Food and Drink Bensonhurst

Preserving his Bensonhurst family legacy, writer Daniel Paterna heightens awareness of all family legacies

Multi-generational immersion in food
leads an Italian-American back to his roots

April 26, 2024 Alice Gilbert 
Daniel Paterna
Photos courtesy of Daniel Paterna.
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Daniel Paterna is a Bensonhurst native whose Italian-American heritage and eye for design melded into his best-selling book, “Feast of the Seven Fishes,” named for the famous Christmas Eve meal. As much a memoir as a cookbook, Daniel’s story spans multiple generations, with tales of immigration, love, and, at the forefront, good, simple food that fosters family and community. In speaking with Daniel, it’s obvious that his dedication to keeping his family heritage alive is as strong as his dedication to his own children.

Tell me about yourself and your work.

I was born in 1958. I grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. I grew up in my grandfather’s house that he had built. He saved his money from being a tailor his whole adult life. We still live in the house part-time. I went to Catholic grammar school. I graduated from New Utrecht High School, famously known as the setting of the television show “Welcome Back Kotter.” I went to New York City Tech for advertising and design. Eventually, I found my way through Pratt Institute for a degree in art and design.

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I worked for about ten years as an animation designer at ABC Television. Then, I wound up in Boston as a creative director for film and television, and then eventually on my own for the early part of the millennium. I worked at home from 2001 to now. I have two children, twins, who are 23. I was a full-time worker and part-time/full-time dad because I worked from home. 

There was a downturn in my business after the housing market crisis in 2008. I began to consider writing a book. There was a book that I had been writing in my head since I was a kid. It honestly began when I was living in Boston. I began to see a wider landscape of Brooklyn, the place I was from, and my culinary heritage. I was always aware of my grandmother’s tenacious life and her strength and wisdom since she was the only grandmother I grew up with. She made it a point that at least one of her grandchildren would go on to have a good indoctrination of what it’s like to come from Italy and live like an Italian. 

My mom became a working mom in the ‘60s and ‘70s. That was when the food industry made the drudgery of housework easier by having meals that came out of a box. My grandmother’s fear was that I would be living like an “American.” She made sure that before each meal, I would have a little Italian snack in her basement apartment. She would pull out the memorabilia and postcards that my grandfather had written to her when he lived in Brooklyn.

He came here first. They met in Brooklyn, and she went back home. We’re not completely sure why, but I think she was very intimidated. She was uneducated. She didn’t read or write in Italian, never mind English. She went back to Italy after meeting my grandfather in a candy shop. He told her that he wasn’t ready to get married and that he would write to her when he was ready. Unbeknownst to her, it would take ten years for him to write.

She was unable to communicate with him herself, so she enlisted the literary skills of her niece to correspond between Brooklyn and Naples. The day that his letter arrived from Brooklyn, my grandmother’s niece picked the mail up in the town square and read it to my grandmother. That was the letter of proposal. They got married in Naples, in a town called Vico Equense. 

I wrote a book about the realization of my legacy and the fragility of it all. Once grandparents leave the earth, you can no longer go to grandma’s house. I had become a parent, and I began to write my own narrative about my experience growing up in that house with American parents and Italian grandparents. My mom was one of the only children of my grandmother who actually documented recipes. A lot of it was word of mouth. Every year, my mother would pull a box of recipe cards out of her dresser drawer. Those cards were something I was enchanted by my entire life. They were constantly revised and annotated in whiteout, typewriter, blue pen, Magic Marker …

Recipe cards from Paterna's book
Recipe cards from the book.

Those recipes became a visual hook for my book. From there, I broadened my story, which is universal to any immigrant whose grandparents come from a different country. I’ve always said I didn’t write this book for my family. I wrote it for every family. 

In 2017, I proposed a book concept to my publisher. He was my son’s friend’s father and the coach of my son’s soccer team. He had read an article that I had written about two very important Italian holidays: Christmas and Easter. He told me, “You might have a book here.” I compiled all of the photographs I had taken since I was in Boston because I had come back for every holiday and documented my mom in the kitchen with the dishes and all of that.

I spent two years canvassing the neighborhood. In addition to my own story, I did profiles on 15 local shops whose stories were similar to mine. In 2019, I was on a plane to Italy to have it printed in Verona. It’s been five years, and the book is now in its third printing. One of the most touching reviews I received was that it reads more like a novel. It’s a very dynamic book. I photographed every single thing in the book, designed it and wrote it. It’s all shot on film because I felt that it was part of the environment I wanted to establish for the reader. 

