The Magellis & The Marettas
The Journey
As Magellis, we trace our family history back more than 300 years. We are the descendants of villagelaborers, coal miners,and matriarchs. From humble beginnings, our ancestors followed new opportunities to America.
You can be sure that even when they did not have much else, they ate well.Through this cookbook, we honor their legacy of eating seasonally, of making use of every delicious scrap, and of doing things by hand the traditional way.
To understand these recipes, we must first understand where they came from: Grandfather Biagio and Grandmother Mary. Their story is ours, too.
They also toiled round-the-clock in the forests surrounding the village, braving the elements to stoke earthen kilns in which logs were carbonized into charcoal.
“Charcoal burners,”as the workers were called, slept under lean-tos.Nourishment was limited to skinny soups of edible plants and mushrooms scrounged from the woods. If lucky, one of the crew may have spirited a meat bone from home to flavor the soup. A delicacy, the bone was tied with a string for easy dipping, drying and reuse.
Charcoal served as compact, valuable cooking fuel. Family members hauled it to Bologna and traded for groceries and other goods. Then, they’d thread their way through emerald mountains to Castel, selling some of their bounty in hamlets along the way, Aunt Theresa recalled.
But Biagio eventually yearned for more. In 1907 at the age of 16, he emigrated to the U.S. with paternal cousins, Attilio, 17, and Amelio, 32. Steamship companies hawked $30 tickets, many of which were sold by traveling salesmen.
Biagio was the son of our paternal Italian great-grandparents, Angelo Magelliand Maria Matilde (Marchioni), who married in 1890.
Their first child was Biagio, who was born a year later in Castel di Casio, then a tiny isolated village in Italy’s Apennine mountains about 40 miles southwest of the bustling city of Bologna.
They also welcomed two girls into their family. Sadly, their mother, 40-year-old Maria, died in 1897. Biagiowas only 6 at the time. His sisters Concetta and Cleofe were 4 and 1, respectively. Their Aunt Rosa raised the little ones as her own.
Our late Aunt Theresa(Magelli) Swanson told us that in thosedays the extended Magelli family owned teams of horses and mules, like early teamsters.
