About

ABOUT THE FLOUR SHOP

Here's the thing: people say the secret to delicious food is love, and we do put a lot in our food, but the secret ingredient here is ingredients. We use the best stuff, and that means we are able to make the best stuff. It's true of our baked goods, and now it's true of our coffee and tea as well.

ABOUT TONY

My mom was an artist, and her medium was food. I remember big family dinners every week in the seventies - aunts, cousins, grandparents all at our table. Every holiday meal was at our house. There were cookies for weddings, when babies were born, when one of the elders passed. Breads for Easter. A whipped-cream cake for Uncle Nutzi, just because. Every occasion and no-occasion, something delicious.

When we did go somewhere else for a family thing, whatever food my mom brought always went fastest. She never gloated; she beamed.

When you're a kid you think your mom is always going to be there to make your birthday dinner, but mine got sick when I was four or five. By the time I was eighteen, she was fast losing the ability to navigate the kitchen. I was working a split-shift then, and would spend the four in-between hours of most days at her stove, making dinners for my dad. She would tell me what to do, and I would do it.

One day, as I was cleaning up after a pie, she handed me her rolling pin and told me to bring it home. It was hard, like a punch in the gut, to take it from her, but it was magic too. 

I've tried over the years to improve her recipes. A fool's task. She experimented until she reached perfection, then she wrote it all down. My mother was free with her recipes, passing them along to anyone who asked. She knew that food was for sharing, and she passed that belief on to her kids, along with her experimental kitchen spirit.

Some of these recipes are straight from my family table - I try to credit everyone who created and refined them. Others are the result of intuition, chemistry and Sicilian sorcery. I hope you find the food as much a comfort as I do.