Campanile Book Release Event

Mark Peel and Martha Rose Shulman



Mark Peel has been hosting his famous Monday Night Dinners at Campanile for over ten years. Served family-style, everyone eats the same meal. Not only is the serving style homey, but the dishes are typical home-cooked comfort food, raised just one notch higher by Peel's deft hand. The co-author of New Classic Family Dinners, Martha Rose Shulman shadowed the chef in the kitchen, measuring the ingredients as he cooked. The recipes didn't need too much fussing with, as most of them originated in the home kitchen.



Monday night Campanile hosted the book release party. Both of the authors were on hand to meet and greet, provide photo ops and sign books. Complimentary hors d'oeuvres included Southern Fried Chicken Drumsticks, Campanile Beef, Pork and Chicken Meatballs, Clams Casino, Onion, Potato and Bacon Tart, and other "culinary delights" from "New Classic Family Dinners." The Tonnato Rolls were fascinating, with tuna wrapped around veal. But of all the standard crowd-pleasers my favorite dish of the night was the spectacular Minestrone. I can't wait until the weather cools down - it is the first recipe I will be making out of this book, and probably not the last.





One of the authors' intentions was to bring back the forgotten classics like Pasta Carbonara and Goulash to remind everyone why these dishes were once so highly regarded. Host a retro dinner of Clams Casino and Breaded Veal Scaloppine, or serve some of the old-school first courses to go with the retro cocktail craze that is still going strong.



Speaking of cocktails, the signature cocktail of the nice was scrumtuous, as was the bartender.





The cookbook wanders from everyday staples like Bacon-wrapped Meatloaf and Spaghetti with Meatballs to the more exotic Grilled Squid, Potato and Asparagus Salad or Lobster Newburg, the recipes are intriguing and tempting. Using clear instructions. Mark Peel teaches you step-by-step how to disjoint a rabbit, and he finally reveals the truth about mashed potatoes!

The cookbook itself is shiny and appealing, begging to be pulled off the shelf. I have a pet peeve with cookbooks, and it's that right when I am up to my elbows in pasta dough the cookbook slams shut. I have tried every gadget and gizmo to hold the books open, but none of them works very well. This book was designed and bound to fall open to a page and stay open on that page. Nice. The attractive book is also highlighted by the mouth-watering photography of Lucy Schaeffer.



Thank the holder-uppers







It was touching to see Mark Peel watching his wife speak.

The Story of Mom Food

A long time ago, in a land far, far away I went to community college. I attended a lecture by a collage artist. She had started making calendars as Christmas gifts. That is how I got the idea to make cookbooks as Christmas gifts. I have always loved kitschy 40s and 50s housewives so I started collecting old magazines and using their graphics and ads to decorate the cookbooks.

There was a really cool lady named Dody working at the copy shop in Long Beach and she gave me a really good deal copying and spiral-binding the cookbooks. But even better, she took the project personally and worked hard to make the graphics perfect. The type was always lined up as well as any professional book.

The first Mom Food was an attempt to collect my mother's recipes along with some friend's mother's recipes. As time went on, I realized every country has moms and my recipes became more exotic. The originator of the recipe is given when known. Sometimes I've been given a recipe and later found it on a package of sweetened condensed milk, so it's not always perfect. I have searched Epicurious and the LA Times to check old recipes and have found the provenance of some.

For nine years I faithfully printed Mom Foods until the demand grew to over 100. I decided Mom Food X should be a best of. This labor of love grew so intensive I never quite finished it, years went by, and I was waiting for technology to catch up. Then at my dad's funeral someone held both of my hands in theirs and said, "Your dad was so proud of those cookbooks you used to make." So that year I printed the slightly more dense Mom Food X with all new recipes.

Now I have Printshop and I am able to scan in the original "glued-on graphics" pages of Mom Food, then switch around the graphics, shrink and expand them, and fix the many, many typos. So that is a long-term project, and blogging does eat up a lot of my free time.

This Christmas my family decided to have a green Christmas and re-work, reuse and recycle objects. My brother Glen and sister-in-law Janine brought my to tears by handing me a huge tome. They had bound all of the Mom Foods into a beautiful embossed cover. My dream realized.

I will still have to go through Printshop and fix those typos, but it was a vision of what my book can be someday. And I had no idea how many pages there were! There were almost 400 pages!

Many of the contributors to Mom Food have since passed on, and older family members have started to entrust me with our great-grandmother's recipes. I feel like this is my role in the family. I am the keeper of the family's culinary history. It is my duty to pass down these old recipes to the next generation. And if I am lucky they will cherish them the way I have.