An Italian-American Legacy of Food & Love
I was moved to tears when I came across my Nonna’s citizenship papers.
There she was — Luisa Falcetano Giordano, fifty years old, in a photograph taken for the U.S. government on February 3, 1948, the 172nd year of American independence. Tucked in with her papers was another set belonging to her brother, my Uncle Nicola, naturalized twenty years earlier in 1928. And folded inside his leather certificate holder, kept safe for nearly a century, was a small silk American flag with just 48 stars. Holding it, I felt like I was holding the whole journey in my hands.
Luisa arrived in America as a single woman, young and alone, having crossed an ocean from Naples with nothing but courage. It was in Hoboken that she met Joseph Giordano, a man born right here in America, in New York. They married and had four children together. Then, in 1942, Joseph died, and Luisa was suddenly a widow raising four children alone, the youngest, Marie, was only nine.
She went to work at the American Lead Pencil Factory in Hoboken to keep her family fed and housed. And still, whatever hours she had left in a day, she spent in the kitchen.
The small apartment she shared with her children and her brother Nicola at 601 Monroe Street became something more than a home, it became the gathering place for the whole building, the whole street. Luisa made raviolis by hand, meatballs, and a red sauce, gravy, as we always called it, simmered the old way, the way it was done in Naples. Nicola made wine in the basement with the other Italian men from the building. Nobody had much money. What they had was food from the old country, made with the kind of care that can’t be rushed, and a lot of love.
That love of food and family carried forward through her children, and it carried all the way to my mother, Marie, the youngest, who grew up watching her mother work a rolling pin and a wooden spoon like they were extensions of her own hands. Luisa didn’t just teach her how to cook. She taught her why people cook for each other, that a meal made with attention is a way of saying: I see you, I love you, come sit with us.
That is the lesson at the heart of Maria’s Italian Kitchen. Every plate we serve carries a piece of that small Hoboken apartment, that widow who refused to let hardship harden her, that instinct to feed anyone who walked through the door like they belonged there. As we celebrate 250 years of this country my Nonna chose to call home, and fifty-four years of Maria’s Italian Kitchen carrying her legacy forward, I am proud: proud to be her granddaughter, and proud to keep her love of food and family alive for many more generations and neighborhoods to come.
From our kitchen to your neighborhood celebrations — Happy 4th of July (250th)
With Lots of Food & Love.
Maddy Alfano
