Rosaria Baldizzi’s Breadcrumb Mix Recipe

A special family recipe for muddica or breadcrumb mix, as remembered by Rosaria’s granddaughter.

Part of our 2022 Gala Celebration highlights the recipes of families past, whether they resided in one of our two tenements at 97 and 103 Orchard Street or in the broader Lower East Side neighborhood.

Adolfo and Rosaria Baldizzi, immigrants from Sicily, Italy, lived at our 97 Orchard tenement in the 1930s with their two American-born children, Josephine and Johnny. In the midst of the Great Depression, Rosaria made do with what she had available, inventing recipes that continue to be lovingly passed down in the family like this one for breadcrumb mix her granddaughter Maria shared with us.

Ingredients

• 4 cups of plain breadcrumbs
• 1 onion
• A couple of garlic cloves
• Handful of pignoli nuts
• Handful of golden light raisins (not the dark ones)
• About 2 inches of hard salami.
  • You can also use pancetta, pepperoni, or sopressata. Whatever is available!
• 1 small carrot, thinly sliced and chopped

Directions

• 1. Finely chop the onions and garlic and sauté in olive oil until soft.

You can use a food processor if you like. Rosaria used to use a small knife and chopped forever!

• 2. Finely chop the pignoli nuts, hard salami, raisins and carrot and add to onions and garlic and sauté until soft.
• 3. Add the breadcrumbs to the pan and mix together, adding more oil as you go, to make the texture as you would to stuff mushrooms.

Maria’s Tip: “My grandmother would let it cool and put it in a plastic bag and freeze. When she wanted to use the mixture she would break off a piece and heat it up in a pan with some olive oil.”