For Kim Addonizio MacQueen, growing up in the sunny South Florida of the 1970s meant squeezing in the back of the family Caddy for weekly 45-minute drives down I-95 to Miami, where the whole family sat for hours at the throne of her grandmother's marathon Italian dinners.
Every Sunday, as Quiana-clad Josephine floated classic Italian dishes to the table from her tiny kitchen singing the Pillsbury Doughboy theme song, Grandpa Fred smoked cigars and shared tales of crooning to former mobsters in Brickell Avenue piano bars, and the kids chased after their mother's dogs while she sulked on the porch.
The only real problem was that not everybody at the table was Italian. Addonizio grew up watching the two sides of her family stonewall each other for decades, becoming ambivalent about the idea of family itself, as well as her own name (Kimberly Sue Addonizio: A southern-sounding mashup of Neapolitan father and a WASP mother who didn't like Italians, "like fried chicken with honey on it, topped with Marinara sauce." It meant she had to investigate, as an adult, a lot of family stories that never got passed down to the children.
Addonizio MacQueen brings those stories to life a dinner party in book form, complete with recipes. Readers are invited to sit at the table with an author descended from generations of butchers, for stories covering everything from lasagna to limoncello to the wiretap that brought down Frank Sinatra.
