this classic spleen sandwich."
Ferdinando’s still serves that offbeat classic, but Simmons is
also interested in sampling the wares of Brooklyn’s newcomers.
"I really want to go to Smith Street," she said, sounding
excited about the borough’s hottest restaurant row.
In 1975, Simmons and her family bought a house in Clinton Hill,
on St. James Place, a few steps from their alma mater, and sent
their daughter to school at Brooklyn Friends.
Simmons went on to work as a pastry chef at Downtown Brooklyn’s
Gage & Tollner [372 Fulton St., between Smith and Jay streets,
(718) 875-5181], and later worked at Cuisine magazine. After
Cuisine closed, Simmons began working freelance out of an office
in the top floor of her apartment, and from this work came her
first cookbook, a compilation of drink recipes.
The mention of drinks reminded her of another Brooklyn food memory.
"Mike’s Coffee Shop [328 DeKalb Ave. at St. James Place
in Clinton Hill, (718) 857-1462], made fantastic lemonade. It
was just water, lemon juice and simple syrup, but they bruised
the lemon rinds in the milkshake machine to get the essence."
Simmons’ attention to recipes runs in the family. When asked
why they chose Simmons to work on the recipe-collecting project,
Heidi Geller, a Progresso Foods spokeswoman said, "[Simmons]
mentioned that her mom has catalogued all her recipes. It just
shows a strong connection to her heritage."
The Immigration History Resource Center will make the collected
recipes available to the public in the future, although the format
has yet to be cooked up.
For more information about the Italian
American Heritage Recipes project, visit www.progressofoods.com.
Italian-Americans who’d like to contribute recipes and anecdotes
to the project should contact: Italian American Heritage Recipes,
c/o Erica Saviano, Ketchum, 711 Third Ave., 16th Floor, New York,
NY 10017 or e-mail heritagerecipes@ketchum.com.
