#COOKING WITH CLORIS--TRADITIONAL ITALIAN MARINARA SAUCE FROM AUTHOR JOAN LEOTTA

Joan Leotta is a writer and story performer who presents one-women shows specializes in strong women and folklore. Learn more about her and her books at her blog. 

An appetite for reading and writing? While it has become quite fashionable to include recipes in books over the past few years, the combination of literary and culinary arts has been around for much longer. Many famous books, poems, and even plays, focus on a family meal or a single food.

In my case, being Italian, I’m sure no one is surprised that my books are permeated with the aroma of tomato sauce cooking on the back of the stove and that much of my poetry and many of my short stories were instigated by favorite foods or recipes.

My Legacy of Honor Series is an example of that. Meals are mentioned in each book of the series. While writing them, I remembered the strong women of my own childhood who put tasty meals on the table while conquering other worlds at the same time—education, war efforts, journalistic pursuits, careers, and family crises.

Giulia Goes to War, the first book in the series takes on the issue of honoring tradition while breaking out into modern life. The book takes place during World War II. Giula leaves home to work for the war effort, thwarts spies and falls in love with a young man who is not Italian-American.

In the late 1960s my own time to break with tradition came. Unlike Giulia, my move was not due to war or over education or about a boy. My father simply said, in response to my request that he go apartment hunting with me, that once I had finished college, even after I had a job, I would be living at home. I had already lived in Europe during college and attended college in another state. Still, my father maintained that a good girl, in the same city as her parents, lives at home. I moved my job search to another city.

Food and traditional holiday celebrations are one way I maintained my ethnic pride and identity while in that “other” city, a place where there were few Italian Americans—Washington, DC. People were excited to receive invitations to my house for dinner—hoping I would make pasta with red sauce or braciole or lasagna or …any one of my grandmother’s recipes. 

When Giulia marries her non-Italian sweetheart, I imagine this sort of culinary attachment to her culture. The core recipe of all of this is the Sunday Sauce—a tomato sauce served over pasta on Sunday and probably at least one other day during the week.

For the purpose of this blog, I’ve included the quick sauce—no meat—only needs to cook twenty minutes—easy to make. Leaves you without excuse when facing those jars of sugared chemical-filled sauces on the grocery shelves. If you want to add meat, cook meatballs and other meats first, double the sauce recipe, add the meat and cook for two-three hours minimum. Enough for two meals.

Family Marinara Sauce

This is the sauce you can smell on the pages of my books

Ingredients:

One pound of your favorite dry pasta

28 oz. can crushed tomatoes

1 can water

1 clove garlic, sliced in half

2 T olive oil

2 T fresh flat Italian parsley or 1T dried parsley

2 basil leaves or 1T dried basil

Salt and pepper to taste

grated pecorino romano cheese (optional)

Brown the garlic in hot oil. Be careful not to let it burn. Remove garlic after it’s browned. Add tomatoes, one can of water, herbs and salt. Stir. Cook on medium heat for 30 minutes, more if you want the sauce to be thicker.

Prepare pasta according to package directions. Drain. Place in bowl. Toss with sauce and top with grated cheese if desired.

Giulia Goes to War

Wartime works draws Giulia DeBartolo out of her close Western Pennsylvania family into a world of intrigue, spies, and new friends in Wilmington, North Carolina’s shipyard building Liberty ships.

Giulia soon discovers supporting the war effort can include fun evenings like dancing with young servicemen at the local USO. It is at one of these dances she meets John O’Shea, an unsuitable suitor according to her old-fashioned parents.

As they grapple with the problems of their own budding relationship, John and Giulia encounter a Nazi spy tasked with blowing up part of the Wilmington shipyard. Saving the shipyard from the spy may prove easier than convincing her parents to let her marry John. Giulia must decide what it means to be a good daughter while still following her own heart.

Giulia Goes to War is currently out of print, but the author has copies for sale. If you’re interested in purchasing this book, contact her through Facebook. 

BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR LIBBY HELLMANN

Award-winning author Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago thirty-five years ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. Fourteen novels and twenty-five short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. Learn more about Libby and her books at her website. 

Novels or Novellas? When Short is the New Long

I don't follow trends. In fact, I seem to catch on just at the moment the tide turns and starts fading. The same goes for my writing. I envy writers who can generate thick, 500 page thrillers. I can't. Happily, it looks like there's an emerging trend for short stories and novellas.

I love dreaming up plots and defining characters, figuring out who does what to whom and why. But the actual writing part has always intimidated me. It's still the hardest thing I’ve ever done, even after all these years. In fact, if I could write stories like a one-panel cartoon, I would.

The same goes for the subject of World War II. I love reading about WW2, and a vast amount has been written. Novels like Nightingale, All The Light We Cannot See, The Book Thief, Sarah’s Key, the Bernie Gunther and Alan Furst crime novels, Unbroken, and The Winds of War are awesome in their power and beauty. What on earth could I possibly add? 

On the other hand it's hard to resist. World War II was the last time when the distinction between good and evil was so clearly defined, with absolutely no gray areas. And that paradigm allows authors to create complex, conflicted characters as well as explore themes of heroism, cowardice, and sacrifice.

In the end it was another World War II junkie and prolific reader who inspired me to give it a go. The very first short story I ever wrote was set in 1930s Lawndale (in Chicago) a few years before the war began. After reading it, my reader friend nudged me to try another story. I was on an espionage kick and was researching WW2 espionage techniques. So I wondered what would happen if a German refugee was forced to spy on the early years of the Manhattan Project in Chicago. But a novel? No way. Far too scary.

I wrote a novella instead: The Incidental Spy, set between 1935 and 1942, about a German refugee who is forced to spy on the early years of the Manhattan Project at the U. of Chicago. I felt it turned out rather well, so I contemplated writing a companion novella. A visit to Bletchley Park in the UK had made an impression on me, but I couldn’t quite imagine a story that was so compelling I just had to write about it. Then I was in exercise class (See? there are benefits to working out) when, out of the blue, someone mentioned an old German POW camp a mile away.

The what? Where?

That’s when it happened – that tingle you get when you suddenly know you've found the right subject. Research revealed almost half a million German and Italian POWs were incarcerated in the US between 1943 and 1945. There were conflicts between the soldiers, but the US Army treated the POWs so well that many didn’t want to leave at the war’s end. Ultimately the companion novella, POW, more or less wrote itself. I packaged the two novellas together, added the short story I mentioned, and there it was.

Writing shorter eliminates a lot of pressure, at least for me. Given my insecurities about doing the era justice—indeed, about writing in general, it's a comfort to know I don’t have to write seventy thousand words. I can, as Elmore Leonard said, “leave out the part that readers tend to skip,” stripping things down to the essential elements of plot, character, dialogue, and narrative. It has been an eye-opener, and I'm growing fonder of the novella format every day.

As a reader, what's your opinion? Can two or three related novellas be as good as a single, thick novel?

War Spies and Bobby Sox

As World War II rages across Europe and the Pacific, its impact ripples through communities in the heartland of America. A farm girl is locked in a dangerous love triangle with two Germans soldiers held in an Illinois POW camp ... Another German, a war refugee, is forced to risk her life spying on the developing Manhattan Project in Chicago ... And espionage surrounds the disappearance of an actress from the thriving Jewish community of Chicago’s Lawndale. In this trio of tales, acclaimed thriller author Libby Fischer Hellmann beautifully depicts the tumultuous effect of war on the home front and illustrates how the action, terror, and tragedy of World War II was not confined to the front lines. 

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