The Matron Saint of Pasta

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Motherhood has always required both sweetness and fierceness, a hand gentle enough to soothe but firm enough to provide. This thought occurred to me as I watched Bastianich pick up a live lobster, casually snip off its legs and claws with scissors, lay the squirming body on a cutting board and then bring a long chef's knife down into its head and through its body in one clean stroke. All the while, Bastianich was chatting amiably, her practiced hands working nearly on their own. "With lobsters, people are very squeamish," she said. "I say, 'Don't give me that. You all go out and order lobsters. What do you think happens to them? Somebody kills them!'" She let out a cackle and then slaughtered a second crustacean.

I asked Bastianich how Lidia the person differed from Lidia the business. "It's kind of the same thing," she said. "My family was involved in the beginning in the restaurants when they were small because we had the holidays there. It was open. We would go there and eat, and they would go home with Grandma. I would continue to work whether it was a holiday or whatever." When Tanya and Joseph were kids, Bastianich would take them each August to her family's old house in Istria--she now owns it--and show them the fig-fattened chickens in the courtyard. She would remind her modern New York City kids that one bird, when butchered thoroughly enough--"all the eggs and the unborn eggs and the liver and the intestines"--could feed a dozen people.

Later, as Bastianich's business grew, particularly after she financed Lidia's Kansas City and Lidia's Pittsburgh, it necessarily became less of a family enterprise. For a woman who writes in her cookbooks precisely when to shake the skillet to achieve perfect caramelization, losing control over every detail wasn't easy. (Even today, she says one way to ensure quality is "to systematize and keep very strict like we do in Kansas City and Pittsburgh ... We make a menu, and you develop it together, but they have to stay on track.") Bastianich has also had to learn how to have a cooperative relationship with her children, since they are so intimately involved in her business. She is famous for ordering her kids around on her TV shows, but "they give me hell all the time," she says with a laugh.

And what about retirement, letting go the entrepreneurialism and simply being Noni to her five grandchildren? "I'm gonna retire to a winery and do the cooking there," says Bastianich as we sip her son's grappa after the lobster risotto, a salad, some cheeses and a grape cake. At which point Tanya pipes up: "Yeah? Let me know when that happens." Then, to me: "She will never retire."

And why should she? For the past few months, I have cooked nearly everything in Lidia's Family Table and eaten often at her restaurants. I have gained a full inch on my waist, but since leaving for college years ago, I have never felt so warmly embraced by a mother's good food.