A tried-and-true recipe from Mom can be a home cook’s secret weapon. But savvy pros use them, too. Some restaurants were practically built on mom’s cooking, like the former Anthony’s Italian Kitchen on Middle Street in Portland, where now-retired owner Anthony Barrasso proudly filled his menu with recipes from his mother, Lucy.

We talked with a few Portland chefs, bakers and restaurateurs who feature their mom’s cooking or baking on their menus today. For some, the moms have been involved in a hands-on way, teaching staff to cook their staple dishes or baking the restaurant’s desserts. Others learned some of their best-selling or signature dishes from their mothers, grateful to be gifted a delicious legacy.

Isai Galvez and mother Sarah Galvez, Sal de la Tierra

Isai Galvez, co-owner of the pan-Latin restaurant Sal de la Tierra, compares his mom’s second-nature cooking style to the social media meme that states, “When I cook, I don’t measure, I just sprinkle until I hear my ancestors whisper, ‘That’s enough, child.'”

“She’s been doing it so long, she’s got that touch,” said Galvez, beaming. “It’s just instinct, a feeling with her.”

His mother, Sarah, and father, Benjamin, owned the former La Familia restaurant on Brighton Avenue, which served Puerto Rican and Central American food for seven years until it closed in 2014. Galvez worked there in just about every capacity while he was a college student.

When he and his business partner, Juan Carlos Sanchez, decided to launch Sal de la Tierra on Congress Street in 2020, he naturally sought his mother’s guidance. “He said, ‘Mom, I want you to help me,'” Sarah recalled.

Sarah taught the crew to cook Salvadoran dishes she learned from her husband, who is from El Salvador. She also schooled them on Puerto Rican dishes from her own heritage, including pernil (slow-roasted pork shoulder), plantain-based specialties like mofongo and tostones, and Puerto Rican empanadas. She’s perhaps proudest of the arroz con gandules — the island’s national dish of rice and pigeon peas — seasoned with housemade sofrito, an aromatic seasoning base of peppers, onions, garlic and herbs she likens to a “Spanish pesto.”

“My mother-in-law taught me to make the arroz con gandules, and really everything I know,” said Isai’s wife, Paola, who operates the restaurant day-to-day, but is stepping back into a more administrative role since she’s due to become a mother herself this summer.

Sarah Galvez said her recipes come from her family, but not necessarily her own mother. “My mom wasn’t the best cook, to be truthful, but my stepdad Luis was,” she said. “Puerto Rican men are really into cooking.”

She’s now serving as a consultant for the restaurant’s new chef, Puerto Rico native Jose Martinez. Sal de la Tierra is closed for renovations, so Martinez has been working at the restaurant’s food truck, El Salerito, and is preparing to add even more Puerto Rican specialties to the restaurant menu when they reopen this summer.

“She taught us how to cook,” Galvez said of his mom. “Our food at Sal de le Tierra is family food. It’s love food.”

Solo Italiano Executive Chef Paolo Laboa and mother Edda Michelucci 

Solo Italiano Chef Paolo Laboa recalled how as a child in Genoa, Italy, he’d often hear his mother, Edda, singing in the kitchen.

“One time, I said ‘Mama, can you tell me why you’re singing every time you’re cooking?’ She said, ‘Because it’s about energy. If I’m happy, the food is happy. And when your father eats it, he’s gonna be more happy.'”

Laboa cherishes the lesson to this day; he’s seen the difference it makes. “If you make a piece of bread, and you throw it on a plate, it’s one thing,” he explained. “If you make it with heart, the people, they ask you, ‘What did you put inside?'”

Laboa credits his late mother — who died 18 years ago at age 86 in Genova — with some of the most foundational parts of his menu at Solo Italiano, including the silky pesto recipe that won the 2008 World Pesto Championship.

“It took me almost 30 years to make the pesto recipe right,” Laboa said. “My mother would always say it needed more of this or that. She wanted balance in everything: not too garlicky, not too pine-nutty, not too cheesy.

“She told me, ‘In the end, if it’s the right pesto, it makes you smile.’ The last one I tried, she told me, ‘That makes me smile.’ I never changed the recipe after that.”

Laboa sources his basil from Olivia’s Garden in New Gloucester, pine nuts from Pisa or Spain and pecorino cheese from Sardinia. He also uses two-year-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Ligurian extra-virgin olive oil because its delicate flavor won’t overpower the other ingredients.

The pesto is the star in one of Laboa’s signature dishes, Mandilli al Vero Pesto Genovese, where it coats thin sheets of pasta, made supremely supple from white wine in the dough rather than water.

The straightforward entrée reflects his mom’s approach of cooking with “simple elegance,” relying on just a handful of top-quality ingredients.

For Mother’s Day at Solo Italiano, Laboa is making another dish he learned from her: Cima de Vitello, braised veal belly stuffed with sweetbreads, pistachios and pine nuts. She taught him to cook with offal, including the Genovese comfort dish Bianco e Nero, which features light and dark organ meats in a nourishing broth.

“I always feel that if I can replicate what I ate (from my mom’s cooking) in the restaurant, it’s going to be very good,” Laboa said.

“If you continue a food tradition, you take with you a little bit of the past, always. Food can pull together family, love and everything. That’s what I want to do.”

Andy Gerry and mother Jacky Gerry, Low Stakes Lodge and Highroller Lobster Co. 

Andy Gerry doesn’t have big Mother’s Day plans with his mom, Jacky.

“There’s a lot of mother-son time for us in the end of April and early May,” said Gerry, co-owner of Highroller Lobster Co and Low Stakes Lodge, because both their birthdays fall within a couple weeks of Mother’s Day. “So for Mother’s Day, we usually end up going and getting some plants or mulch and doing some yardwork.”

