Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

by Louise DeSalvo

Overview

During Louise DeSalvo's childhood in 1950s New Jersey, the kitchen becomes the site for fierce generational battle. Louise's step-grandmother insists on recreating the domestic habits of her Southern Italian peasant upbringing, clashing with Louise's convenience-food-loving mother; Louise, meanwhile, dreams of cooking perfect fresh pasta in her own kitchen. But as Louise grows up to indulge in amazing food and travels to Italy herself, she arrives at a fuller and more compassionate picture of her own roots. And, in the process, she reveals that our image of the bounteous Italian American kitchen may exist in part to mask a sometimes painful history.
Louise DeSalvo is a writer, professor, lecturer, and scholar who lives in New Jersey. Her many books include the memoirs Vertigo, Breathless, and Adultery; the acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work; and Writing as a Way of Healing. Recently, she edited Woolf's early novel Melymbrosia and coedited The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture.
A Book Sense 76 pick in hardcover
"Louise DeSalvo packs about six courses of emotional wallop into her slim memoir...[A] tough, courageous story, one of hard-won wisdom and memory."-San Francisco Chronicle
"Illuminate[s] the difficulties of reconciling past and present...DeSalvo celebrates the table of her ancestors by savoring her own rediscovered history."-New York Times Book Review
"An affecting story of immigrants in America...These recollections are tinged with pain and beauty."-Publishers Weekly
"The dramatics of [DeSalvo's] youth, it seems, produced a superior, dedicated writer and a determined, devoted cook who may go a little crazy in the kitchen...[A] juicy, tender text, seasoned with fear, loathing, and love served Italian style."-Kirkus Reviews
Crazy in the Kitchen is in the "Home

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582344706
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	01/03/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	773,049
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Louise DeSalvo (1942-2018) was the multi-award-winning author of such memoirs as Vertigo, Breathless, and Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. She was also a renowned feminist scholar and essayist who wrote about such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Virginia Woolf. Her book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work was named one of the most important books of the twentieth century by the Women’s Review of Books.

A professor of English, Louise taught creative writing and literature at Hunter College where she implemented the school’s MFA in Memoir program, and she wrote several books on creative writing including Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives and The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Times, Craft, and Creativity.

Table of Contents

	Prologue: Wild Things	1
Part 1	Cutting the Bread
	The Bread	9
	The Other Bread	12
	Convenience Foods	16
	Making the Bread	19
	Kneading the Dough	24
	The Knife	30
	Slicing Onions	32
	Breaking the Dishes	38
	Home Ec	42
Part 2	Wounds
	Keepsakes	57
	Slingshot	64
	Handwork	73
	Dark White	84
	Passing the Saint	95
	Food on the Table	105
	Holy Oil	117
Part 3	Chasing Ghosts
	Hunger	131
	Puglia Diary	139
	Big Shot	145
	Nightmare (Without Food)	155
	Food Fights	160
	The House by the River	167
	Appetite	179
Part 4	Communion
	Courtship (with Food)	195
	Matchmaking	206
	Respect	214
	Feeding the Dead	222
	Wiping the Bowl	236
	No More Cooking, No More Food	240
	Tearing the Bread	250
	Epilogue: Playing the Bowl	253
	Acknowledgments	256

Editorial Reviews

"Illuminate[s] the difficulties of reconciling past and present...DeSalvo celebrates the table of her ancestors by savoring her own rediscovered history."

New York Times Book Review

"Louise DeSalvo packs about six courses of emotional wallop into her slim memoir...[A] tough, courageous story, one of hard-won wisdom and memory."

San Francisco Chronicle

"In fierce and brawling prose, Louise DeSalvo evokes how food and its absence shaped three generations of her family. Now I know why Italian cooking is so good: every bite has the power to vindicate the past."

Patricia Volk

… through recording the past, through her visits to the countryside where her grandparents were born, through the peace she makes with her mother and grandmother (both now dead), DeSalvo celebrates the table of her ancestors by savoring her own rediscovered history. — Lee Thomas

The New York Times

Professor, lecturer and scholar DeSalvo successfully blends catharsis and storytelling in an affecting story of immigrants in America. DeSalvo (Vertigo; Breathless; etc.) grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of first-generation Americans and the granddaughter of Italian emigres who spent much of their lives without much food-or happiness. Her culinary-centered essays feature the genre's requisite characters: the old widow who dresses in black every day, the drunken grandfather, the young mother who "tries to put her Italian past behind her" and serves her kids toasted cheese on white bread that sticks to the roofs of their mouths. Yet DeSalvo's chronicles are nothing like the many memoirs of growing up Italian-American that more closely resemble slapstick comedies. Rather, these recollections are tinged with pain and beauty. She writes of the depression her mother felt after never knowing her birth mother and being raised by her stepmother, a mail-order bride from Italy. She's frank about the constant bickering ("I'll break your head!" "I'll break your legs!") that dominated much of her childhood. She's up-front about her southern Italian heritage, which classified her grandparents as "dark" people whose "whiteness was provisional." And she addresses the irony of purchasing expensive organic produce when her grandparents sometimes subsisted solely on bread soaked in wine. Still, the memoir isn't all melancholic; dry wit and pride temper DeSalvo's prose, as she attempts to become "a person aware of inequities faced by Italian Americans in a country that has not yet fully equated the Italian American experience with the human experience." (Jan. 17) Forecast: With a five-city author tour of the Northeast, local New Jersey readings, a long list of acclaimed books by the author and solid reviews, this erudite but accessible book could have legs. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Employing her crusty step-grandmother's crusty Italian bread instead of a madeleine, memoirist and biographer DeSalvo (Adultery, 2000, etc.) adds to her remembrance of an operatic past. She offers not one interlarded Ruth Reichlian recipe. The cuisine in DeSalvo's childhood home wasn't the loving Italian sort with lots of tomato meat gravy on the vermicelli. Chef Boyardee, Dinty Moore, Chung King with Minute Rice, and Dugan's pastry were the staples of her troubled mother's menus, served with vitriol for Mom's old-country stepmother. Clad in classic black, the old lady glared and muttered in dialect. Family dialogue consisted of lusty curses punctuated by sudden lunges. It was Italian New Jersey in the 1950s, when old men descended to basements to make wine or, in winters, to sit near the warmth of the furnace. DeSalvo tells of strong men and steadfast women from Puglia and Campania, Sicily and the Abruzzi, superstitious and wary in a new land. She depicts a culture of put-upon wives and fierce husbands, of immigrants only reluctantly and never fully assimilated. The flavors of the old world were ever redolent, despite the Dugan's white bread. The author's family lore is marked by intergenerational warfare, recrimination, regret, hatred-and love, too. Beneath the crust there were, after all, tenderness and nourishment. The revelations mount, and lessons of universal significance are drawn from trips to the vegetable markets and journeys to Italy. DeSalvo finally finds pleasure in food, in tasting, and in preparing artfully prepared dishes. The dramatics of her youth, it seems, produced a superior, dedicated writer and a determined, devoted cook who may go a little crazy in the kitchen. Asin life, past tense unites with present in this juicy, tender text, seasoned with fear, loathing, and love served Italian style. Suitable for literary ladies, sensitive guys, and others, too. Agent: Geri Thoma/Elaine Markson Agency

Kirkus Reviews