Mangia! Mangia!

Book excerpt: Mangia Mangia , Italian for Eat Eat , celebrates home-style Southern Italian food, based on traditional recipes and methods passed down through the generations. Authors Teresa Oates and Angela Villella are passionate in their quest to preserve the vibrant food culture of their parents' native Calabria, and to introduce new generations to the joys of simple, generous cooking with the freshest produce.Join them as they record the sacred seasonal rituals of their childhood, from the production of a year's supply of passata using summer's tomatoes, through autumn's ceremonial preservation of vegetables and olives, to the "making" of the pig in winter, when an entire pig is converted into a pantry full of salumi. Learn how to match pasta types to sauces, how to prepare traditional Italian favourites like minestrone and lasagne, and how to create mouth-watering sweet treats for special family celebrations. Mangia Mangia embraces the one constant of their migrant families' journeys - their food - prepared with an innate wisdom and served with a generosity of spirit. As you cook and eat, you will be doing your part to save these unique traditions and recipes, born of a rich migrant food culture, from extinction. Beautifully photographed, Mangia Mangia is not only a wonderful cooking reference, it is a heartwarming account of the sharing of wisdom, the creation of community and the preservation of rituals that keep us close to those we love. Includes metric measures.