Having launched Julia Child to stardom in the 1960s, in the early ’70s WGBH became the would-be staging ground for other Boston-area chefs and gourmands who wanted to find fame and fortune on television in the Age Before Cable. I was always partial to Joyce Chen’s cooking show. (A quick Joyce Chen sidebar: her original restaurant in Cambirdge closed about 10 years ago and was converted into a day care center. When we were scouting day care before Charlotte was born, it was one of the centers we visited, and even though the restaurant had been gone for a couple of years at that point, it still smelled like pork fried rice inside) WGBH put a lot of effort and promotion into another show that starred a husband and wife team of film-makers named Franco and Margaret Romagnoli; the show was entitled “Romagnolis’ Table”, featured what was then the rather exotic scope of Italian cuisine beyond the familiar spaghetti-and-meatball dinner (and prior to the Pasta Revolution of the 1980s), and hinged on the charisma and interplay of the voluble and very Italian Franco and his common-sense, lower-key wife, Margaret. That’s them in the photo above…and it’s no coincidence that Margaret looks a LOT like Julia Child in that photo, as they were hoping to attract the very same audience.
The Romagnolis produced several cookbooks during their heyday on television. Their first book, tied to the first season of their series, is still available with recent updates that reflect the changes in styles and greater familiarity of American home chefs with Italian cuisine. A second book dedicated to fish and seafood recipes is out of print, but still available from used book sellers. While there was some initial splash of popularity for the Romagnolis, they did not capture the fancy of viewers the way Julia Child or Graham Kerr did. Franco’s outsized personality was reined in too much, I think, and culinarily they were just a little too far ahead of home cooks in the early 1970s. Neither was a professional chef, but they did open several restaurants in the Boston metro area that were popular and well-regarded. I think Food Network sometimes runs their PBS series at odd times along with old “French Chef” programs, but they don’t seem to be available on any form of home video or online at this time.
Franco Romagnoli died Monday at the age of 82. In recent years, he taught cooking at Boston University in their culinary arts program and wrote both cookbooks and travel books about Italy. Boston Globe food editor Sheryl Julian remembered him in her Boston.com blog yesterday with a story about his way of mangling English and his recipe for gnocchi. Margaret Romagnoli died in 1995.
I loved them.