Eat! You’ll Get Hungry, A Family Food Saga

Food, as you will find out in Eat! You’ll Get Hungry, A Family Food Saga, has always been important in Sam Gugino’s family. Whether it was a routine weekday dinner, a holiday feast, or a post-funeral lunch, food was the glue that held everything and everybody together. One of the biggest meals in his memory was provided to Sam’s immediate family by aunts and cousins after returning from his father’s funeral. It was as if the volume of food was designed to ease the hurt.

Anna Gugino, Sam’s mother, believed that if you were healthy, you ate. If you didn’t eat, you were sick or dead. So, for her the denial of food to anyone was cruel and unusual punishment. On those rare occasions when a guest-usually a non-Italian-would say they weren’t hungry, her instant response was ＂Eat! You’ll get hungry.＂

In the Gugino family, food was more than just something her four children ate. Mom cooked because she loved them. They ate because they loved her-and because their father threatened to lock them in the basement and feed them nothing but raw onions if they didn’t. If you were sick, you ate. If you were well, you ate. If it was a rainy Tuesday, you ate. And if it was a holiday, you ate twice as much.

Anna Gugino was an alumna of several schools of feeding and eating. One was the ＂Always Cook Twice as Much as You Need Because You Never Know Who’s Going to Drop By＂ school. Since it was well known among neighbors and relatives that she graduated from this school with honors (magna cum sugo), the Guginos probably had more visitors at dinnertime than most other people. Their house was like the 24-hour diner. It never closed, even on holidays, especially on holidays.

Many of the recipes in this 175-page book are for dishes the Gugino family ate for decades, like Mom’s Sauce, the Sunday spaghetti sauce (＂gravy＂ in Philadelphia, where Sam lives) with meatballs, braciola, spareribs and ham hocks, her lasagna, and baked macaroni (a variation of Grandma’s brought over from Sicily where grandparents on both sides of the family were born). Mom was also a great pie maker. So, the book also contains her recipes for lemon meringue, coconut cream, apple, peach, and pumpkin pies. There are fabulous cookie recipes from Sam’s Aunt Sandy, the spinster aunt (every Italian family seems to have one), and two recipes from Big Aunt Jo, stuffed artichokes and chicken cacciatore. (In the book, you’ll read more about her and her husband, Big Uncle Alphonso, as well as other characters in the extended Gugino family.)

There are also a few recipes from Sam’s four earlier cookbooks, including Smothered Lamb Chops, from Cooking to Beat the Clock, Inspired Meals in 15-Minutes, which was listed as one of the ten best cookbooks of the year by Amazon.

Early in his writing career-after years as a chef and restauranteur-Sam’s mentor, Art Milner, urged him to focus on what he thought Sam wrote about best: food, family, and humor. Today, we need those three qualities more than ever. And that’s what you’ll find in Eat! You’ll Get Hungry, A Family Food Saga.