Recipes From DeLuise With Love

Eat This: It’ll Make You Feel Better! by Dom DeLuise, (Simon & Schuster: $17.95, 238 pages, illustrated)

There probably is no better autobiography for a man who loves to eat and cook than a cookbook.

For comedian Dom DeLuise, the heart, soul and poetry of his life--the heartache and laughter, too--jump out of the recipe pages. You get to smell, sense and enjoy his food even before you try the recipes because they are, without question, an expression of his love for them and the dear people in his life who shared them--his dignified mother, handsome father, beautiful sons, formidable wife and his adoring friends, among them some of today’s haute celebrities, beginning with the Ronald Reagans.

What you get is a picture story with recipes from a man’s life. He starts life loving food, as you can tell from the photo of a chubby preteen DeLuise stuffing his mouth with a hot dog somewhere in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where he grew up.

There is Pop, dressed up and holding a paper bag (filled, perhaps, with roasted chestnuts purchased on route from Church?), and Mamma, wearing sensible shoes and a feathered hat, in their Palm Sunday best. You know darn well that the minute Mamma is back home, she’ll throw on a clean, crisp housedress that smells of Clorox and start putting enough Sunday sauce on the stove to feed 25 people, easy.

Mamma is the focus and spearhead, credited not only for most of the fabulous Southern Italian recipes in the book, but also for the philosophical view of life, as described by DeLuise: “When I was a kid, if I had a fever, had a cold, had a fight, had a fall, had a cut, was depressed, had a disappointment, fell off a truck, woke up with a headache . . . no matter what the situation, my mother’s solution was always, ‘Eat this, it’ll make you feel better.’ ”

Mamma appears in a daguerreotype as a young bride, standing against a grapevine (in her native Potenza?), shy, innocent and strong. She is followed to the present--on the day her son married, in the midst of her clan during a 88th birthday, tasting a sauce and sportingly acting straightwoman to DeLuise’s antics, which make up most of the color graphics in the book.

“My parents immigrated from peasant surroundings, a little town called Spinosa in the province of Potenza, Italy. When I was a child, growing up in Brooklyn, my mother made the most delicious Italian peasant dishes, and the more experienced my palate became, the more I realized how special and really terrific her way of cooking was,” DeLuise writes.

So you get Mamma’s regional Southern Italian recipes in the book, which you can be sure are really terrific: marinara sauce, pasta e fagiole, stuffed eggplant rolls, stuffed mushrooms (stuffed with Italian sausages and cheese), lasagna, sausage bread and anniversary-birthday rum cake, among many others. All you can say is, lucky Dom.

His relatives--Aunt Rose, Ma Ziti (a sister-in-law named after the macaroni, ziti, for which she became famous), sisters Tessie and Anne, who contributed other fine transplanted Southern Italian recipes, such as Stuffed Shells.

DeLuise has good eating and cooking friends with whom he has shared personal or professional experiences as well as recipes throughout his show business career. Their recipes are also in the book: Dinah Shore’s moussaka, Dean Martin’s red clam sauce, Mel Brooks’ red clam chowder, Anne Bancroft’s vegetarian chili, with appropriate explanations of how DeLuise obtained and used the recipes. Mel Brooks, for instance, shared his red clam chowder on Fire Island, but used canned clams. “We just didn’t tell anybody,” DeLuise said.

Nancy Reagan’s chicken, which has been served to Republicans, ambassadors and other dignitaries, as well as to Tip and Mrs. O’Neill, is also in the book.

Carol Burnett, who has known DeLuise since 1964 when they worked on a television show called “The Entertainers,” loves the scampi named in her honor, which DeLuise prepares for her.

Even chef Paul Prudhomme of K-Paul’s in New Orleans, who bears an uncanny resemblance to DeLuise, contributed a blackened redfish recipe from his own book.

And there is Frank Sinatra, arm-in-arm with DeLuise, with a comfortable, content look of a man who had just enjoyed a plate of Mamma’s veal Marsala, which DeLuise dedicated to Sinatra.

Burt Reynolds, with whom DeLuise has worked and played through numerous movies, has a few recipes dedicated to him too.

DeLuise says he is currently on the Pritikin Program with his wife, Carol. But if you worry that his food empire will crumble in the heap of no-cholesterol, no-fat, no-fun distress, don’t. He’ll probably come up with a way to make the Pritikin diet palatable enough to make the ghost of Pritikin materialize with fork and knife in hand.

MAMMA’S MARINARA SAUCE

1/4 cup olive oil

5 cloves garlic, minced

2 (28-ounce) cans ready-cut peeled tomatoes, or 5 pounds fresh tomatoes

1 (6-ounce) can tomato paste

4 tablespoons sun-dried tomatoes, chopped

10 fresh basil leaves

Pepper

Grated Parmesan cheese

Heat oil in a 10-inch skillet. Add garlic and saute until tender. Add tomatoes, tomato paste and sun-dried tomatoes, if desired.

Simmer 20 to 30 minutes over medium heat, stirring occasionally. To serve sauce over pasta, tear basil leaves into small pieces and sprinkle over sauced pasta. Then add pepper and cheese to taste. Serve with fish, scallops, shrimp or broiled chicken if desired. Makes 2 quarts sauce.

Note: Add 1 medium onion, finely chopped and saute with garlic until limp, if desired.

If fresh tomatoes are used, place in boiling water 10 seconds. Drain, then peel and discard skins. Cut tomatoes into pieces and add to skillet in lieu of canned tomatoes.