Product Description

The star of NBC's reality show The Restaurant dishes up the mouthwatering Italian classics that made his TV show and eateries so hot.

A delicious collection of timeless family recipes -- including Mamma's Meatballs -- from culinary superstar Rocco DiSpirito!

Superstar chef Rocco DiSpirito made a name for himself by taking flavor where it had never gone before. But this decorated chef who blazed through the Culinary Institute of America and burst onto New York's fine dining scene -- landing himself on the cover of Gourmet -- actually honed his taste buds on the timeless Italian recipes handed down through his family for generations. Rocco's Italian-American lifts the lid on these age-old meals and shares their secrets, as well as the histories and family traditions that go along with them.

More than just a cookbook, Rocco's Italian-American is a celebration of the family recipes and experiences of one immigrant family in New York and is sure to become a classic. It is also filled with the wisdom of Rocco's Mamma, who is beloved by the millions who know her from her television appearances.

Each delicious recipe includes a personal note on the dish, a story associated with it, or a variation preferred by certain relatives. The book is organized by parts of the meal (antipasto, soup, pasta, fish, meat, salad, bread, sweets, and holiday menus). Rocco describes the techniques of the Italian-American kitchen and instructs on the indispensable ingredients, such as tomatoes, olive oil, basil, and beans. The book is lavishly illustrated with (old and new) photos and other artifacts and mementos from his family's treasure chest, including maps, handwritten recipes, and childhood drawings.

Now for the first time, Rocco shares his favorite family recipes, including:

--Mamma's Meatballs
--Mamma's Frittata
--Sardines with Fennel and Orange
--Farfalle with Grilled Sausage, Fennel, and Baby Artichoke
--Rabbit Cacciatore
--Red Snapper and Heirloom Tomatoes Poached in Olive Oil
--Asparagus with Besciamella
--Poached Cherries with Ricotta Gelato and Toasted Pandoro

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #344800 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-17
• Released on: 2004-11-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito is best known for his short-lived reality TV show The Restaurant, which chronicled the start-up (and disintegration) of DiSpirito's Manhattan dining spot, Rocco's 22nd Street, whose menu was partially devised by his mother Nicolina. Rocco's Italian American offers 150-plus recipes--restaurant-connected dishes like Nicolina's much praised meatballs plus her Eggplant Rollatini and Pizza Fritta, among others. Worthy versions of old favorites include Spaghetti Carbonara, Linguini with Clams, and Stuffed Artichokes. Requiring fewer than ten ingredients, the recipes are as tempting as they are approachable.

But recipes are only part of the package. Following the introduction (a bumpy start, as DiSpirito writes that "every American has in common... one émigré in his family who started it all by coming to America," a statement that Native Americans, among others, will find objectionable) the book offers "Nicolina’s Story" and "Rocco’s Story," 60-odd pages of detailed reminiscence that some readers will welcome and others find excessive. Photos throughout illustrate the dishes; the chef and his clan (this reader stopped counting shots of DiSpirito at 22); and, unaccountably, portraits of common ingredients like lemons, walnuts, and red pepper flakes, among others. This lavish "editorializing" means recipe squeezing, resulting in the use of a very small font that makes reading the methods, especially at "cooking distance," difficult. There are other problems as well, including the "loss" of recipes promised on the flyleaf and in the seafood section intro.