You mentioned you were inspired to write this story about Brooklyn and Italy while living in neither of those places. I’m curious how you saw pieces of your Italian-American Bensonhurst community in Boston.

I’m sort of a country bumpkin, in a way. I’d never really left Brooklyn. I didn’t go away for college. I never went to camp; we didn’t have the money for it, so we played on the street in the summer. When I moved away from Brooklyn, I was flying on my own for the first time. Boston has a very distinct neighborhood called the North End. I had lived in Beacon Hill and Brookline, but I felt more at home living in the North End. That’s when I became aware of the difference between living in Brooklyn and living in the North End. Although they’re both Italian neighborhoods, they come from different provinces of southern Italy. The distinctions between the two are subtle, but they’re real. That’s predominantly the situation in Italy. Before it was liberated, all of these little towns feuded with each other over very subtle things. From town to town, region to region, dishes are prepared differently.

Being away from home for the first time, I began calling my mom for recipes when I would entertain guests. I had met a lot of Italian friends, and I’d have them over for dinner. I never got clearly defined recipes from her. It was always, “A little bit of this; a little bit of that.” It frustrated me, and that’s when I became more aware of the idea of a recipe. It wasn’t as automatic as my grandparents and mom prepared everything. I got back to relearning how uncomplicated and complicated preparing a simple dish can be. You do it enough times, and it becomes like osmosis. It just happens.

The Sea Breeze II Fish Market photo Paterna's book.
The Sea Breeze II Fish Market photo from the book.

I totally relate to this. To the person who’s been doing this for 65 years, it’s simple, but to the person who hasn’t, it really needs to be spelled out. 

When you get up to speed and take the training wheels off, you can really cook with your nose and eyes and trust your instincts. Because of gentrification and Americanization, very few really grew up with these intergenerational families. My mother lived in the house with my grandmother her entire life. She didn’t live alone until she got married. The person with the most culinary history was right there on the premises. Now, kids move out to go to college and to establish themselves. In those days, being at home and watching your grandparents was like tuning into YouTube and watching a cooking video. 

You brought a design eye to your family’s food. I’m wondering how the art of cooking and presenting food complimented each other and how the older generations received that style. How did you decide how to present their work, and why did you do so in that way?

There’s a lot of snootiness about food and presentation. I was so conscious of not portraying any of these dishes in any way other than the wholesome goodness we received from previous generations. I wanted to adorn them in a way you would remember a favorite toy or relative you loved growing up. I felt that the dishes we grew up with were never really honored properly.

As an Italian-American, I felt less than. The first time I went to Italy, I didn’t speak a lick of proper Italian. I only spoke a dialect. My grandmother was from Naples, so she spoke the Neapolitan dialect. I felt beaten down.

We lived on 61st Street in Brooklyn, where my grandfather and his two brothers had houses next to each other. In between the houses was an alleyway. Inevitably, you’d always see my grandmother standing at the top of that alleyway. Sometimes, she would put her arms out. There was always a breeze. I always noticed her face when she would enjoy the breeze going around her face and body. 

In 1996, I went to my grandmother’s hometown for the first time. I was standing in Vico Equense, near where she was married, and the breeze off the coastline was somehow reminiscent of her. I remember thinking, “I have this voice in the back of my throat. My grandmother was standing right here, and she was making these exact dishes that she was making for me in Brooklyn, and “Damn it,” I thought. “I’m Italian!” 

“Food is like commerce. It’s like part of your heart. It’s an honorable way of life.”

As an Italian-American, some dishes have been changed, and overdone, and oversauced. I strive to keep it as pure as possible. A dish like beans and escarole, which will be in my next book, is literally just beans and escarole. I kept self-diminishing and asking why people would want such simple dishes. But simple dishes are like the way we learned to tie our shoes. It’s what we grew up with. They are nearly forgotten, and my purpose was to reanimate the idea of why these dishes were so ubiquitous, their nutritional value and why we never got tired of them.

How was I going to portray them in a way that wasn’t snooty or terribly pedestrian? Stuffed calamari, for example, was a special dish back in the day. It was like making a steak or lobster dinner for someone. When I moved to Boston, I called my mom and said, “There’s a restaurant called The Daily Catch with stuffed calamari. You must come here because they’re exactly like you make them, with raisins, pignoli, cheese, breadcrumbs, and egg.” She came, and I nervously brought her, and she agreed with me. 

