Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Hey, just a reminder, our May Get Lit with All Of It Bookclub pick is Audition by Katie Kitamura. She came on the show yesterday to preview the conversation and I'm so excited to talk with her about it this month's Get Lit event. Go back and listen to the preview. It's on our show page WNYC.org. Our Get Lit event is happening on Thursday, May 20th, 29th at 6:00 PM. We will be at the New York Public Library Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library branch. Tickets are free, but they tend to be grabbed up pretty quickly, so get yours now by going to wnyc.org/getlit, plus there will be a special musical guest. We can't announce it right now because we're still nailing down the details, but you won't want to miss it. That's all I'm going to say. Again, that's this Thursday, May 29th. Tickets and more information can be found at wnyc.org/getlit. that is in the future. Now let's get this hour started with Your Pasta Sucks.

On the cover of Matteo Lane's new cookbook, there is an image of the comedian standing in the kitchen wearing close to nothing. He has on a heart covered apron, tighty whities, and he's feeding himself a spoonful of pasta. The book is titled you, Your Pasta Sucks and the Book and the word Cookbook, it's in quotations. It's filled with 30 recipes, stories and tips like how to survive an Italian dinner, how to properly order a coffee in Rome, or a rant on why Matteo thinks Alfredo is basically a lie that transitioned into a recipe for Penne Alla Vodka.

His debut cookbook is as much a love letter to Italian food as it is to Matteo's family and culture. These are also topics he discusses in his forthcoming special on Hulu, the Al Dente special, which streams this Friday. It's funny, by the way. His cookbook, Your Pasta Sucks is out now.

Matteo, hi.

Matteo Lane: Hi. I love that anecdote. You're like, it is fun, by the way.

Alison Stewart: Just telling you.

Matteo Lane: I hope so. My God, but yeah. Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. First of all, do you like to cook?

Matteo Lane: Yes. I just wrote a cookbook. What is this?

Alison Stewart: It says cookbook is in giant quotes on the cover, so I had to be clear.

Matteo Lane: What I'm trying to say is it's ridiculous to think of my, like Fran Leibowitz said too many people are writing books. Too many people are authors, and I thought, she's right, but I am a writer because I'm on stage writing every single night, and I know how to cook. I thought, this is more of a cookbook with a series of essays, short essays, and exactly like you said, like an homage to my family, my tradition, my culture, and just fun stories. Cookbook in quotations because yes, you're going to learn how to make Cacio e Pepe, but you're also going to learn about my ranting and ravings about mindless, stupid things.

Alison Stewart: Your Pasta Sucks. It's a hilarious title for a cookbook.

Matteo Lane: Thank you, and I fought for it because originally, they were like, "We should do cooking and stories with Mateo." I was like, "Well, it's not poetry reading hour. I'm a comedian. You've got to get people's attention immediately." I thought that was funny. If you're walking around Barnes and Nobles or the Strand or you're looking for a book, especially, you're trying to figure out new recipes or something, and you walk by a book that slightly insults you by telling you Your Pasta Sucks, I'd be intrigued.

Alison Stewart: You wrote in the book, "I never meant to write a cookbook. Honestly, I probably should have written a book about love or Mariah Carey or Forteight."

Matteo Lane: Yes, I could write an encyclopedia. Remember, they used to come to the house and try and sell you encyclopedias, I could probably do half of it on Fortnite and half of it on Mariah Carey.

Alison Stewart: What, in your experience, gave you the strength, the desire to write about pasta?

Matteo Lane: Oh, I mean, I think pasta for me is like a comfort, yes, it's comfort food, but there's something comforting about pasta, and I would come home from school and if I know pasta was being made, that was one part of my day that I enjoyed because I hated school. For me, as a writer already, when I was doing a YouTube series on, I started 2021, 2022, my YouTube channel, I was looking for ways to just continue exploring comedy and not waste any material.

I thought, I already cook, so I can cook, but then sort of use it as an excuse to tell stories about my family, et cetera, and it just kind of evolved. I started cooking all these recipes, and people were coming to to see what I was cooking next and show me pictures of things that they've cooked. At that point, my agent was like, "Have you thought about a cookbook?" I was like, "Under no circumstances," but they were like, "Well, you know, we think it might be a really good idea." I really thought about it, and thought, "Okay, yes. Give me a year and a half. I'm on planes anyways every weekend for touring."