These objections aside, the book promises much good eating--including "dolce" like Elena's Ricotta Grain Cake and Chocolate Walnut Budino--and for DiSpirito fans, another chance to learn from, and gaze at, the master. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly
DiSpirito, who lent his name and career to Rocco's, the restaurant that was the subject of the NBC reality show The Restaurant, offers utterly familiar Italian-American recipes. On television, DiSpirito hired his mother as top meatball maker; here he provides Mama's Meatballs and a host of other dishes he ate while growing up. The most interesting reading is actually DiSpirito's mother's autobiographical essay, which includes the story of how she came to move to Queens from Italy when she was 24, in the late 1940s. In his own essay, DiSpirito repeats some of the same information. (His mother "had overcome monumental challenges for us.") DiSpirito's writing is clunky, with obvious statements such as "Soup is, hands down, the most comforting, restorative food a person can eat, as far as I am concerned." Recipes, which include active time and total time required, tend to the mundane, such as Shrimp Scampi and Linguine with Clams. Some chapters are oddly short, such as a Parmigiana chapter with only three recipes, and one on eggs, which also consists of just three dishes. A master recipe for homemade pasta would be difficult for a novice to follow, and Baked Sausage and Nutella Panini is simply misguided. This is a disappointing follow-up to DiSpirito's far superior Flavor. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
DiSpirito's well-documented travails in giving birth to a New York flagship restaurant have become familiar, revealing much about the dark side of celebrity chefdom. But it was DiSpirito's cooking that initially made him a star, and this new cookbook amply demonstrates his mastery of Italian cooking filtered through the immigrant experience. Chef DiSpirito has always credited his mother with nurturing and inspiring him to become a successful chef, so he gives her first place in his cookbook, letting her record her life history, the saga of her family's migration from Italy to America at midcentury. Both mother and son attribute his accomplishments to family solidarity. Recipes recorded here embrace southern Italian standards: soups, pastas and sauces, stews, fish and shellfish. Unexpected dishes include a simple white pesto that eschews basil for a rich, satisfying walnut-ricotta paste. Fresh and dried pastas benefit from sauces that bring out the best of each variety. Sprinkling family photos throughout the text gives the book the look of an old photo album. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Mixed Review
I just bought the book and haven't tried the recipes yet. I'm sure they're good, because they look like the Italian home cooking I was raised on. To be fair, those holding it up to the standard set by "Taste" are comparing cutting edge restaurant recipes to "just like mama used to make." That's apples and oranges.

I find one glaring shortcoming in the book already though, which is that it seems to have been poorly edited (sloppily or hastily assembled). Some recipes list the same ingredients twice. Some names are almost comically misspelled. The dust cover lists Classic Tiramisu - its not in the book. The fish section says "a dozen recipes" - there are only ten. And on and on. They probably wanted this one on the shelves for the holidays, but if I could find these errors in a half-hour, how hard could it have been for them to pick up on the fact that featured recipes aren't there?

Italian-American Culinary Autobiography. Good, not Great
`Rocco's Italian American' by Rocco DiSpirito, his mother, Nicolina DiSpirito, and freelance writer Nina Lalli screams CELEBRITY CHEF Cookbook with the number of pages dedicated to current and historical snapshots of the principle authors, Rocco and Mama. This book was also almost a certainty after the featured role of Mama's meatballs in the two Mark Burnett `The Restaurant' reality shows. You just knew that there was a book in the works that featured a recipe for these meatballs.

Rocco's principle premise for these recipes is that `Italian-American' cuisine is no less genuine and involves no compromises of `genuine' Italian cooking because it is not exactly the same as that done in Campagnia or Apulia or Lazio or Tuscany or the Veneto. In fact, Rocco claims to have very little knowledge of native Italian cuisine compared to Marcella Hazan or Food Network colleague Mario Batali. I really have no difficulty whatsoever accepting Rocco's position here, and, neither to a lot of respected cookbook authors, as such leading names as Lydia Bastianich and John Mariani have written important books on Italian-American cuisine.

Before the book gets to the recipes, it spends the better part of seventy pages giving us brief memoirs from both Mamma and Rocco. As Nicolina can write neither English nor Italian, I am sure that one of Ms. Lalli's principle jobs was to transcribe and edit Mamma's oral history. While Mamma concentrates on the truly difficult childhood due to poverty of their family in 1930's Italy, followed by the premature death of her father, Rocco's story concentrates on his experiences and enthusiasm for food starting at a very early age. Both stories are interesting, but they lack the kind of spark that enlivens the best memoirs of childhood and the struggle to survive in difficult circumstances. Unlike tales of childhood memories of Jacques Pepin in `The Apprentice' and of Gennaro Contaldo in `Passione', there is practically no art and little intellectual interest in these stories. Rocco has done very little to repair the opinion I formed of him in the course of viewing the two `The Restaurant' shows where he was seen as a self-absorbed, inept manager who probably lied and certainly acted petty in dealings with his financial backer. Not that his backer was a model of probity, Rocco did more to create drama for the camera than he did to rescue the fate of his `Rocco's on 22nd' restaurant. He tried to play to the house like Emeril or Wolfgang without the business sense both of these men seem to maintain.

