Flavors, Feelings & Memories

Some of my earliest and fondest memories originate from my grandparents basement. Family gathered to make food. They made wine, roasted peppers, tomatoes, and sausage. Oh...did they make sausage. The scene, in the basement, on an old large old wooden table, where the uncles sat working with hundreds of pounds of pork to make sausage and salami in the tradition of Decollatura, Calabria.

You see, they all came from that mountain village in the early 50's to Canada, for a better life. Their traditions followed them and I attempt to keep their methods, tastes and ultimately, the feeling of family that they created, alive today. If you close your eyes, you can taste that feeling. Smells and tastes invoke those memories for me. I miss those who have since passed and I wish to carry on their traditions and the unique taste of Calabria with as many people as possible.

I didn't realize how different or special their processes and traditions were till I went 500 miles away to college. In our small steel town in Canada, there were a lot of families like ours. So everyone I grew up around had family that got together to make their own special recipes. Going to school where there were not as many first generation Italians, gave me more perspective to how I had been exposed and taught something not just traditional, but seemingly as old, filled with character and feeling, as those Calabrese mountains with views of the Ionian Sea.

Having later in life, traveled, extensively to southern Italy, to the birth place of my father and his parents, I got a much deeper understanding of how the making of sausage and other cured meats was to their quality of life. I saw the small little hole in the wall home my grandfather raised a family of five. Out the door was a field where they grew potatoes and other food. I was shown where they kept 'the pig'. Those families were sustenance farmers primarily, growing what they ate. Every January they would butcher 'the pig' and scrape together some money to then buy a suckling to fatten over the coming year. Every inch of that pig was used. But being Italian, it was used with flavor and artisan recipes that belayed the pure need to use all the pig.

Calabria....it is a province in southern Italy where my family is from. It has mountains, beaches and everything in-between. What you need to remember is that, there was no "Italy" until the late 1800's. Before then there were many number of rulers in influences. Calabria alone was at some point controlled by the French, Spanish, Romans, Greeks, and Moors. These small towns, like Decollatura, didn't even have roads or rail in and out until almost the beginning of the 19th century. Donkey paths in and out where the only means of transportation. These villages survived because they were isolated. Pirates and invaders didn't go up there. Conversely, they didn't have much outside influence until recent history. This is why a recipe that may seem 100 years old, is easily 200 years old or more. Things didn't change much for long periods. We are lucky to have such a window to the past.

The recipes, processes, and flavors connect me personally to family. Those that embrace these unique tastes, are connected to hundreds of years of authentic Calabrese men and women, in their villages, creating marvelous flavors. Food was the way they showed their love. They couldn't do much more, but they could keep their family fed and do it in a way that they never, ever realized how little they had.

This is just the beginning of my story...