Rocco's Italian-American: More Than 150 Recipes from Rocco and Mama

This cookbook is beautifully written and these recipes are the real deal! Oh and the meatballs and the Moma’s Marinara. If you watched the restaurant she guarded the meatballs and she made them every day! No one else was getting near them! This is just a crazy good book.

In preparation for a long recovery, I ordered several Italian cookbooks. Rocco's book was just the ticket! While others have a better "voice" of the cook, this one actually has recipes that I will try. It contains recipes that most closely resemble my mother in law's cooking which I have been trying to replicate since we lost her to cancer in the mid 80's. Often I'd remember just part of the recipe or some of the ingredients and not be able to make it. This book contains so many of them that maybe now I'll be able to give it a try. It is just what I was looking for. Thanks.

The book is like a treasure,it has all the italian dishes that my family has made for years, but never wrote down.All are very easily explained and simple to follow,I am no where a good cook but these receipes sure make me appear to be a professional.Thanks Mama and Rocco for taking the time to put these together. And,the stories make me feel closer to both of you, thanks again for sharing your family memories.This is a definite, for all who love italian cooking. Cynthia M.

I just bought the book and haven't tried the recipes yet. I'm sure they're good, because they look like the Italian home cooking I was raised on. To be fair, those holding it up to the standard set by "Taste" are comparing cutting edge restaurant recipes to "just like mama used to make." That's apples and oranges. I find one glaring shortcoming in the book already though, which is that it seems to have been poorly edited (sloppily or hastily assembled). Some recipes list the same ingredients twice. Some names are almost comically misspelled. The dust cover lists Classic Tiramisu - its not in the book. The fish section says "a dozen recipes" - there are only ten. And on and on. They probably wanted this one on the shelves for the holidays, but if I could find these errors in a half-hour, how hard could it have been for them to pick up on the fact that featured recipes aren't there?

`Rocco's Italian American' by Rocco DiSpirito, his mother, Nicolina DiSpirito, and freelance writer Nina Lalli screams CELEBRITY CHEF Cookbook with the number of pages dedicated to current and historical snapshots of the principle authors, Rocco and Mama. This book was also almost a certainty after the featured role of Mama's meatballs in the two Mark Burnett `The Restaurant' reality shows. You just knew that there was a book in the works that featured a recipe for these meatballs. Rocco's principle premise for these recipes is that `Italian-American' cuisine is no less genuine and involves no compromises of `genuine' Italian cooking because it is not exactly the same as that done in Campagnia or Apulia or Lazio or Tuscany or the Veneto. In fact, Rocco claims to have very little knowledge of native Italian cuisine compared to Marcella Hazan or Food Network colleague Mario Batali. I really have no difficulty whatsoever accepting Rocco's position here, and, neither to a lot of respected cookbook authors, as such leading names as Lydia Bastianich and John Mariani have written important books on Italian-American cuisine. Before the book gets to the recipes, it spends the better part of seventy pages giving us brief memoirs from both Mamma and Rocco. As Nicolina can write neither English nor Italian, I am sure that one of Ms. Lalli's principle jobs was to transcribe and edit Mamma's oral history. While Mamma concentrates on the truly difficult childhood due to poverty of their family in 1930's Italy, followed by the premature death of her father, Rocco's story concentrates on his experiences and enthusiasm for food starting at a very early age. Both stories are interesting, but they lack the kind of spark that enlivens the best memoirs of childhood and the struggle to survive in difficult circumstances. Unlike tales of childhood memories of Jacques Pepin in `The Apprentice' and of Gennaro Contaldo in `Passione', there is practically no art and little intellectual interest in these stories. Rocco has done very little to repair the opinion I formed of him in the course of viewing the two `The Restaurant' shows where he was seen as a self-absorbed, inept manager who probably lied and certainly acted petty in dealings with his financial backer. Not that his backer was a model of probity, Rocco did more to create drama for the camera than he did to rescue the fate of his `Rocco's on 22nd' restaurant. He tried to play to the house like Emeril or Wolfgang without the business sense both of these men seem to maintain. Since there are several important books out on the `Italian-American' cuisine, it is very easy to evaluate Rocco and Mama's recipes against an independent standard. The obvious place to start is with Mamma's meatballs. But, to make this recipe, you need `Mamma's sauce' made primarily with Red Pack tomato puree, sugar, chicken stock, garlic, onions, and tomato paste. I confess I find this sauce a weak entry compared to Mario Batali's basic sau