Two Meatballs in the Italian Kitchen Review

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(More customer reviews)My wife worked for Pino Luongo for years and years.
Mark Strausman cooked our wedding dinner.
And now, burdened by this long collaboration and friendship, I'm going to try to convince you of a proposition you may find extremely unlikely: This is the most practical --- and certainly the most fun --- Italian cookbook out there.
Let's start with the fun. These guys, as the title almost suggests, are goofballs who will fight with one another over just about anything. Start with meatballs. Luongo insists they should be pan-fried in olive oil, "only occasionally served with tomato sauce and never on the same plate as spaghetti." Strausman wouldn't dream of cooking them that way. For him, meatballs are to be simmered in tomato sauce and invariably to be served over pasta.
And they have their reasons --- just ask them. In one of the dialogues that launch each section, Luongo and Strausman explore the philosophical depths of their disagreement. Here's a highly abridged version:
Strausman: I like the sense of abundance you get with a big, juicy meatball.
Luongo: But the proportion is all off.
Strausman: Is the dish too humble for you? Oh, I forgot: You were born in northern Italy, wearing an ascot.
Luongo: What you're talking about has no basis in Italian tradition.
Strausman: Meatballs are all about the meat. Italian-Americans came to this country with nothing, and as soon as they could afford to buy meat, however inexpensive, they created big, juicy meatballs.
Luongo: Yes, you put raw balls of meat into tomato sauce and cook them long enough to suck all the juices out of the meat.
Who wins? You do. "A cook-off is in order --- let the reader decide," Strausman proclaims. And so you can. And you can also go on to cook Mark's mom's meat loaf, Pino's meat loaf, Pino's fresh pasta with meatballs and mushrooms, Mark's turkey meatballs in spicy tomato sauce and Pino's meatballs with amaretti.
In short, two books in one.
Well, one, actually, for Pino Luongo and Mark Strausman are really brothers separated at birth. Luongo may be one of New York's most successful restaurateurs --- his establishments have included Le Madri, Coco Pazzo, Tuscan Square and Centolire --- but he remains the son of a loving Italian mother. Strausman may have been at the helm of some of Manhattan's most satisfying restaurant's --- he now is chef of Fred's at Barneys New York and Coco Pazzo --- but he too is a kid from the old neighborhood. It's just that Luongo's from Tuscany and Strausman's from a working-class neighborhood in Queens. One's tall, one's short. One's Catholic, one's Jewish. Otherwise, no difference.
What Luongo and Strausman agree on is all that ultimately matters: "The simplest food is best." That's why more than a third of this book is given over to pasta recipes --- hey, it's what you like. Fish? A few recipes, mostly for the grill. Meat? A hearty Tuscan pot roast, ribs (no baby back for Strausman!), even pork chops. There's an entire section on --- gasp! --- Italian-American cooking: veal and chicken parmigiana, sausage and peppers, the dishes you find on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Because Sunday is for family, there's a section on hearty meals. As a sop to modernity, there are nine vegetable recipes. And in the short dessert section, the range goes from "ugly but good" cookies to pears in vin santo with sweet polenta.
This is not, the authors emphasize, a book for readers. It's for daily cooks, people who need to set dinner on the table for their families. Old-fashioned? Try this: They see nothing wrong with serving chicken every Tuesday, pasta every Wednesday, just as it was when the authors were kids.
So okay, these are boys who never grew up. But they're hardly prisoners of their childhoods. They're keepers of the flame, protectors of the idea that "sometimes the best dish for the moment is the one that makes you forget about your problems and brings back happy memories of times past." Amen.


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