Family Food Traditions . . . Where have they gone?

Last week, my family lost is matriarch; Erma Novello, my grandmother, died after living 91 phenomenal years.  You will find a picture of her with her strong, confident and friendly face in the photos on our Harmoni Market bistro walls.

On the Friday before the funeral, our family gathered at my cousin’s house in the bucolic suburbs of Philadelphia to make Grandma’s most famous dish – potato gnocchi.  It’s an amazingly simple dish to make and no manufactured / processed gnocchi comes close to the hand-made version.  The dinner prep started with my brother and I peeling the potatoes.  Well, wait a minute.  The dinner actually started when I popped the cork on a delicious Italian white . . . then, we set out to peel the potatoes.  (We always cook with wine!)  While we waited for the potatoes to boil, we departed to an outdoor patio to sit outside under a gracious blue ski and a perfect 72-degree / low-humidity afternoon – it was ideal.  My brother and I watched Grandma’s 10 great-grandchildren running around the back yard while the family adults continued to migrate to our table with more open bottles of Italian wine.  We all recalled our kitchen stories where Grandma taught us all how to make potato gnocchi. Sadly, we all agreed how silly it is that we  Americans have lost so many of our home-kitchen food traditions and pondered what will happen when each family’s “grandma” passes on and takes her famous dish with her.

After a glass of wine, we all returned inside and huddled around the kitchen table to make our Grandmother’s famous potato gnocchi.  My brother Mark (the family chef) kept us all in line.  After ricing potatoes and allowing them to cool, we added two eggs to about two pounds of potatoes and an equal volume of flour.  After kneading the dough about three minutes, we simply rolled out “logs” of dough about the width of our index finger.  We rolled out about 12 pounds of gnocchi dough in total – we had a lot of Italians to feed that night!  Then, we cut the logs in one-inch widths and, with the tip of our index finger we rolled the dough toward us, which adds more surface area to the potato dumpling and helps the gnocchi boil properly.  We had family members ages 6 to 76 around the table cutting and rolling the tender gnocchi and recalling stories of how our grandmother always made us laugh.  It was almost a bit uncomfortable that a tragic event like a death was resulting in on of our most memorable family get-togethers.  But, I don’t think my grandmother would mind – she was the glue that brought us all together anyway.

The Novello family normally serves its gnocchi with traditional spaghetti sauce, but this time, my brother created an amazing brown-butter sage sauce this time, too.  The family could not get enough of it.  After it was all over, there wasn’t one gnocchi left in the kitchen.

It’s truly a shame that family food traditions are being lost and forgotten due to our continuous quest for speed and productivity.  I’m not sure when we’ll make hand-made gnocchi again, but I know that my Grandma, Erma Novello, was smiling down upon her entire family that Friday evening.  And in true Italian fashion, she was probably most proud that all of the plates were clean as they came back to the kitchen.  Mangia! Mangia!

Viva Bene!

While living in Europe during the 1990’s, I was fortunate to travel throughout much of the Mediterranean – the south of France, Spain, Italy, Turkey and Greece.  I was amazed (and yes, a bit jealous) of the lifestyle the people of the Mediterranean enjoyed - sun, water, street cafes and fresh markets, delicious fresh food, and smiling family and friends breaking bread and raising a glass at every dining occasion.  After selling almost all of our restaurants in Europe and returning to the US, I found that our hectic American lifestyle left little time for the most important treasure - delicious, wholesome food, wonderful wine, great friends, and plenty of conversation and laughs around the table.

That is why I started Harmoni Market.  We want to become your living room and dining room, kitchen and pantry.  You work too hard to have to worry about shopping and cooking.  Let us create that comfortable European atmosphere for food shopping and dining, and you focus on enjoying a laugh or two with your friends and family.

As we like to say, “Viva Bene!”