Over the years, they slowly phased them out. I asked one of the owners why stuffed calamari left the menu. He said it was because people don’t want it anymore. There are too many things in it.

Before my grandmother passed away, she had this doctor that she had total faith in. In the pouring rain, we brought him a pot full of thirty stuffed calamari because she wanted to thank him for diagnosing something she had. That was, to her, like bringing him a pot of gold. Food is like commerce. It’s like part of your heart. It’s an honorable way of life. Over the years, the Daily Catch has brought back stuffed calamari, and there it is on the book’s cover. I put it there because I wanted it to say, “Hello, remember me?” It’s the redemption of stuffed calamari. 

It deserves its moment in the spotlight! I also want to know about these food vendors you feature in the book. Is there one that sticks out to you in particular?

The vendor that sticks out to me is one of the only ones that no longer exists: the fish market. This isn’t to detract from the other vendors. I spent hours in line at that store waiting to buy fish two days before Christmas Eve. Standing in a line at least a block long with other Italian-Americans — either first-generation, second, or third, or fourth — everyone was sharing stories about how their grandparents made dishes. The guy who ran it, Angelo, was a very animated character. He would be directing deliveries in and out of the building, and it was like performance art. You’d walk out of there with five pounds of fish, ready to prepare it for your relatives. That’s always been a standout.

I remember when they closed. I made a little video of people just walking up to the corrugated steel gate that was drawn up over the beautiful displays of fish that didn’t exist anymore. People were practically making the sign of the cross because it was that meaningful. 

Just like the closing of the fish market or your favorite Chinese-American institution or Jewish-American institution, it’s not going to be there forever. How do we transition over the memories of the culinary history we hold so dear? That’s why I wrote the book.  

Recipe from Paterna's book.
Recipe from the book.

There are innumerable places like this in New York, lost to history unless someone memorializes them. It’s very important work. Speaking of work, you mentioned another book you have coming out. Can you tell me about that?

During the production of my first book, my daughter had just started high school and was unfortunately struck by an anxiety eating disorder. Recovery took a long time because she wanted to recover at home, and there’s a specific method of doing that. I was the chief cook, bottle washer and primary caregiver. I was it. Over the years, she transitioned from an omnivore to vegetarian to now vegan. I did Italian vegan food as much as I could. I basically threw caution to the wind and said, “Forget the nutritionist. I grew up with nutrition.” Over the years, she wouldn’t eat some of the dishes as she transitioned to vegan, like meat sauce or the Feast of the Seven Fishes. 

She would always help me cook. On Christmas Day, we’d wake up and make lasagna, whether it had meat or not. I’d make a meatless version for her, and she went through the ritual with me. She said one thing that threw me over the edge. She said, one day, “Dad, even though I didn’t eat everything that you made, the fact that you made it so consistently and traditionally was something that grounded me and got me through my emotional stress.” That was the inspiration for the next book. 

I’m writing a book about relying on my Italian culinary heritage in the effort to help my daughter recover from anorexia. It’s about how I survived. My daughter would write a parallel story to mine. We had two different states of mind. Mine was a parent; hers was a patient and daughter. Everything I’ve ever read about eating disorders is clinical: “It looks like a duck, smells like a duck; it’s a duck.” There’s no field guide, per se. Not to say this is a field guide, but at least it’s a story about a regular person taking care of their extraordinary, wonderful daughter, who is in such pain, and how we all survived. There’s no magic to it. It’s just consistency and love. It’s really not about food. It’s not really something that people talk about. 

One of the vendors in my book, Coluccio’s, is a well-known Italian importer on 60th Street in Bensonhurst. When my book came out, one of the owners asked me, “I’ve been writing a book for years. I love yours. If I ever get my book published, would you work on it with me?” Her book is coming out in the Fall. It’s called “The Italian Daughter’s Cookbook.” I photographed and designed it. It’s like the sister of “Feast of the Seven Fishes,” and it’s being published by my publisher, PowerHouse Books. I introduced them, and to my pleasant surprise, they took a chance on her cookbook (which isn’t the type of project they usually do) based on the success of my book. I’ll have two books under my belt, and, who knows, it could be my fourth career. 


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