Food in Films – Moonstruck

~ foodinbooks

I grew up watching the film Moonstruck over and over and over again. The sense of romance, of the adventure of being set in New York City – a city which has fascinated me since I was a very small girl – the hilariousness of the characters and that overall sense of family all combined to create a film that has well stood the test of time. I just love this movie, so much in fact that I wore out two VHS tapes of it in the mid 1980s and early 1990s and have gone through two DVD Blue-Ray discs of it as well. As you might suspect, I know the entire movie by heart, literally line by line, and for that reason, people refuse to watch it with me because, as my sister put it one time “You annoy the shit out of people quoting along with it!” Well excusez-moi! 🙂

Anyway, if you haven’t seen this marvelous film, it stars Cher as Loretta Castorini, a 38-year old frumpy widow who has accepted that she will never love again after the untimely death of her first husband. She is content to date the very boring Johnny Cammareri, who has just proposed to her in one of the film’s opening scenes. She accepts, knowing that she doesn’t really love him, and this is hilariously brought home when she tells her parents Cosmo and Rose – your typical Italian parents – and her father’s first reaction is horror and her mother’s reaction is “Do you love him?” Loretta responds “No” and her mother says :Good. When you love them, they drive you crazy, because they know they can.” And it’s true! When you love someone so much, they absolutely can make you nuts sometimes but the good thing is that you can drive them batshit crazy in return. So it all works out!

Loretta goes on to try and make amends between Johnny and his younger brother Ronnie, who runs the family bakery in Brooklyn. Well, there is a full moon that is being mischievous and wreaking all sorts of romantic havoc with the family. Loretta unexpectedly is seduced by Ronnie (wonderfully played by Nicolas Cage), who the next morning, declares his love and his desire for her to go to the opera with him. She gets a gorgeous makeover, goes opera-ing with him, finds herself in love with Ronnie, and more hilarity ensues as she returns home the next morning and her mother tells her that Johnny has come back from Italy where he was at the deathbed of his very dramatic mother. When the mother learns of Johnny’s engagement, she of course recovers and proceeds to cook “a meal that would choke a horse” so that her son won’t get married. It’s pure Italian drama and so hilarious! Of course, as these types of films go, Loretta and Ronnie end up engaged, with Ronnie borrowing the ring his brother Johnny originally gave to Loretta when he proposed, so I always have wondered if Ronnie ever sprang for a new ring for Loretta. Sheesh, I hope so!

There are some wonderful subplots in this film, involving Loretta’s father Cosmo and his trashy mistress, her mother Rose – played to perfection by the late, great Olympia Dukakis who died just last month – who unexpectedly attracts the attention of a very attractive professor, Loretta’s grandfather who walks his five dogs under the light of the moon each night to make the dogs howl, Loretta’s aunt and uncle who own a butcher shop and find themselves amorous for each other after 50 years of marriage, and the moon itself, which is a mischievous, lovely lunar presence that turns everything on its head and shakes this family up in ways no one could expect. God I love this movie! My #1 favorite of all time. Watch it with me sometime and you’ll either be amazed at how I literally know it line by line, or you’ll be driven to strangling me with your bare hands to shut me up. Good times!

You’d think that in a film about an Italian family in New York that there’d be tons of food scenes involving luscious Italian food, and there are a few good dining scenes, the best one being when Rose, Loretta’s mother, goes to have a solo dinner at their favorite neighborhood trattoria and ends up being hit upon by an NYU professor wonderfully played by the late John Mahoney. But by far my favorite foodie scene is early in the film when Johnny calls Loretta from his dying mother’s bedside in Siciliy and Rose is cooking them both breakfast. She makes eggs in nests, or birds nests, as they are more commonly called. It’s basically a slice of thick, good-quality bread with a hole cut in the center, toasted in butter in a large skillet and with an egg cracked into the hole and cooked together. Simple but oh so good! So I recreated that scene with my own touches, including a vegetarian versions, so read on.

INGREDIENTS
2 large eggs
1 thick slice of good-quality bread
1 thick slice of a red bell pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Salt and pepper to taste

METHOD
Cut a hole in your slice of bread but keep the part you cut out. Since this is a love story, I used my heart-shaped cookie cutter because I am cheesy like that. Don’t judge me.