I just kept it as a series of short essays, so I could just write short stories and then sort of lob them together based off recipes.

Alison Stewart: Yes, and the first chapter, you spent a lot of time talking about your family in between the recipes or stories about your mom, your sister Cate Nona, Aunt Cindy, your grandfather who had a secret family. How did growing up in a family like yours help shape, I might just be sort of real about this, how did it shape you, the person you are?

Matteo Lane: I think your family is normal to you until you exchange stories on the playground and none of them match up, and then you realize that your family is not like every other family. I would say, for me, it feels normal, but I think other people entering in my family are experiencing, like what they experienced in Jumanji when the board started becoming alive, and there's animals running around, screaming, yelling, and monsoons. That's really what it's like to be at an Italian dinner.

It definitely shaped me because I think my family, whether they know it or not, through all their trauma, clearly used humor as a way to deal and cope with their trauma. No alcoholism, no drugs, just humor. My family enjoys sitting around and laughing, and I just picked up on that as a young kid. Especially growing up in the late '80s, early 90s, we weren't consumed by iPads and distractions. I mean, you sat at the dinner table, you had to keep up with a 45-year-old, even though I'm 6. I think that that probably had a lot to do with how I tell stories and how I navigate myself through the world.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Matteo Lane. He's joining us to discuss his new cookbook, Your Pasta Sucks, as well as his new comedy special, the Al Dentes Specials streaming on Hulu this Friday. All right, let's get into the cookbook. You have a section of the book titled how to Ruin Pasta. First of all, that many people are ruining pasta?

Matteo Lane: Are you Italian? I don't know what you are.

Alison Stewart: No, I'm a black chick.

Matteo Lane: Oh, so you must know good food. It's like, don't you see people making things that you grew up eating and you're like, "Why-

Alison Stewart: Mac and cheese. Oh, Mac and cheese.

Matteo Lane: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Potato salad.

Matteo Lane: Potato salad. I would say, doesn't it irk something in you when you see it and you know that it's just a few simple changes that they could make to better not just themselves, but also the food they're presenting to other people?

Alison Stewart: True, true.

Matteo Lane: I think it's the same way. I feel like when you eat pasta the right way and then you see everybody else really messing it up, you're like-- Like, case in point, I was in England, and I was at my friend Danielle, who's Italian. We found a real Italian restaurant, and they made really good carbonara. We sit, we order it, and then this very nice British woman and her daughter ordered the same thing next to us. The second they presented them with the plate, she just started cutting up all the spaghetti. It was like I felt something's dying inside of me. I was like, I think that I need to either exercise these demons by just moaning and screaming about it, because, I don't know, there are so many simple rules, like salt your pasta water enough, so that it has flavor, and treat your pasta like it's a steak, so that way you're not eating sponge with a soup over it. Small change.

I think what people, and sorry if I'm talking too much, but I think, for example, people putting oil in their water, I think that is a sign of people wanting to be in the know and how to cook something authentically, but they're not in the know. It's just a few simple rules that live under your nose, and I think when people apply them, you can take what's really simple cooking and elevate it to a level that makes you feel like, "Oh, wow, I learned something, and it does taste better."

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Graham's Eggplant Parmigiana.

Matteo Lane: Yes.

Alison Stewart: First of all, you didn't really like eggplant. What did you have against eggplant initially?

Matteo Lane: I don't know. Maybe it was a texture thing. I finally fell in love with it after living in Umbria because they would do Melanzane, Lasagna de Melanzane. Melanzane is how you say eggplant in Italian. I always get so mad. I'm like, "Why can't we just use pasta with cheese?" Then I would spend all afternoon in the kitchen with the chef, because I was the only kid that spoke Italian at the school, and I just started falling in love with it and then cooking it with everything.

Then in Sicily, they use eggplant a lot, and they use a pasta called Pasta Alla Norma. They fry up eggplant and they put it in red sauce and put the ricotta salata and shave it over. I slowly fell in love with eggplant. That took me a while to come around to it. But I remember my bisnona, my great Grandmother, before she passed, I remember her coming over to my Mom's house and cooking all those recipes for her, and my Mom writing down all the recipes, so she could remember it before she died.

