Allan Appel Photo
Silvio Suppa remembers the olive season. He remembers riding in horse and buggy with his grandfather to the olive presses in town near his native Sant’ Agata dei Goti in southern Italy’s Campania, a region from which many New Haveners’ ancestors hail.
He didn’t want to forget those memories. He wanted also to be sure that the next generation would know how to make spaghetti d’olio the way his nonna, or grandmother, did.
So after 26 years as chef at Delmonico Ristorante on Wooster Street and a dozen years owning Café Allegre in Madison, Suppa has published Cooking with Chef Silvio: Stories and Authentic Recipes from Campania.
Publication was celebrated Thursday night at 216 Crown St., where the book was the subject of the inaugural exhibition of the new UpCrown Gallery in the LoRicco Building. The event drew more than 100 well-wishers.
The compendium of Suppa recipes and local Campania social history was written by Anthony Riccio, whose previous book was The Italian American Experience in New Haven.
A week after the olive picking Suppa recalled, his grandfather took the olives and the grandkids to the montano, the olive press in town. “We stayed overnight,” so that his grandfather could be sure all that he brought was pressed.
Suppa provided the memories and the recipes and Riccio, who traveled to Campania with the chef, was Suppa’s amanuensis and personal oral historian for chef’s culinary memoir.
Ricci (at left in photo) has surrounded each of the recipes in the book with the Suppa’s memories and the larger cultural history that grows out of the gastronomy.
Take pacche e fasul, said Riccio.
It’s basically macaroni and beans. Local folklore had it that the recipe was not only traditional, but extraordinarily old, said Riccio.
How old he only found out when he got back to Yale University, where Riccio has been the long-time head of the library stacks.
There he found that pacche e fasul was the oldest known recipe in Campania. “It was known to the Samnites, contemporaries of the Greeks and Romans,” said Riccio.
Chef Suppa agreed. “Some of these recipes are a hundred, a thousand years old,” he said.
Many of the secrets were in the memories of Suppa’s five surviving aunts, all in their mid to late 80s. Riccio interviewed them.
As waiters passed around sumptuous hors d’ouvers of lamb chops and dates wrapped in bacon with gorgonzola, guests looked up on the walls where two dozen of Riccio’s photographs of Italy were on display.
Like this one from Pisticci in Calabria. It shows a woman who came out every day at 3 o’clock in this ancient costume, to read in front of her house from the Bible, Riccio recalled.
His exhibition is called “;Il Senso di Quotidianita,” or daily life in Italy.
The black and white photographs are from all around Italy, not only Campania. They include images he made as a student in Florence in the 1970s. Riccio also took all the photos in the Chef Suppa’s cookbook, which are in color.
Suppa said he had always dreamed of writing a cookbook but hadn’t found the right fellow to work with until he met Riccio when the latter was one of the speakers at a wine and food event at Café Allegre.
For his part Riccio said the invitation came when he was in the middle of his own new book, which he is calling (it is still in progress) Farmers, Factories and Families – Italian American Women of Connecticut.
Although he was originally reluctant to collaborate with Suppa in order to continue his own work, when the chef began to regale him not only with recipes but also tales of the area’s cultural life, “I was hooked,” he said.
There may be more collaborations in the offing. Cooking with Chef Silvio has chapters with titles like “Nonna’s Apprentice,” “Il Pranzo (the lunch) on the Farm,” and “Shepherds’ Dishes.”
The last chapter is “Leaving for America.”
Suppa did that in 1968 when he arrived in New Haven, where his wife had relatives. He remembers that experience well, a seven-day journey by boat on the ship Rafaello out of Naples.
The next creation of Chef Silvio well may be based on his life and recipes over the last 40 years in the Elm City.
John Scafariello will likely be in it. Before a retirement that has permitted more pleasurable eating, he said, he was the bartender at Delmonico’s and Café Allegre. He has known Suppa for 40 years.
As he ate some asparagus with prosciuto with a garlic and oil sauce, Scafariello revealed one of the secrets to the chef’s success: “Silvio is smooth as silk.”
In the often hectic world of the kitchen, “he calms everyone down.”
On Tuesday Scafariello’s book debuted at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, which is across the street from Café Allegre. When they sold 125 books and then ran out, Suppa invited everyone, especially those who were disappointed, across the street to Café Allegre for a free dinner.
The book is available from State University of New York at Albany Press. An exhibition about the book will be on view at UpCrown Gallery at 216 Crown St. through the end of October.