Macon Magazine

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2013 MACON MAGAZINE I 79 Growing up in a household where my second-generation Italian mother cooked homemade delicacies wouldn't have been too unusual in some parts of the country, but in the Atlanta of my childhood, not too many people knew true Italian food. But I did. For example, I didn't taste a restau- rant pizza until high school, and I thought everyone's pasta sauce came in quart Ball Mason jars endlessly emerging from the basement cellar. All this expertise in true Italian cooking came from my Grand- ma Rose Mattia (her maiden name was Mascia), my mother's mother, who hailed from San Marco, Italy, a hilly olive-growing region not far from Naples. Both Rose and her husband, Mike, came from this same village, their families having known one another for genera- tions. Paisanos, they call them. And while many remain in Italy to this day, a number of Mascias and Mattias emigrated to Chicago dur- ing the waning days of World War I. Born in 1907, young Rose sailed with her parents, two sisters and brother to America and settled with many other Italians in the Windy City. Rose, the eldest of the girls, wasn't born cooking, but learned by her mother's side to make basics like bread when she was just 10 years old. She was thrown into the task full-time as a teenager when her mother, Cristina, suffered a stroke and couldn't keep house any longer. When her mother died shortly thereaer, Rose took over in the kitchen. "No one taught me to cook," Rose, now 105, said. "But my mother died young. She was only 48, and I was 20. I had to learn." Rose's father, Pietro Mascia, was no stranger to the kitchen, and taught her most of the basics. "We didn't have recipes, but I was interested, and I paid attention," Rose said. Rose cooked for the whole family every day. One of her favorites from those days, the late 1920s, was pizza. "When we made pizza, we made the dough, stretched it out in a pan, and laid slices of tomatoes and slices of mozzarella on top," she said. "It was wonderful." Rose also learned to make cavatelli (homemade pasta) by hand, eggplant casserole and other family favorites. "By the time I married, at age 25 in 1933, I could cook just about anything." Fast forward through the decades, and my Grandma Rose raised and cooked for her own three children, then shared her talents with her six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. We've all grown accustomed to being at her side as she cans homegrown tomatoes, grinds and stuffs her own Italian sausage, rolls homemade pasta by hand, punches the bread dough, stuffs the cannolis and grows her own vegetables. Her talents in the kitchen have always seemed end- less, and culinary questions are always directed to her, to this day. We've all cherished the family dinners and special occasions gathered around her table, groaning under the weight of the Italian feasts. Photography by danny gilleland That's Italian! GRANDMA ROSE AND HER RECIPES LIVE ON FOR THE LOVE OF FOOD | by lisa pritchard mayfield S p e c i a l W e d d i n g V e n u e s

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