The spaghetti mafia, Mietta again, nostalgia and family history

Today I am moving on to my next Christmas cookbook Mietta's Italian Family Recipes and I have to say that this is different yet again. Indeed my Christmas goodies are so varied that it will be impossible to choose between them - to choose a 'best' of the 'best'.

I have barely got into the recipe part of the book but the initial part sparked a few things in my mind - not just about Mietta but about myself - and people in general - as well. And also specific things about the Italian food culture of Melbourne. Which is a tiny bit ironic, or at least curious, for Mietta's two restaurants had a very pronounced French bias - not Italian at all - well for a lot of the time her chef was Jacques Reymond.

I have previously written about her restaurant, and a little bit about her, so I won't repeat that here. But I will expand a little bit on nostalgia and family history.

For the first thirty or so pages of this book are all about the Italians who founded the Italian restaurant tradition in Melbourne. And only one small mention of Lygon Street.

The photograph at the top of the page is of a group that became known as the spaghetti mafia - They are: standing from left - Ferdi Viganŏ, Lou Molina, Leon Mason, Rino Codognotto and Joe Molina, seated from left Mario Virgona and David Triaca plus an Italian journalist. Now these names might not mean a lot to you - some of them meant a little to me but together they are responsible for some of Melbourne's most famous restaurants - some past, some still going - Florentino's, The Latin, Mario's, Tolarno and even Jimmy Watson's. The Grossi family is not there, but one of the spaghetti mafia brought in the original Grossi as a chef for his restaurant. What I found remarkable though was how these few families intermarried and connected in business ways, buying and selling to each other, swapping chefs and influencing some of the major changes to the Melbourne restaurant scene - including licensing laws. I carefully read through each of the small family histories that Mietta recounted but ended up totally confused as to who was related to who. Everyone to everyone it seemed to me.

And the other thing was how connected to the music - specifically opera - and theatrical communities they were. Their restaurants became 'homes' for the performers, and Mietta herself was famous for her cultural 'salon' in the downstairs part of her restaurant. And finally, the other surprise for me was to discover that this particular Italian community were mostly from the north of Italy and also came to Melbourne at a much earlier time than the majority of Italian immigrants in the fifties. Some of them came as far back as the nineteenth century but almost all of them were here and working in their various food enterprises well before WW2. Like, I suspect, most Melburnians I had thought that our Italian immigrants were from the south and came here after WW2. As indeed many did, but there was obviously a vibrant Italian community here well before then.

Mieta O'Donnell herself (a good Irish name - for her father was of Irish descent), is from the Viganŏ family which was responsible for Mario's on the corner of Exhibition and Little Bourke St. After she and Tony Knox closed the doors on her restaurant one of the things she chose to do was to write this book. By then she would have been in her late forties, for she died shortly before her fiftieth birthday. Having spent her entire professional restaurant life with mostly French food, it is extraordinarily interesting to me that she should choose to write a book about Italian food. And to spend quite a bit of the space on laying out the family histories.

For me I did not really start wondering about where my family came from until I was well into my fifties - maybe sixties even. When we are very young it's all about the future isn't it? Every day we make exciting discoveries and we wonder how our lives will turn out. Our parents are just our parents. Our grandparents are perhaps a little more interesting. I do remember asking my grandmother about her younger days, but sadly I do not remember what she said. But really it's all about the future - will we ever get to the age of ten? Will we marry and have children? What will we be when we grow up? Then we get a job, perhaps marry, perhaps have children, perhaps travel and the focus is almost exclusively on NOW. How do I stop the baby crying? Will I finish that project at work on time? Can I afford to buy this or that? Where shall I live? Is it time to weed the garden or clean the house or do the washing? The minutiae of life take over. There really isn't even much time to think about the future.

Then at last the children leave home - and we cry and feel empty. We retire and we relax and slow down. Then is when we begin to look back, firstly at our own lives - we bring out the old photos, we scan them into our computers, we wonder how we could have done better and count our blessings too. And then some of us - not all - start to look further back. First of all we wonder about our parents - now long gone - and start to uncover little - or maybe big - mysteries in their lives. This piques our interest and starts us off on the family history trail. Some of us (me) get a little bit obsessed about it for a while, find out so many interesting things about the people, their lives and the worlds they lived in - we discover that even very ordinary people have extraordinary lives - and we want to share that with others.

Alas mostly no-one is that interested. For a while I went to some family history research meetings and listened to other people's stories - and I was mostly bored I have to confess, even though the stories they recounted were at least as interesting as my own. I have tried to share what I know on a website, and I suppose that it has been a wonderful way of getting in touch, however briefly, with new relatives. It has also been a creative outlet and a way of putting what I know down for future generations. For even though they are not interested right now - they are too busy living their lives - I hope that one day my children and my grandchildren and so on and on, will be interested to read what I have written and discover their roots. Where they came from and how even an ordinary life can be unique and can have meaning and value.

And I suspect that this is what Mietta O'Donnell was doing when she wrote this book. For the recipes I think are a celebration of the food of her childhood and youth. A celebration of a way of life which she had helped to preserve - if only in inciting a love of good food, company and music. Though admittedly, in her case, for the monied few. She was remembering her youth, her roots and preserving it for others in times to come.

Thank you Dionne again.

"Looking back it is abundantly clear that the reason for starting down the restaurant path in 1974 and for writing this book a quarter of a century later is a fascination with food and with entertaining which came from my Italian grandparents ... They gave me a glimpse of the sort of pleasure that can be given and gotten through true hospitality - where you give of yourself, of what you enjoy, and what you like to surround yourself with. If that is, as it was in my grandparents' case, art and music, fine food and wine, gardens and animals and family, it's not a bad life." Mietta O'Donnell

POSTSCRIPT: And another thing I noticed as I read on was that there were no pictures of the food - unusual in this day and age. The only pictures were of family and friends. Each section is fronted by one of the photographs, but cropped and treated in a very artistic way. And each section was also fronted, not by commentary on the food, but by yet another family story.

And finally, most of the recipes are not Mietta's at all. They come from her friend Silvan and from Patrizia Simone from Bright. Well I say they are not Mietta's. I think the family ones are sort of remembered by her and then tested and refined by Silvana. Both of these wonderful ladies are given full and copious credit for their contributions I have to say.

All of which is to say that this book is Mietta exploring her roots rather than a cookbook per se. Some of the recipes looked interesting, but some also looked amazingly dull. But that's comfort food for you isn't it?