Ethnic foods give Northern transplants a taste of home

By Theresa Curry

Correspondent

Al Castorano’s  grocery store was just across the street from a Brooklyn  brewery, so lunchtime was hectic. Dianne Bailey  has childhood memories of heading over there with her mother – Al’s daughter, Mary Augugliaro  – to help serve the hungry brewery workers.

“It was just a small neighborhood grocery store, but he always had something cooking in the back,” Bailey said of Castorano . “For lunch, he had Italian cold cuts, and he might make a hot sandwich out of meatballs or eggplant Parmesan.”

Bailey’s grandmother, Lillian,  made the pasta and vegetable salads  Castorano served on the side.

Even though  Castorano’s family lived in the city,  he always had a garden out in back of his store, growing vegetables to serve his family of five children. The grandparents on both sides came from Calabrese and Sicily.

“I wondered why my grandmother always served soup before every meal,” said Bailey, who now lives in Suffolk. Lillian, would dish out hot bowls of broccoli or zucchini soup, or a vegetable broth thick with pasta and beans. 

“Later, I realize she didn’t have enough meat for everyone, so the vegetables were to fill the children up a little before the main course.”  They ate well, though. She remembers the women cutting up calamari to simmer in huge pots of tomato sauce.

“I was the one who didn’t like seafood,” Bailey said. “I ate a lot of plain pasta with butter because of that.”

For years, she and her sister Suzanne  tried to duplicate Lillian’s broccoli soup and never could get it right. They’d faithfully follow Lillian’s recipe, cutting up the broccoli and sautéing it in olive oil, then adding water and pasta.

“It always tasted like broccoli and water to me when I made it,” Bailey said.  They did better with the zucchini soup, which had sautéed zucchini as well as potatoes, tomato sauce and pasta.

“When I first made it, I thought it tasted bland and my grandmother told me it needed basil,” she said. “She just assumed I knew every time you used tomatoes, you also added basil. Now I know.”   

 On holidays, the family would make a big seafood salad, octopus and conch dressed with lemon juice, a favorite of her father’s and, later, her husband, Scott.  Her mother would always have shrimp cocktail at Christmas , followed by a big antipasto – a huge platter of peppers, cheeses and meats – assembled by the cousins. There would be shrimp scampi with pasta on the side and a big salad.  

Dianne keeps some of these holiday traditions, combining them with some of the Polish traditions of Scott’s family.

“We’ll have shrimp scampi and also three different kinds of pierogies – sauerkraut, potato and cheese – that Scott makes,” she said.

The couple met when they were students in Pennsylvania. When Scott got a job at Malcolm Pirnie , a Newport News environmental consulting firm, he came to Virginia, and Dianne followed. 

“Of course, we knew we’d miss the ethnic food we grew up with,” Dianne said.

Relatives bring  hard-to-find food to stock their pantry.

“I have a freezer, and my mother makes sure we have plenty of Italian bread from New York,” Dianne said. “It’s not unusual for me to have 25 loaves in there.” 

Scott’s family pitches in, too, to fill the Polish food gap. “They always bring us sausage from Pennsylvania,” she said.

Other essentials come from closer to home. 

“When we moved to our home in Suffolk, I told Scott we needed a garden out back,” she said. “He resisted at first, because the other outdoor chores took up so much time.” But after one bite of his first home-grown tomato,  Scott became a fan.

 Daughters, Rebecca, 7,  and Jessica, 4 ,  love the fresh zucchini and cauliflower their mother dusts with bread crumbs and fries.    Theresa Curry, flavor@pilotonline.com