Alison Stewart: Pasta Alla Carbonara is a dish that you include in your Rome chapter, and it's real carbonara, but you didn't want Italy to cancel you, so you just specify, this isn't the only carbonara.

Matteo Lane: What's very Italian is to have rules and then to all argue about them. They're ever arguing is essentially what it is. They just love to argue with each other, but it's like the one city you could get in a cab and then the cab driver's telling you his way of making carbonara. Essentially, carbonara is one of the four Roman pastas, so they all sort of switch off ingredients. I would say, the king is carbonara, which is egg yolk, pecorino romano, pepper, guanciale pasta. Then you have Gricia, which is just without the egg yolk. It's basically a Cacio e Pepe with guanciale.

Then you have Amatriciana, which is basically get rid of the egg yolk and add in red sauce, and then there's Cacio Pepe, which is just the pecorino and pepper. There are these four sister dishes that live in Rome and people do them their own way. Some use egg yolk, some use the full egg, some people use spaghetti, some people use Mezzi rigatoni. Kind of depends, but generally speaking, those are the ingredients you're going to be playing around with.

Alison Stewart: You write a love letter to pig jowls. I'm not going to say it. I'm going to let you say it because it sounds so beautiful when you say it.

Matteo Lane: Guanciale.

Alison Stewart: Guanciale.

Matteo Lane: There you go. That was great. That's exactly it.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. Guanciale.

Matteo Lane: Yes. Brava. [Italian language]

Alison Stewart: One semester of Italian, that's all I have under my belt.

Matteo Lane: That's all you need.

Alison Stewart: It's really a fatty part of the pig. Why is it important when you're cooking? What's important about cooking with it?

Matteo Lane: It's the buccal fat removal of the pig. The pig afterwards has great cheekbones, Alla Lia Michel. I think that difference with pancetta or bacon, the guanciale coming from the cheek, it can cook in its own fat. It can render in its own fat, so when you're making Carbonara Alla Gricia, or all'Amatriciana, you don't have to put a bunch of olive oil, garlic, or things that you sort of associate when you're frying on a pan. You can just take cold guanciale, chop it up, put it on the pan, put it at a low heat, and it will slowly cook in itself. It cooks in its own fat.

Alison Stewart: We got this great text that says, "This is giving me the judgmental Italian therapy I need. I will immediately get this book. Thank you."

Matteo Lane: I know. I've noticed being Italian, when I go to my friend's house younger, they immediately apologize before I eat the meal. They're like, "Oh, well, you're Italian. I'm so sorry. This meal's not going to be that good." I'm like, "Wow, Italians really have sort of conquered the guilt of the culinary world." Like, people feel afraid of an Italian if they come over to eat, which I guess is a good thing because we make good food.

Alison Stewart: Matteo Lane is my guest for discussing his new cookbook, Your Pasta Sucks. I'm going to read this from page 119. It says, "Pesto is not just one thing. The word pesto is just a form of the Italian verb pastare, which means to crush. So because this is Italian food we're talking about, of course, there are a hundred different sauces made up from crushed stuff." When did you realize this was the case?

Matteo Lane: Honestly, being in Italy so often, just talking to locals and talking to people about food, you just start learning more and more about food. I know that sounds so crazy, but I remember when I was young, I was in Sicily, I was 16, and I'd never seen how tiramisu was made. I didn't even know what Mars Capone was. I didn't know how to put all that together. I didn't know. You sit there and you make it with people, and then you just kind of build up the knowledge.

I sat in a kitchen at Luciano, who's like the king of Carbonara, and he taught me how to make a proper Carbonara. It's kind of like learning a language, where it's like you just pick things up by being surrounded by it so often. I never made risotto before, and so my friend Elena cooked risotto for me, so picking up little tiny things. Also, my friend Katie Parlo, who can look at a basil plant and tell you how old it is and what it's from and what it's used for, I pick her brain all the time to talk to her about food and talk to her about pasta and talk to her about why this ingredient, why not? What's the history of this?

Even like with Fettuccine Alfredo, it's a really rich history and a really complicated dish, and you just learn it by going and talking to people, "Well, how did this come to America? How did this change like this? Why is the Olive Garden so sturgy? Where did it actually come from?" Just talk. I know that sounds so crazy, but it's equal also, too.

I had Saturday night, how fun am I? I sat and watched a Carbonara documentary for an hour and a half.