In fact, Gerry gets plenty of time with his mom year-round. Jacky Gerry bakes all the whoopie pies, cookie sandwiches and brownies at Highroller, along with the layer cakes, skillet cookies and savory breads for Low Stakes — where she also works a couple evenings a week as a server.

“Sometimes I run out of stuff to tell her, because I see her everyday,” he said.

“It’s super cool that I get the opportunity to work with my son,” Jacky said. “Not a lot of people can say that.”

The Gerrys have been working together for years, ever since Andy got his first restaurant job shucking oysters at J’s Oyster, where Jacky was a longtime server (and all three of Andy’s brothers also worked at one time or another).

Around 2015, when Andy was working at Maps, a basement bar on Market Street, the owner wanted to add baked goods to their offerings. Gerry enlisted his mom to make cakes and cupcakes, her first account as a professional baker (she now takes special orders through her business, Portland Cake Company). Then when Gerry and his partner, Baxter Key, turned their Highroller food cart into a brick-and-mortar restaurant in 2017, he brought her on board as well.

“It was a no-brainer having her make treats for us at Highroller,” he said. “What better dessert to have with a Maine lobster roll than a whoopie pie?”

Andy said his mom’s sweet treats were an integral part of his childhood.

“Her baked goods were always my favorite,” he said. “I’m kind of spoiled. I didn’t really eat cakes anywhere else when I was growing up. I always had the best ones at home, like at my birthday. Or whenever my brothers and I visited friends for sleepovers, my mom would always send us with a tray of something or other.”

She also baked a Vespertino tequila cream liqueur cake for his 2019 wedding, though her wedding gift was even more precious: a boxed collection of her recipes, with ingredients and methods on the front of each card and the sentimental significance of each dish written on the back. It’s a culinary treasure trove, packed full with baked goods and his favorite meals from childhood, like chili, stuffed shells and meatballs.

“There are a handful of baked things that I’ve taken a stab at over the years,” Gerry said. “They don’t come out quite as good. I’m convinced she left secret ingredients out so I couldn’t replicate them.”

Stacy Begin and mother Betty Begin, Two Fat Cats Bakery 

Two Fat Cats Bakery owner Stacy Begin makes some of her most prized family recipes in the summer, when berries are in season.

Just talking about the glazed strawberry pie — the first pie she ever learned to make — transports her straight back to childhood. “It was the pie we always waited for during the summer,” Begin said.

“My memory is going into the field with my parents or grandparents and that warm sun on you, and picking flats and flats of ripe berries. For the three or four weeks that strawberries were in season, we gorged ourselves on that pie. It was pie every single week. By the time the season was over, we were strawberried-out.”

The pie recipe is uncomplicated — fill a baked-off crust with fresh strawberries, top with a glaze made from crushed berries, sugar, cornstarch and butter, and chill — but its success depends on peak-season berries. “If you try and make it with strawberries that are out of season, they’re not ripe or sweet enough, and it’s just not the same,” Begin said. “It’s so simple, but you cannot get more strawberry than that pie.”

The recipe originated with her paternal grandmother, but Begin said she learned it from her mother, who took over the tradition of making it after her grandmother grew too ill to bake.

“It was kind of special because it was like, ‘Oh, Mom’s going to make a pie and she almost never bakes.’ It added to the anticipation of the pie. My mom didn’t bake a lot, but the things she did bake were very good,” Begin said.

At Two Fat Cats, Begin prepares the pie recipe as individual tarts.

Sporadically during the summer, the bakery offers another of Begin’s heirloom recipes, this one for blueberry muffins. It’s a somewhat unconventional recipe that swaps in butter for oil and bakes the muffins about 75 degrees hotter than usual, producing a craggy, crunchy top and texture closer to a soft biscuit than cake. Begin said they’re glorious fresh from the oven, though they don’t hold up well the next day.

“You’d make them and then you’d devour them all that day. You didn’t have just one,” she laughed. “It’s all about the blueberries. It lets the berries shine.”

She recalled her mom baking a batch of the muffins whenever she got the urge during the summer. “It felt like a special breakfast, the muffins coming right out of the oven and then you add a little butter to it — it just started your day right, you know?”

Stacy’s mother, Betty Begin of Waterville, said the recipe likely originated with one of Stacy’s aunts.

“I am not a good baker,” Betty chuckled. “Wherever she got her baking instinct, it skipped a generation with me, but she got it from family.

“It’s very nice that she’s keeping on with these traditions and that people like it. That’s the main thing,” she added. “It makes us very proud that she’s doing that. And I love it when she brings her products home to me.”

Begin Family Blueberry Muffins
Stacy Begin’s mom used to bake these biscuit-textured muffins as breakfast treats. During blueberry season, Stacy Begin features them occasionally at her bakery, Two Fat Cats.

2 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 egg, lightly beaten
¾ cup milk
¼ cup (4 tablespoons) melted butter, cooled
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen (do not thaw)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Grease a 12-cup muffin pan.

Mix and sift together the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Add the egg, milk and melted butter. Stir just enough to mix the wet ingredients with the dry. It’s OK if a little bit of dry ingredients is still in the bottom of the bowl. Now fold in your blueberries, mixing in any bits of dry ingredients that remain. A couple folds should do — don’t overmix.

Fill each muffin cup about 2/3 full and bake the muffins for 20-25 minutes until tops are golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the muffin comes out clean. Let the muffins cool for 10-15 minutes (if you can resist), then slather with butter. Lemon curd is nice, too. Great with coffee or eggs or chowder or all by its lonesome.