Melt the butter in a large skillet and add a small drop of olive oil, to keep the butter from burning. When it’s hot and foamy, put in the bread slice, the slice of bell pepper and the bread chunk you cut out previously. (That is your cook’s treat.)

Cook the bread and the pepper on medium-high for about 2 minutes, then flip them over and cook another minute before cracking an egg into the center of the bread and the center of the bell pepper.

Cook until the eggs are set, about 4-5 minutes,then flip over each next and cook another few seconds before sliding onto a plate. (And this is the point where you eat the toasted bread cutout with your fingers over the sink, savoring every crispy bite.)

Mine got a teensy bit burned, but since I like my toast a bit darker than most people, I was in heaven. This is such a simple and tasty breakfast method. Please try it. Toasting bread stovetop in butter is one of the best methods of cooking bread ever in life. And you can add any kind of topping to these eggs that you want, although a simple sprinkle of salt and pepper is all that this moonstruck girl ever needs. Enjoy!

Published by foodinbooks

I read, I cook, I travel, I love pugs, I drink wine, and I blog about food and books.

29 thoughts on “Food in Films – Moonstruck”

  1. Well, on the Westside of town in LA running into actors its if not a daily occurrence it’s not uncommon, our shop was a high end place, that people with money patronized frequently, and actors are well paid, so we had many of them visiting us, the joke on my side was that I did not run into actors, they come and visited me!😉
    And I will not mention names respecting their trust, and privacy, and there was a few of them who actually asked for me to talk, and conduct business, or just chat, because they liked me.
    And not only actors but Movie Directors, Book writers, Doctors, Lawyers, and whoever had money enough to shop at our place, actually my favorite people to talk was professors at UCLA, and USC who enjoyed my conversation, I worked there over fifteen years, and the place was a low key kind of place, where we treated all customers as any other normal person, as long as they were nice, as on any business, sometimes you run into disagreeable people, once in a while, even a couple of actors, who for whatever reason had disagreeable attitudes.
    But one particular person whose father was an old movie director, he had a couple of children who were child actors, and become very famous on TV, of course they grew up, and went to college, on the East Coast, and never failed to come each year to say hello, and bring me a present, for some reason they were very fond of me, I guess because the father really liked me, and they visited me at work often when they were not quite in their teens.
    The business no longer exists. I retired when they closed up, after the original owner died at a very old age, and the people who inherited, did not care to keep it open, they just wanted to sell the property, it was worth a fortune. 🤦‍♂️😒

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  2. Well, no soon I commented on your Hex post, I got two power black outs in a row, both lasting a few minutes each. But here I am back.
    Moonstruck, what should I say?
    I had maybe a year living in LA, and remember seeing the movie with Cher, and Nicolas Cage, but to be honest I need to see it again, because I remember almost nothing about it, except, that it was a romantic comedy.
    Nicolas Cage used to patronize the last business I worked fifteen years before retiring, and talked to him as a customer of the business, a few times, and remember selling him a few things.

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      1. Well, to be honest our business, had many actors as customers, hardly a couple of days went by that an actor, or actress wouldn’t show up, so at least for me it was not a big deal, some of them I will not recognize, until as they left, someone will mention it, I could not tell you how many times that happen, I spoke over two hours with two kids, and there was a neighbor girl looking in awe at these kids, in question, after they left I said to the girl:
        “Now you can close your mouth and stop drooling, you obviously find those kids attractive.
        Looking me in disbelief the girl said: “Mr. B!!!”
        “Don’t you know who they are?”
        “No!”
        Her response: “Heath Ledger!!!”
        I saw him on a Batman movie before as the joker, but couldn’t recognize him even after talking with him for two hours, same with many of them, after some other customer, or a coworker will tell me.
        The other one was also an actor, already forgot who he was.
        The ones who impressed me the most where the old actors who I saw them as a child and a young man since I was addicted to movies at that time, today I hardly watch any,
        The great disappointment was meeting a British actress who when I saw her in a movie for the first time on the early 70’s a friend of mine and myself thought she was an angel, she behaved at the shop horrible, and she was a cheapskate!
        Of course once I found out who they were, next time I will be aware of them, but we treated them as any other customer, many come regularly if they lived in town, others who don’t, well maybe once, or twice on those fifteen years.
        But if you live on the Westside of LA you will run into actors, eventually, they live and hang around there.
        In fact, it’s of bad taste if you live there to make too much out of seeing an actor, specially if you bother them for an autograph, or want to talk to them.
        But on those years I could tell you many anecdotes, about them, some of them, it’s better not even to write about them, they may sue you!
        Acting may make you famous, but they are just regular people, acting made them on our eyes special, not so.