Alison Stewart: Oh, what did you learn?

Matteo Lane: That the original recipe was published in Chicago, and it was from an Italian immigrant, so obviously, he had brought it from Italy, but there were no publications before 1950 about what Carbonara was. The original recipe, actually called for pancetta, cream, garlic, parmesan cheese and fresh pasta. The dish sort of evolved both in America and both in Italy. Specifically in Italy. Then the dish that we know today arrived in the late '80s and '90s, I think, at a Michelin chef restaurant. Now the ingredients and how it's cooked with the pasta water is more recognized today.

It really, Carbonara is a dish about trends as opposed to sticking to historical facts.

Alison Stewart: In the book, you often highlight the differences between Italian and Americanized Italian cuisine. What are some of the major differences that come to your mind when you think of how Americans have come to understand Italian food versus food made in Italy?

Matteo Lane: Italian food from Italy is simpler, portions are smaller. The pasta is often cooked in the sauce. It has an al dente, like a real bite to it. There's more rules in America, and a lot of places you can go and pick the kind of pasta with the kind of sauce that you want, and they're not so blase in Italy about that. I love American Italian food.

American Italian food is Italian food because you get all these immigrants from southern Italy living in one tiny area of New York City. You have people from Bari, people from Napoli, people from Calabria, people from Sicilia, they all speak different languages because they don't speak Italian. They're all there trying to stay alive. They're immigrants, how do we make money? When Italian immigrants came over, Americans had the idea that you have to have a carb, you have to have a vegetable, and you have to have a meat on a plate, and that's the American diet. So, boom, you take a bunch of different recipes, you put them together, you get pasta, red sauce, and meatballs.

Meatballs aren't traditionally eaten over pasta, but to make money and to please American clients, you change around your recipes. Also, ingredients change. They came to America and they had more meats, more ingredients, so things changed, but they're all based off of regions and places of where these people came from. But it was really to accommodate a lot of Americans and non Italians to make money, to survive. That's really the basis of Italian American food.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Matteo Lane. We're discussing his new cookbook, Your Pasta Sucks. He also has a new comedy special, The Al Dente Special, streaming on Hulu this Friday. Al dente? It translates to the tooth. Why did you decide to call the special that?

Matteo Lane: Honestly, I wish I had a more creative answer, but that was the name of my tour at the time, and they were like, "What's the name of your special?" I panicked, and I was like, "Al dente," and that was it. It took and a half years to write that special and took about 30 seconds to panic and write a really crappy title.

Alison Stewart: In the special, you talk about Uber drivers seeing Oprah out and about, Mariah Carey.

Matteo Lane: Yes, and when I met Gayle on CBS this morning, which there's controversy in that, but I love Gayle.

Alison Stewart: Oh, tell me more.

Matteo Lane: She remembered me. She came up to me, she had a billion notes, and she came up in the green room, and she goes, "I remember you in Rome. I remember you. Me and Oprah both remember you." I thought, "Oh, wow, I really made an impression. I said, "Well, Gayle, I also remember you, because I remember I was at a Mariah Carey Christmas concert, and she was two hours late, and you were sitting right by me, and I thought, you're really going to make Gayle King wait two hours? Like, get on stage, Mariah, your hair looks fine."

Alison Stewart: I think we could all have a Gayle King story. I saw this from Gayle King at this Broadway show. We could all have a whole book of Gayle King stories.

Matteo Lane: I give it to Gayle. She's out and about in New York. She really is doing it.

Alison Stewart: You talked a lot about your Italian heritage, but also your Mexican heritage came up in this special. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Give people a little teaser.

Matteo Lane: Yes. The older I get, the more curious I am about my Mexican heritage, because it was so taboo to talk about it around my nonna, because my grandmother had married a Mexican man named Joaquin, and they had five kids together. She's Italian, he's Mexican, and at the same time, he had another woman and had five kids with her, and then he named all the kids the same name, so he didn't confuse them. Clearly, my grandmother, this was traumatic.

They divorced, and she later remarried a Sicilian who is my grandfather, helped raise me, cared for me, and loved me and. But I know that my mom is Mexican. My family's Mexican. They're all half Mexican, but we never grew up with the strong culture. My mom did when she was a kid. Everyone was Mexican, ad they're all speaking Spanish. We still have photos of our family in Mexico, and it was just one day. My grandma didn't know how to handle the stress, and she was like, "They're no longer our family, bye.

