Silver Lake

My Mom is French Canadian and Dad is mostly Irish. Our dinner usually consisted of beef, pork or chicken and canned vegetables and POTATOES. Spices? No. Salt only and plenty of it. Fast forward to 1973 when I move into the dorm at Rhode Island College in Providence. Only about twenty miles away from my hometown of Somerset, MA but culturally, a world away. And the most immediate culture shock was the FOOD.

Eggplant? I had never even heard of it.

A few years later, I moved into a third floor apartment on Dorchester Avenue in Silver Lake. I might have been the only non-Italian on the street. Every Sunday, I'd wake up to the wonderful aroma of  my downstairs neighbor simmering gravy -- and by gravy, of course I mean tomato sauce, Italian style, with some veal and beef and a lot of garlic, maybe canned San Marzano tomatoes from the garden. If I was lucky, I'd get a handout of leftover eggplant, meatballs and gravy or beef braciole. I learned to cook a bit so I could duplicate my neighbor's meals. I learned that you only buy Land of Lakes American cheese sliced as thin as paper, at the local meat store. Pasta must be al dente. How would I know? Everything I ate at home was cooked until it nearly dissolved.

This was a time when the produce man and fish man would still come around every week. You would hear them shouting out as they came down the street, usually on a fairly predictable schedule, with their push cart or battered truck and the housewives would go out and purchase the wares. Old school.

Of course I ate out too. My favorite restaurant was The Original Marcello's on Cranston Street, in Cranston near the Providence line. The interior was '70's Italian decor -- red, white and black and cave-like. There was also another sister restaurant in Knightsville, right up the street, that was more of a diner. The restaurant served up the absolute best stuffed peppers ever made. To this day, I still am trying to duplicate them; the restaurant is long gone, as I recall, it burned down. I had better luck finally recreating the pasta fagiole that the Marcello's diner offered. After about twenty years of failed attempts, the Providence Journal posted a pasta fagiole recipe and the minute I read it, I was pretty sure that was the right one and it was.

Tonight I am (again) trying to recreate  Marcello's stuffed peppers. We'll see. Maybe this is it.