Just Who Am I Anyway?

I am a writer, designer, and business owner who has entered a new chapter of life.  As you may know, I recently sold Willow Grove, the inn and restaurant in Central Virginia that I owned and operated for 22 years. During that time, I wrote three cookbooks and began writing a fourth—a personal account of my experiences revolving around family, food, and friends.

Born in Philadelphia, I grew up in a large extended Italian family in Camden, New Jersey, and have since been transplanted to California, Virginia, and Florida, where I am currently living.

It is no wonder I relate food with these stories and events. I come from a family of inveterate storytellers. Everyone always had a story to tell. The day provided their script. The dinner table their stage. The family their audience. Not a meal went by without everyone eagerly recounting the day’s activities. The most ordinary assignment became an adventure. The most commonplace person an unforgettable character. The most mundane meeting a hilarious encounter.

Everyone wove tales throughout the evening. And when they ran out of new stories, they eagerly retold the old ones—expanding, embellishing, embroidering them until they began to take on lives of their own. And so it is with the stories I will be presenting here. While they are all true, they may not be told exactly as they happened. They all recount my experiences as I moved around the country, met new friends, and learned from them what were to me unfamiliar foods and new techniques for preparing them that I incorporated into my own repertoire.

Some of these stories have been modified, some have been expanded, and some have been joined together. But all of them reflect my lineage, my heritage, my upbringing. They recall the good times and the bad, places I’ve loved and hated, situations of joy and sadness. Most of all, they evoke memories of the people who shaped my life, influenced my notions of food, and taught me that the kitchen is the center of our lives, that the food we prepare nourishes our souls as well as our bodies, and that it is around the table that our differences, and our similarities, come together.

Family members and friends who read the draft of these stories have offered comments about their recollections. But these are the way that I remember them, and I present them with apologies if the facts have become somewhat muddled over the years.

I hope you enjoy reading them and look forward to hearing from you.   

Angela

 What Was a Nice Italian Girl Doing in a Place Like That?

“Camden was originally an accident, but I shall never be sorry I was left over in Camden. It has brought me blessed returns.”  Walt Whitman

Though you might find it hard to believe today, Camden was really a wonderful place when I was growing up. Ethnic in character, the city was composed of a mix of individual insular communities, each centered around a place of worship and each a microcosm of its ancestor. A different nationality comprised each neighborhood: Greek, Irish, Polish, Jewish, Italian. We lived in the Jewish neighborhood. Our neighbors were the Greenbergs, the Wisemans, the Brownsteins, the Blooms, the Salines, the Parzows, the Katzes, the Liebermans. Their neighbors were the Ciccotellis.

My grandfather set out for America from his native Abruzzo when he was just a teenager. Like many young men at the beginning of the twentieth century, he left Italy’s poor economy and slow social growth in search of better opportunities. Unlike them, however, he had a little money, he could read and write, and he had a skill—recently having completed his tailor apprenticeship in Italy. A very energetic and ambitious young man, he settled in South Philadelphia, where he applied for citizenship, quickly mastered the English language—then a requirement—found a job, and married my grandmother. Well-connected with a closely knit group of Philadelphia families from Abruzzo, he got established quickly. But it was his impeccable, flawless English that opened opportunities for him, and it wasn’t long until he had the financing to open his own business—Attilio Ciccotelli, Tailor of Distinction. His business grew quickly and, as he became more and more successful, he decided to move up from his neighborhood in South Philadelphia.

In those early days of the 1900s, South Philadelphia was a mini-town of crowded row homes on narrow treeless streets. It was not surprising that my grandfather fell in love with Parkside, a well-to-do Jewish community of nuclear families who lived in single family homes. There he transplanted the entire Ciccotelli clan—no nuclear family here—to a four-bedroom brick home on a lovely tree-lined street. It was there I lived with my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins for a large part of my early childhood. It was there I learned to eat lox and bagels, matzoh, blintzes, knishes, and gefilte fish along with our traditional Italian dishes. And it was there I learned the differences—and the uncanny similarities—of the two cultures.

I often wonder what the neighbors must have thought when the Ciccotellis arrived. Not only were they a different nationality with a different religion and different holidays, they were a big, loud bunch who got even louder when the “relatives from Philly” arrived each Sunday. Carload after carload of my grandparents’ sisters and brothers would arrive with their families, none of whom spoke any English.

In nice weather, they would gather in the back yard where they could be heard, in their hometown Italian dialect, discussing the week’s happenings as they drank pitchers of my grandfather’s wine from the cellar and devoured a loaf of Italian bread and a freshly made antipasti: cold meats and cheeses surrounded by garlicky roasted peppers, bright pickled beets, vine-ripened tomatoes sprinkled with pungent basil, pale green cucumbers laced with feathery dill, bitter black and green olives, and thin slices of sweet onion.

Appetites whet, they would then move indoors to a veritable Italian feast that to this day translates in my mind as a rare taste of culinary perfection.