For the Santabarbara family, cheese is more than a tasty, high-protein treat, wine is more than a spirit that goes well with dinner, and meat is more than something you pick up at the supermarket. For them, these items are associated with hard work, culture and family.
Three generations of Santabarbaras sat around a kitchen table on a recent afternoon over plates piled high with homemade meats, cheeses and other Italian goodies to discuss how those foods are made and what that process means to them.
My family has quite a history, said Angelo Santabarbara of Rotterdam.
His parents lived in neighboring Italian towns close to Naples City but did not meet until they moved to Rotterdam.
`I’m the first generation that was born here. I kind of take an interest in what happens, what happened or what still is happening [with my family]. We still have family in Italy, back in our town in Italy,` said Santabarbara.
In Italy, Santabarbara’s parents, Angelo and Marianna Santabarbara, made much of their own food. They didn’t have the luxury of driving in a car to the supermarket to pick up staples such as cheese and bread. They had to make it themselves and also figure out how to preserve it. Air could ruin anything. Oil could preserve anything.
`The way we survived over there, everything was homemade, and we had to keep on doing it, and it was a necessity to do it,` said the elder Santabarbara.
In America, making your own foods, such as cheese and wine and pasta, seems like a luxury. The process of making your own cheese takes weeks from start to finish, on top of hours of physical labor. The same can be said for making wine and tomato sauce, all of which the Santabarbaras make in abundance.
Despite the hours it takes and the labor involved, the Santabarbaras do it because they want to ` not because they have to. It provides them with an opportunity to spend time with family and pass down traditions and share with younger generations their culture.
`We make wine we, make homemade sauce, we go to the farm and pick tomatoes. We take our grandchildren with us,` said the elder Santabarbara.
`This year I had my granddaughter help me with the tomato sauce,` said Marianna Santabarbara. `I had all the jars ready, and she put all the basil and parsley in the jars and I put a little apron on her. … She’s 5 years old and she was so excited that she was helping me.`
She said that she hopes to teach her granddaughter about the process of making her own tomato sauce someday in the future, when she’s a little older, and perhaps a little bigger. Currently, she is smaller than the pot the tomato sauce is made in.
`She had so much fun because she thought she was such a big girl, helping out, and I said, ‘When you’re a big girl, Grandma will teach you and then you can make your own sauce,’` said Marianna.
Of all of the items the Santabarbara family makes, the cheese might be the most significant. They make it in quantities large enough to sell, and they can’t seem to keep it on the shelves. All of the proceeds benefit the Albany Autism Society. It is currently sold at the 4 Corners restaurant in Rotterdam, and the family considered mass-producing it with machines, but they are hesitant.
`As soon as you mass produce it, when the handmade part of it’s gone, it does become a little different, so we’re trying to be careful because we don’t want it to taste like every other cheese,` said Angelo Santabarbara.“