Since there are several important books out on the `Italian-American' cuisine, it is very easy to evaluate Rocco and Mama's recipes against an independent standard. The obvious place to start is with Mamma's meatballs. But, to make this recipe, you need `Mamma's sauce' made primarily with Red Pack tomato puree, sugar, chicken stock, garlic, onions, and tomato paste. I confess I find this sauce a weak entry compared to Mario Batali's basic sauce which uses whole tomatoes, carrots instead of sugar, and no stock, and can be completed in about half the time, 45 instead of 90 minutes. Mamma's meatballs themselves are very similar to my favorite recipe in `Italian Classics' by `Cooks Illustrated' except that instead of chicken stock, it uses buttermilk or yogurt and instead of bread crumbs, it uses torn white bread. Against this standard, I find nothing special in Mamma's recipe. Rocco's Puttanesca recipe is also nothing special when measured against `Cooks Illustrated' and other models I've seen. It's weakest point is that Rocco requires that you use 2 cups of Mama's Marinara which takes 90 minutes to make plus 20 minutes of cooking for the Puttanesca itself. All other recipes are self-contained, starting from pantry ingredients and often taking little more than 15 minutes from prep to finish instead of Rocco's 20 minutes of cooking. Rocco's spaghetti Carbonara is an odd mixture of influences. He is cooking Italian-AMERICAN, but he is insisting on pancetta that I suspect was hard to get even by most poor Italian-Americans in a Queens Latino neighborhood. On the other hand, this is a Roman dish and Rocco is using Parmigiano-Reggiano instead of including the more traditional Pecorino Romano.

On the other hand, Rocco's recipe for Caesar Salad is about as true to tradition as you can get with raw egg and anchovies and all. I especially liked Rocco's recipe for Mama's everyday bread prepared using the well technique in much the same way as one may make fresh pasta. This yeast recipe is both very simple and economical with the use of yeast, unlike Jamie Oliver's recipe using three packets of yeast. Both are good, Rocco's is simpler.

Rocco and his designers at publisher Hyperion have chosen a very odd arrangement for the color pictures depicting various cooking techniques, in that they have put them all together in a single `rotogravure' section in the back of the book. I'm sure this was done to maintain a very nicely modest list price, but it doesn't help the cook who is trying to follow a procedure and must switch back and forth to make any sense of the text and the pictures together.

The final section on `The Italian-American Pantry' is pretty good. I did find it odd that there are no stock recipes in the book, and no comment about using canned stock. Especially missing is a recipe for a mushroom stock, although several recipes call for this ingredient and I have never seen this ingredient in my local megamart.

Aside from the inconvenient picture layout, this is a very good autobiographical cookbook by a very talented professional chef, but if I were to want a reference on `Italian-American' cuisine, I might prefer Lydia Bastianich's much larger and more professional offering on the subject. If I wanted Italian home cooking, I think `Eleanora's Kitchen' by Eleanora Scarpetta may be just as good.

Interesting and worthwhile if you don't already own a lot of Italian cookbooks.

ROCCOS ITALIAN-AMERICAN
The book is like a treasure,it has all the italian dishes that my family has made for years, but never wrote down.All are very easily explained and simple to follow,I am no where a good cook but these receipes sure make me appear to be a professional.Thanks Mama and Rocco for taking the time to put these together. And,the stories make me feel closer to both of you, thanks again for sharing your family memories.This is a definite, for all who love italian cooking. Cynthia M.