I Develop My Cooking Skills

Living during a time of pestilence, I have decided to become a better cook. My goal is to cook meals that both Martine and I like. We both like Italian food, but for some reason, Los Angeles is not a great place for Italian cooking.

Although Martine was born in France, she spent her most of her childhood in Oceanport, New Jersey, where she loved the pastas with rich red sauce—not the pale imitation to be found in Southern California.

Several years ago I picked up a used cookbook written by ex-Mafioso Henry Hill entitled The Wiseguy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes from My Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run. Now you may remember an entertaining gangster film directed by Martin Scorsese and released by Warner Brothers in 1990 entitled Goodfellas. The film starred Ray Liotta as a mafioso with the non-Italian moniker of Henry Hill. Well, it’s the same Henry Hill as wrote the cookbook.

Today I spent several hours preparing a favorite dish that Hill cooked while serving time at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania on narcotics charges. The recipe is for “Oven Penitentiary Sauce with Sausage” on page 133. For some reason, there is an Italian grocery in Santa Monica called Bay Cities Italian Deli whose shelves are not picked clean by hoarders. (I guess they’re too busy snooling on their stash of toilet paper.) So I have access to high-quality Italian groceries, while not having comparable access to American goodies at the supermarket.

The Oven Penitentiary Sauce with Sausage was a big hit with Martine, and I loved it as well. It was the rich Italian food of the Italian migration to the East Coast, with lots of garlic and fresh basil baked in a 350º oven for an hour. I even added my own touch, combining the sauce with fusilli pasta in the oven for an additional quarter hour.

I am looking forward to exploring this cookbook in greater detail during the prevailing plague conditions.