More recipes just like nonna did it

A book that gathers closely held recipes from Italian grandmothers has proved such a hit it has led to a sequel.

Treasured recipes: Authors Gina Carpinteri and Rosie Romano, of Thorpdale, in Rosie’s kitchen. Picture: Dannika Bonser

ILLEGAL grappa production is one of Rosie Romano’s earliest childhood memories of her Italian food heritage.

“My children remember the slaughtering of a pig, the blood on the garage floor and the salami and sausage making that followed,” recalls Rosie, who lives on a 40ha beef farm in South Gippsland’s Thorpdale with her husband Mano.

They are vivid food memories, to be sure, the kind of recollections treasured not only by Rosie’s family but the wider Italian community.

And it’s those kind of memories — perhaps a little less graphic and certainly not illegal — that come to life in Nonna’s Secret Recipe Book II, which Rosie has helped compile alongside her friend Gina Carpinteri.

The first edition of Nonna’s Secret Recipe Book was released at last summer’s Mirboo North Italian Festa, with the second to be launched at this year’s festival on February 9 in the town’s Baromi Park.

Picture: Dannika Bonser

While the first edition featured a recipe for a whole roasted boned pig, stuffed with herbs, and cooked in a wood-fired oven, Rosie says the cookbook is accessible to even beginner cooks, with the offerings celebrating authentic Italian cuisine.

“This year we have recipes on how to make salami, the lemon-flavoured liqueur limoncello, passata, eggplant in oil and green tomatoes,” Rosie says.

“There’s also all the basic recipes like making pasta dough, Italian pastries like cannoli and crostata.”

The $20 book — to be sold at the festival and via the festa’s website — even includes her own recipe: chicken fillets with lemon and caper sauce.

There are 24 recipes in total, across starters, mains and desserts, all of which have been contributed by nonne, or grandmothers, in the Mirboo North and Morwell region.

However there are a couple of offerings by younger cooks, “the next generation”, as well as great grandmothers (including her own 90-year-old mother).

Starting the second book in March, the nine-month project has seen Rosie take the photos, while Gina would sit with nonnas to work out recipe methods and ingredients, and also collect anecdotes.

“Especially with the older nonnas, quantities could be difficult because generally they use a handful of this or a drop or dash of that, so Gina would bring her measuring equipment,” the 61-year-old mother of two and grandmother of two explains.

“If we didn’t transcribe these recipes a lot of them would be lost. And we also include tips in the book and brief stories.

“One of the nonnas, for instance, told us her polenta-with-sauce recipe was 150 years old and when her mother made it she would pour the polenta on the table, cover it with sauce, and the family would eat it off the table with forks.”

When most of us think of Italian migration to Victoria, we imagine tobacco and wine-grape farms of the North East or little Italy in Carlton.

Picture: Dannika Bonser

But Rosie — a retired teacher currently learning Italian every week in Melbourne — says many Italian migrants came to the Morwell area, drawn by jobs in electricity production.

Her mother’s parents came in the 1920s from northern Italy to Trafalgar, where her mum was born, and grew up on a dairy farm.

Rosie’s husband was born in Italy and came to Australia from Sicily as an 11-year-old.

She says it was about 50 years ago that a group of Italian immigrants in Mirboo North commissioned a statue of St Paul, the patron saint of their hometown Solarino in Sicily, and had it shipped to Australia. The first St Paul’s Festival was subsequently held in the town in 1966, including a three-day Mass, and continued until 2015.

“The festival was held on and off and it was very much a Catholic Italian event. By the end, though, it was less relevant to the younger generation. The organisers — including my husband — said no one was turning up so they were going to stop running it,” Rosie says.

“At the time, I said we can’t let this die after 50 years and so with three others we revitalised it, renaming it the Mirboo North Italian Festa.

“I didn’t realise how big it would become.”

In 2016, 500 people came to the first Festa and since then it has doubled every year, last year attracting about 20,000 patrons, Rosie guesstimates. The festival continues its religious traditions, with a Mass at 10am, followed by the carrying of the statue of St Paul in a procession through the park.

But the popular drawcards are the 50 food stalls, 100 art and craft stalls, as well as grape-stomping and spaghetti-eating competitions, flag throwers, tarantella folk dancing lessons, in addition to cooking demonstrations by nonnas featured in the book.

“We aim to be as authentic as possible, to celebrate Italian culture in Gippsland, our traditions and history,” Rosie says. “It’s a beautiful family day where you can see four generations of a family come together.”