Love, Italian style

Like a fine stock, Mena Castriciano’s cookbook has been simmering on the back burner for a long time. But this week her lifetime of dishing recipes becomes reality with “Cooking with Mena,” a collection of her favorite Italian recipes.

“It was my dream,” she said while holding court in the dining area of Roma Bakery Deli & Fine Foods, 428 N. Cedar St. in Lansing. She owns the longtime business with her husband, Sostine, where she’s frequently interrupted by friends and customers.

Castriciano talks lovingly about her life of cooking and of coming to America in 1960 when she was 12 years old.

In her cookbook, Castriciano tells about her early life in Calabria, Italy, and how it influenced her appreciation for simple cooking. As the oldest daughter, she helped her mother cook for the family of seven, and she often would visit her father Mario, a butcher, when he was at work.

She writes in the book that it was through watching him prepare food that she grew to appreciate the origins of food and understand the gifts she could bring others through cooking.

“Papa was number one,” Mena writes in the book. Her father’s goal was to join his father from Italy, where he had gone in 1929 to work and save money to bring the rest of the family to America. But the Depression and war intervened and it wasn’t until 1960 that the family joined him. Her father began working at his father’s North Town Grocery, 807 E. Grand River.

Castriciano said much was different for them in their new home, adding that at school she would trade part of her meatball sandwiches for American food. Her family introduced authentic Italian food to her neighbors and friends. She said she never had peanut butter before coming to America, and when she learned Americans cooked with Velveeta she responded, “You are kidding me.”

While Americans were satisfied with in prepared box food, she could already wax poetically about prosciutto, Romano, mortadella, capicola and especially crusty bread.

Castriciano said that at holidays and other celebrations, family gifts were almost always food. Another gift came when her cousin introduced her to her future husband when he was a young baker living in Hamilton, Ontario, who had recently emigrated from Sicily. Soon after their marriage they started dreaming about owning their own bakery.

That opportunity presented itself in 1969 when Antonio’s, a small Italian food store at the corner of Erie and Cedar streets in Lansing, went up for sale. With financial help from an aunt, Sostine and Mena became proud owners of a store, which a few months later they would be renamed Roma Bakery and Imported Foods. Then in 1978, they constructed a new 5,200 square feet location just a few blocks south on Cedar.

Crusty artisan bread, which at that time was unavailable anywhere else in Lansing, became one of their best-selling items and remains so today, Castriciano said. Roma became a place where people came to learn about Italian food. The store carries an assortment of olives; 25 kinds of pasta and dozens of soft and hard cheeses and meats with names most can’t pronounce.

Castriciano also used to conduct cooking classes, showing people her recipes and picking up from them secrets of Greek, Mediterranean and American cuisine. But before “Cooking with Mena,” she said most of the recipes were never written down. But it’s not hard to learn, she said.

“Everything starts with olive oil,” Castriciano said. “Being from Calabria, I am a Southern lady and we cook with tomatoes, hot peppers, vegetables, beans, peas and broccoli. It was a handful of that and a pinch of that. There was not a cup or a tablespoon, everything was done by hand.”

She writes that she often started with only a list of ingredients on worn sheets of paper, some without quantities. It took hours of conversations and translations to compile the more than 180 recipes in the book.

Her favorite recipe is braciole, which is thin rolled sirloin filled with ham, mozzarella and breadcrumbs. But not all her recipes made it in — one notable absence is Roma’s popular rum cake.

“It’s a secret,” she said. Castriciano said the cookbook, which includes recipes ranging from lasagna to Italian desserts and antipasto, is her legacy and her gift to family, friends and customers. Like the family tradition of giving food as gifts, her new cookbook is a continuation of that Old World approach.

“That’s Mena,” Castriciano said.

“Cooking with Mena”

Book signing, entertainment by Gino Federici and refreshments 2-5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15 & Saturday, Nov. 22 FREE Roma Bakery Deli & Fine Foods 428 N. Cedar, Lansing (517) 485-9466