Vegana Italiana

Vegana Italiana

My Story

Sometimes I think I was destined to become a chef. Cooking for others is in my blood—my Italian blood.

The vegan part came later. That wasn’t in my blood. That was in my heart.

I have always loved my family’s cooking, and I truly value my Italian heritage. When I first became a vegan, I worried that I might have to sacrifice one or the other, or both. It turns out that I never had to sacrifice anything! The plantbased dishes I created were just as delicious and true to my heritage as the non-plant-based dishes I grew up with. I still love Italian food more than any other type of cuisine, and my plant-based versions of it are, in my opinion, completely authentic. (Fortunately, the guests who come to Pura Vita, my restaurant, all agree!)

I should know: I grew up in a typical Brooklyn and Long Island Italian household where we spent more time cooking than we spent watching television, reading books—and probably anything else. My parents organized our home around food. The kitchen was where they showed us their love. There was so much, it all barely fit inside the house—and they shared their love, and their food, with as many people as possible.

Many of my childhood friends came from broken homes. As a result, they often had no other place to go after school except our house, where no one ever needed an invitation. All of my friends were always welcome at my parents’ front door and greeted with just one question: “What would you like to eat?” and soon enough they were offered a plate of food. Dinner at the Punzone home could be four of us, or fourteen of us. It didn’t matter to my parents. The more people at the table, the more cooking they could do, and the more they could share. This was the Brooklyn, the Italian way.

Not surprisingly, both of my parents absolutely loved to cook. And although they could whip up just about anything, my father’s specialty was peppas, or peppers, and he particularly loved a New York variety called Italian long hots (which, for some reason, you can’t buy on the West Coast. I miss them!). My dad cooked the peppas with oil, garlic, and whatever was sitting in our kitchen cabinets, but he always added something crunchy and something sweet, such as nuts and raisins (see page 106 for one of my favorite peppas recipe, one of the specialties at Pura Vita). But what my dad most enjoyed was working with peppers so hot that it became a competition among my friends to see who could actually eat them. Most of them said, no problem. Most of them ended up turning bright red, and not from embarrassment.

My mom favored more traditional, straightforward southern Italian cooking, where everything starts with garlic, olive oil, and tomatoes. Pasta was her specialty, and every Sunday she made “gravy,” aka marinara sauce. (I give my take on her sauce on page 37.) One of my favorite memories will always be waking up to the sound of a metal spoon clanging on the pot, a sound that even today takes me back to mornings in my childhood bedroom.

If the heart of our home was the kitchen, the heart of the kitchen was the large table where we spent much of our time eating but also talking, socializing, and anything else that involved getting together. (We weren’t allowed in the living room because, as in most Italian households on Long Island, that room was offlimits; and, regardless, the sofa and chairs were all covered with that strange clear plastic that crunched and sighed if you were ever permitted to sit on it.)

My parents were just following in their parents’ culinary footsteps. My grandparents on my father’s side came over from Italy when they were very young; his mother from Calabria and his father from Gragnano, a small hillside town near Naples that is so synonymous with pasta that in 2013 the European Union designated Gragnano a Protected Geographical Indication. Both grandparents came from enormous families—my grandmother had about twenty siblings, my grandfather just a couple fewer, so I have more than one hundred cousins, most of whom probably consider cooking as important today as it was for my grandparents.

When my grandparents settled in America, they started a small grocery store in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. There they worked from five o’clock in the morning until they basically passed out from exhaustion at midnight. Over the years my grandfather became known as the king of the neighborhood; and all kinds of people—from local workers to employees from the sanitation department just down the street—came to the store to savor his famous heroes. Heroes (also called subs, hoagies, grinders, as well as many other names depending on where you live) were the specialty of the house, although the shop also served other standard Italian meals, including eggplant, veal, and artichoke parmigiana.

But it was the heroes that truly made my grandparents famous. Oddly, my grandparents didn’t intend to start serving food—but as their grocery store became a place where regulars in the neighborhood would drop by, it slowly evolved into a hero shop as well. It was the family tradition that when people showed up, feeding them was essential.

Everyone knew and loved my grandfather. Naturally, as a child, I decided I wanted to be just like him: someone who provides the entire community with nourishment and happiness. My grandparents made people happy by feeding the body and the soul. I wanted to do the same.

When I would say this to my father, he was supportive in the sense that he believed that I could do whatever I wanted to do in life. But he added a caveat: Please don’t open up a restaurant! In his eyes, running a restaurant meant that I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. He was wrong and he was right—I do own a restaurant, and, yes, there’s barely room for anything else in my life! But I couldn’t imagine having it any other way.