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      2. I remember when the first time I went to NYC and saw the model Iman and David Bowie walking down the street like total regular folks, I about died. But my friend, who lived there at the time, nudged me and said “keep walking and don’t act so starstruck. They’ll know you’re a tourist.” LOL! So I tried to act cool but it was tough. But I get what you’re saying about not slobbering all over them, particularly when they’re in their own neighborhood/environment. Different than the red carpet, where I imagine that is a requirement. 🙂

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  7. …like la boheme (has to be puccini,) but ending after act 2. As, after all, it can. Terribly lovely flick of the kind that nowaday has a nearly impossible time of it (like pane e tupilani and the like). We do need a healthy bit of so-called socialism, I think, before everything ends like a real Brave New World plot. (just in case, I think you might like a movie that heads in a similar way there, in case you haven’t seen it- plus you can see it in the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10VvEwcjSaA Chinese Take-away.)

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    1. Pane e Tulipani is in my top 5 favorite films of all time. I was contemplating doing a post on it, in fact, making something with fava beans and hard boiled eggs. 😁 Thank you for your recommendation as well!

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      1. …any movie recomendation you might give would be appreciated here, seeing as, regarding that sort of thing I think we go in a similar way with simliar tastes
        .

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      2. Oh I have many films i can recommend. Though I would imagine you probably have seen most, if not all of them. Immortal Beloved. Gosford Park. Summertime. The Hunger. Enchanted April. The Mirror Has Two Faces(speaking of Puccini). A Walk in the Clouds. Francis Ford Coppola ‘s Dracula. Like Water For Chocolate. Secretary. Stigmata. Blade Runner. Possession. The Matchmaker. The Red Violin. Frequency. Cousins. Delta of Venus. 😁

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      3. elswhere will answer one at a time when viewed… but those already seen: The Hunger a lovely -kitch-horny, those steaming films from then that haven’t been duplicated like that, and… the Kathleen Tuner/Hurt flick the title of which that I can’t recall… Body Heat, and such. Like Watrer for Chocolate, which has a… personal thing attached to it (for another time. sigh.) Dracula wasn’t my cup of blood though Lennox voice and production made for a seductive, great pop tune thick and romantic-dripping, Secretary was a blast and well acted, quite, Blade runner… ahh. Barcelona (there was a theatre that showed ever day when I was there, just after the olympics….

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      4. The Hunger is a marvelous film, and very horny indeed. I’m not into women, but even I was aroused watching Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in that love scene. And of course David Bowie was wonderful. I love Dracula but then I love over-the-top Goth so that was definitely my cup of blood. 🙂 I can only imagine how wonderful Barcelona was after the Olympics…….how lovely for you! Another wonderful film that is in my top 10 is Dangerous Beauty, which I blogged about awhile back. It’s set in 1500s Venice and it is lush and gorgeous and has some wonderful actors and dialogue.

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      5. …Barca… you would have been in high school I suppose, and I had a ton of hair on my head, still. I’ll start the rec. list this weekend from the top (Beloved and-or Gosford)…I never did go to that theatre with the nightly Blade Runner showings, always thinking I’d be back soon, instead….

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  9. Too funny, I only 2 minutes ago finished watching Moonstruck for the umpteenth time! LOVE me some egg in the hole, although I do not eat it with peppers of any kind. I toast the piece of bread I cut out in the same pan where I am cooking the egg/toast and use it to dip into the center of my runny egg! #yum

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