In cookbook, a recipe for Italian Market feud

For nearly a decade, Celeste Morello hawked her slim paperback,

The Philadelphia Italian Market Cookbook: The Tastes of South 9th Street

, through a profit-sharing deal with a Ninth Street butcher, periodic signings beneath a banner on the street, and bookstores across the city. Copies sold to date: 25,000.

But beginning in July, says Morello, the butcher suddenly stopped carrying the book, some market merchants seemed to shun her, and her taste of South Ninth Street turned increasingly bitter.

Mamma mia! What's going on here?

In the insular, cheek-by-jowl world of the market, where disagreements can turn operatic and rumors morph with each retelling from stall to stall, the question of what motivates this dispute is more easily asked than answered.

Morello maintains it is the fallout of a political feud between supporters of City Councilman Frank DiCicco, including herself, and backers of Vernon Anastasio, who tried to unseat DiCicco in last year's Democratic primary, and whose brother Anthony runs a coffeehouse and chocolate shop amid the spice and spectacle of the historic market. Anthony is also an officer in one of the market's business-owner associations.

The Anastasios say that there is no political feud with DiCicco, and that they have had nothing to do with the rise or fall of the book.

"There is no controversy. You are responding to a fabricated story," Anthony Anastasio said.

"One colossal misunderstanding," said Vern Anastasio, who as a lawyer represented his brother in a recent exchange of letters with Morello's lawyer, each side accusing the other of defamation.

An Aug. 4 letter from Morello's lawyer, H. Adam Shapiro, threatened legal action for alleged interference in Morello's business. On Aug. 15, Anthony Anastasio countered with a "civil action/defamation," docket No. 001788, filed in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.

Last week, Morello was served with a complaint signed by Vern Anastasio alleging that statements she had made amounted to "intentional infliction of emotional distress" on his brother.

"If there is anything going on in the Italian Market regarding her book, it has zero to do with politics," Vern Anastasio said. "As far as Anthony is concerned, he never told anyone not to carry her book."

Speaking for DiCicco, his legislative aide Brian Abernathy said he knew of the cookbook imbroglio but was not familiar enough to comment in detail. "Certainly, Celeste is a friend" of DiCicco's, he added, "and Anthony and Vernon are not."

Relations have been strained since about 2004, said Abernathy, after Vern Anastasio questioned the mental stability of DiCicco and DiCicco responded with a defamation lawsuit.

Morello, who holds degrees in history and criminology, also has written three books about organized crime in Southeastern Pennsylvania. A native of Norristown, she has lived near the Italian Market for 26 years, did documentary research for some of its historical markers, and runs tours of its shops. She is a bookish, 50ish woman capable of elbows-out infighting to protect her turf; a feud involving a restraining order against a rival tour operator seven years ago is among the market's most enduring modern legends.

This time, Morello said, she began to feel ostracized after Charlie Cannuli Jr., whose grandfather founded Cannuli House of Pork, a Ninth Street landmark, stopped selling her book despite a long-standing arrangement in which Cannuli kept about $8 of the $20 reduced price and Morello got the rest. He averaged 100 sales a month, she said.

She maintains Cannuli came under pressure from Anthony Anastasio and others to stop selling the book.

Cannuli, whose back-of-the shop office is surrounded by trussed pigs on meat hooks, said, "If she wasn't out there hawking it [through signings], there were no sales." Except for those times, he said, wiping his hands on a long white apron, "we were down to one or two a month."

The decision to stop selling the book at his adjacent poultry shop, he said, was simply because "it ran its course."

As for the suggestion that he walked away from $800 a month in revenue, Cannuli said: "I don't throw $800 out the window, especially on something that doesn't go bad. . . . My electricity bill is $4,400 a month. . . . Nobody's going to influence me not to make money. This has nothing to do with her quarrels with other people."

In the end, he said, it just became too much of a hassle to interrupt substantial meat sales on a busy Saturday to run random book sales through the credit-card machine.

"Would you go to a meat store to buy a book? Does it look like I need to sell cookbooks?" asked Cannuli, gesturing toward a line of customers.

He said he had suggested to Morello that she sell the book herself and keep all the profit. But without a store affiliation, she said in a subsequent interview, she cannot legally engage in sidewalk sales.

"I told her, 'Celeste, look. Jackie Collins is a great writer, too,' " said Cannuli, " 'but after a while you've got to take her books off the shelf.' "

Morello's book documents the creation of the market for Italian American foods around the turn of the 20th century. It includes historical photographs and has an intimate feel, with recipes for Kippee Palumbo's chicken rosemary, Mary Lucchesi's tuna balls, and John Righi's liver casalinga, among many other dishes.

It is a best-selling local-author offering at the Cookbook Stall in the Reading Terminal Market - "particularly popular with out-of-towners" - proprietor Jill Ross said. Fans include Angie Montes, a Washington lobbyist for the hospice industry who bought 50 books to give as gifts for guests at her wedding in Philadelphia this December. She and her fiance, from Boston, courted here and met Morello at one of her signings in the Italian Market.

It's nice to know that she has some fans, Morello said. But for now, her Italian Market cookbook is not on sale at its usual place in the Italian Market. And, she said, "that hurts."