About
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Roberto Pisano
Italian Cooking Instructor
About
Traditional Italian Cuisine For The Home Cook
Our palate, our expectation of taste and flavor, develops during childhood. We associate what is familiar with that which comes to define good. Nothing wrong with that, though a mind open to new tastes, innovation, and experiences is a mind open to great reward.
Family Trained: It All Began With Ma
In 1908 a devastating earthquake, the worst in recent European history, destroyed my grandmother's village in Calabria, Italy, along with the neighboring cities of Reggio di Calabria and across the Straight in Messina, Sicily. Over 75,000 lives were lost, and my grandmother, “Ma”, was left for dead beneath the rubble. Her brother Bruno, a popular chef in the area, dug her out and revived her with squeezed lemons. She always said I looked like him and had his soul. Grazie, la cara mia Nonna.
“Ma”
The Great Calabria Earthquake of 1908
Pasta alla Putanesca
These are the flavors I grew up with, accessible and deeply satisfying, forming a taste memory that is the basis of my cooking. Ma passed her skills on to my mother who was equally adept in the Italian kitchen and continued to share this family knowledge and sensibility with me until her passing in 2013. It is because of my grandmother and mother that I cook the way I do. They did not pass down recipes to me - - that would be a bit like "painting with numbers”. What they did give me was my palate, my expectations of what a meal should taste like, in addition to years of experience both in the kitchen and at the table.
The Royal Treatment
When King Victor Emmanuel III, Italy's last Monarch, visited the region to inspect the damage firsthand, he and his envoy were the recipients of a lavish meal prepared by my Great Uncle Bruno. The King was so impressed he hired chef Bruno, along with my Grandmother as sous chef, to be his private chefs in season at the Royal retreat in Sanremo on the Italian Riviera. After a few years honing her culinary skills there Ma emigrated to the USA and settled just outside Boston. The rest, my friends, is history.
Spaghetti Aglio e Olio
My Grandmother, "Ma", on her visit to Seattle after I first moved here from Boston, 1977.
Mushroom Risotto with Porchetta
Chicken Cacciatore, the Original Hunter’s Stew.
My Mother, Maria Antonietta Pisano
Lifetime Learning
Scarcely a day has passed in all these years that I haven’t prepared a home-cooked meal without my mother and grandmother at my side in spirit and inspiration. This is not fussy cooking - - it is delicious, attainable, nutritious and charmingly unpretentious while still inspiring those who may seek a foundation to more “elevated pursuits” in the culinary arts.