My mom and my aunt are like, "Well, wait, we have cousins. We have aunt." "No, no more." It's like, "Okay." Growing up and hearing those stories and knowing that that's a part of my heritage, I want to shed a light on that and explore that and continue talking about it and be proud of it.

Alison Stewart: Mexican cookbook. It could be in your future.

Matteo Lane: I know. I have to learn how to make tortilla. I don't know. Another cookbook, I don't know. I kind of ran out of recipes. I was like, "I'm not Martha Stewart, you guys. I can't do a crostini for someone's bachelorette party. I'm pretty limited here."

Alison Stewart: How did you get started in comedy?

Matteo Lane: It's interesting. I didn't think it was a thing that was for me, and I'm not playing victim here. I didn't see gay men do stand up. That wasn't a thing. I know that Mario Cantone existed or Jim David, but you have to remember this was not accessible to me. Whatever Came on TV was what I saw, and I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

I was 23 years old, that was the first time I ever saw an openly gay man do stand up. That's how long it took. Usually, comedy lent itself to a lot of homophobia. It just wasn't a place that gay men existed in a way that I saw. I think this country really struggles with misogyny and homophobia, and as a result, it's maybe somehow more comfortable for them to see a gay woman do stand up, because men are so threatened by their masculinity, can't handle the idea of anything feminine that they're not making fun of in a male.

You had Wanda Sykes, you had Ellen DeGeneres, you had Rosie O' Donnell, you had Judy Gold, there were so many representations of gay women, lesbian women, and never gay men. The first gay person I ever saw do stand up, I had to wait till I was 23 years old. His name was Bill Cruz, and he was a local Chicago comic. What I admired about Bill is that he treated comedy how everybody else did. He was gay, and that's that, and let's keep working on the jokes. I always admired that because I didn't feel like tokenizing myself for the sake of trying to get ahead was fair. I thought that I need to be a part of this community and challenge myself.

Alison Stewart: Do you feel like it has gotten better?

Matteo Lane: Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me? Oh, my God. Now, there are so many queer comics out there in all different types, ways, shapes, and forms, and it's so, so cool to watch, because even when I started in 2009, it was just so far and few between. On the grand scale, it was so far and few between. They I moved to New York, and you meet people like Rick Chrome, you meet people like Jim David, you closeted people. You really get to hear what it was like.

I remember talking to Rick Chrome, who's been doing comedy since the '80s, and I said, "When was it okay to be open on stage?" He thought for a second and looked at me, he goes, "Now," so imagine trying to build a career that begs you for authenticity, and so many people just had to be closeted for years and years and years and years. Mario Cantona has reached out to me personally to say, "Thank you for saying such nice things," but someone's got to say it. For me to see comedy that had anything to do with anything that I was thinking or feeling started with Kathy Griffin.

Alison Stewart: Ah, Kathy Griffin.

Matteo Lane: I don't know why. She just really locked in on how gay people felt or thought. That was the first spark, but then when I saw Joan Rivers when I was 21, that was it for me. That unlocked the door, and I thought, "Oh, this is what I meant to do," and I've never looked back.

Alison Stewart: All right, final question. How do you become good at comedy?

Matteo Lane: I would say comedy is many things. I would liken it to singing, right? Like, to sing, you have to learn how to breathe, support, project, you have to practice. You have to learn about different types of music. You have to listen to other singers, but sometimes at the end of the day, you are either born with it or you're not. I always say, people can study singing their entire lives with the best trainers, but Whitney Houston is still Whitney Houston. There was something innate in her soul and body that she was born to sing. I think some people really just kind of have it. You're just funny or you're not, and if you have even that tiny little bit of spark of just naturally being funny, you just have to work really hard. You have to do open mics every single night. You have to make a lot of sacrifices. You have to miss weddings, funerals, parties, dating, and just be within the comedy community and do it 247, and really give your talent a chance to grow.

Alison Stewart: Matteo Lane has a new cookbook. It's called Your Pasta Sucks. He has a new comedy special called The Al Dente Special, streaming on Hulu this Friday.

It was nice talking to you, Mateo.

Matteo Lane: It was great talking to you. This was such a fun interview and you asked great questions.