Mary Ann Esposito’s Plant. Harvest. Cook!
Mary Ann Esposito hosts PBS’s nationally syndicated Ciao Italia, the longest-running cooking show on television. For thirty years, through her show and a dozen cookbooks, Esposito has educated Americans about regional Italian cuisines and culture. When the pandemic made filming impossible, Esposito turned to the garden—a 30 by 60 foot vegetable plot that’s fed her family and neighbors for decades. Esposito’s husband, Guy, masterminded the garden, and the book is in part a collaboration with her husband and a tribute to what she’s learned from him. But it’s not sentimental—the book is packed with useful information about light and soil, flavors and techniques to make the most of whatever garden plot or market haul you’ve got. Plant. Harvest. Cook! It’s that simple.
-Rachel Caldwell, Special Projects Editor
Photo by John W. Hession
How has your audience changed over thirty years?
When I started out with the cooking series, Ciao Italia (which was filmed in a studio here in New Hampshire in 1989) there was very little awareness of what Italian regional food was. People had their little stereotypic images of Italian food as, you know, deep dish, Chicago-style pizza and spaghetti and meatballs, things like that. The program set out to kind of dish on that and let people know that really there is no such thing as Italian food, there’s only regional food. That became the premise of the show—that this series would talk about the 20 regions of Italy and recipes that come from these 20 regions.
In 1989, people were just waking up to the idea of olive oil being good for you. Fast forward thirty years, people are much more aware of the benefits of olive oil. They know what balsamic vinegar is, they know what real parmesan cheese is. In 1989 there were no Italian regional cooking shows dedicated to this information.
Photo from Plant. Harvest. Cook! by John W. Hession
Why a gardening book?
I was about to take a group to Italy when the pandemic hit. We couldn’t film anything because of the pandemic so I thought, okay, this is a great time to just hunker down in my office and write a book about the vegetable garden. For a year and a half, I was glued to my computer, writing this book.
It’s based on the episodes that we filmed in the garden, which is also my home garden and the work of my husband, who is a master gardener. As I say in the book, he taught me everything I know about vegetable gardening because I knew nothing before. I married him and then we had a little garden that grew bigger and bigger. Every year I learned how to stake tomatoes. I learned how you had to plant seeds for seedlings. I learned what true leaves were—all from him. So the book is a compilation of what went on in the garden, but also a tribute to him because he taught me so much.
Our new season just came out in October. I think at last count we had over 500 shows. We did 1500 videos and 1300 recipes, and I can honestly say that 30 years later we’re still informing the public about Italian regions, because that’s how vast [Italy] is. I’ve been studying this for 30 years and I still have a lot to do, there are lots of recipes that I don’t know about. And people want to learn—they travel more and more, they’re exposed to cuisines and ingredients, and they really want to eat well. That really is the reason why I wrote this cookbook.
How do you hope people will use the book? As a gardening guide, a cookbook, a coffee table book?
Plant. Harvest. Cook. The title of it tells you how you could use the book. But you could just cook—even though the book is based on having a plot of land where we planted everything, you don’t need a plot of land. You can make any of these dishes by utilizing fresh vegetables from your grocery store or from a farmers market. You could plant in containers, if you wanted to try just a few things like the eggplant, zucchini or tomatoes. So it’s a book for anyone who enjoys vegetables, whether you want to begin as a beginner gardener or go to the store and buy these vegetables and then follow the recipes in the book. I didn’t want this to be a tome on gardening; it’s just simple advice on how to do your own garden, like knowing what zone you’re in, which vegetables to plant at what time of the year, that kind of information.
It’s a book that encourages you to eat the Mediterranean Diet. And if you look at the Mediterranean food pyramid, you’ll see that the largest portion of the pyramid is dedicated to legumes and grains and vegetables. So I chose vegetables that I thought people are familiar with, and I show new ways to use them. They may discover that, Oh gosh, I didn’t know you could use tomatoes to make a marmalade for cheese, or I didn't know that you could use the leaves of roses or geraniums to make a cake.
Today, people want to know where their food is coming from. How is it processed? That's another reason for the book—because here you have total control over where your food is coming from and how it’s been planted, and you know how to cook it. I don’t wanna be preachy about it, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a grocery store—it’s summer, right?—and people are buying canned corn. Crazy! Why wouldn’t you want to eat something that’s wholesome and fresh? So I’m encouraging a younger generation to go back to the table because even in Italy today we find that the younger generation has lost their traditional culinary knowledge. As the older generation dies, that information goes with them.
Photo from Plant. Harvest. Cook! by John W. Hession
Which recipes do think readers will cook most?
Oh, I think especially the tomato sauce—a real authentic sauce, which is so plain and simple. Zucchini recipes. The stuffed peppers—I do my mother’s stuffed peppers but I put them upside down like she did so they don’t dry out. They’re very moist and flavorful because they haven’t been exposed in the oven like that. Peppers, zucchini and tomatoes, which are the start of the garden.
30 years is a good run. When do you think you’ll be done with TV?
I don’t know—it depends when I run out of steam because I’m always curious about the next thing. Like on the series that’s airing now, we did something from Abruzzi called soffioni, an Easter cake that’s made in a tube pan, but it’s filled. You have to put the dough overlapping the form, which is a tube pan, then you fill it and fold over the flaps of the dough and the filling pops up through the dough. I had never heard of this thing before. So I did all my research and I thought okay, we’re gonna do that, not a lot of people would know about this.
I love to teach, I really do. And I just feel really good about being able to share this kind of information with people who may not have known about these things before.
