This is Amused Bouche, SAVEUR’s food questionnaire that explores the culinary curiosities of some of our favorite people. This interview series dives deep into their food routines, including dinner party strategies, cherished cookbooks, and the memorable bites they’d hop on a flight for.
Lisa Ann Walter’s life and art are intertwined like spaghetti twirled around a fork. Her Abbott Elementary character, Melissa Schemmenti, hosts incredible Italian American feasts, battles her sister over Nana’s sacred gnocchi recipe, and goes after office fridge thieves. And off-screen, her castmates’ first impression of her began with her secret sauce. “I had everyone over for dinner, and they fell in love with my baked ziti and meatballs, so I started making stuff and bringing it to set, and still do,” she shared during our chat earlier this month. She thinks food-centric Melissa moments—like an iconic scene where she screams, “Oh Jesus, my branzino! Everybody out of the way, out of the way!”—may be inspired by Walter’s real-life culinary adventures, but she doesn’t take full credit. “I don’t know which came first: the chicken or the chicken Parmesan!”
Walter also famously brought pizza gaina, aka Italian Easter meat pie, to Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and even though the holiday has passed, she still thinks it’s a worthwhile undertaking. She describes the dish as “all the sausages and the meats like soppressata, Genoa salami, and hard salami cut up in chunks with cheeses in a ricotta-egg base.” The whole thing is then encased in a dough accented with anisette: it’s “peppery, almost spicy, and there’s a little bit of licorice that you can’t really taste but it’s in there.”
Hungry yet? Just wait until you read the rest of Walter’s viscerally evocative food memories below.
If you could only eat one thing 24/7/365, what would it be?
It can’t be something that I eat every day and I know will sustain me like egg whites because I’ll kill myself. But brisket braised with caramelized vegetables? I think I could do that. It could be dinner, soup, or straight-up barbecue, or I could change the spices and turn it into a tagine or curry. I could make it in all different kinds of ways and keep myself interested.
What’s the first thing you learned how to cook?
A lemon meringue pie from scratch when I was 11 because my grandfather loved it. It was from my mother’s copy of the Joy of Cooking. I was so terrified to make the meringue because the recipe scares you: if your thing’s not clean, if it’s the wrong temperature, if you don’t do this or that, your egg whites won’t whip. The truth is that if you just beat the crap out of it, it’s going to form peaks. You have to really mess it up for it to not. My first one actually worked out! But it was not yellow. The custard was very pale because it only had lemon zest and juice. It was off-white, no food coloring, so not that pretty…but god, was it good!
How about your latest kitchen adventure?
Sometimes I see viral things and decide to give them a shot. The rotisserie chicken in a bag with ginger-scallion rice did not turn out good. It was a sloppy mess. And sometimes mess is good, but this mess was not good.
What’s your treat-yourself splurge?
I would never go to the store specifically for this because it feels so wrong, but Combos! The pretzels with cheese inside. The cracker is good, too. I might get one bag every five years, but that’s the treat that I picture in my mind. I also really love Korean cream cheese bread with garlic and corn.
And okay, I got another one: chocolate cake, and I don’t mean dark chocolate or chocolate hazelnut. Don’t put a berry next to it. I don’t want to see any kind of fruit. I want chocolate cake like in Matilda! It could be devil’s food, it could be milk—I just want to taste chocolate. And you could put a little caramel in between if you insist. That wins for me over anything. My daughter makes a chocolate cake so great that it makes me want to slap myself.
What’s your most cherished cookbook, and what do you love to make from it?
A friend gave me The Encyclopedia of Italian Cooking before you could go on the internet and learn anything. First of all, it’s beautiful. There are dishes from various regions in Italy, like a whole bunch of bean soups and how to make different shapes of pasta.
There’s stuff that I’m not going to use their recipe for, like bolognese. But I make their maccheroni alla pesarese all the time. I brought it to Jimmy Kimmel before. It is basically turkey breast, prosciutto, onion, and mushrooms diced teeny tiny and sautéed with butter and olive oil, then cooked with white wine and cream and stuffed into occhi di lupo, a type of pasta that’s somewhere between rigatoni and manicotti. After you stuff the pasta, you layer it like a lasagna with gruyère and more cream and top with dots of butter. It’s incredible and people love it.
Was there a cooking disaster that made you swear off a dish forever?
My track record is great, but in the past I have gone to make a whole pot of sauce, but after I put the tomatoes in and things started heating up, I smelled soap because my ex didn’t rinse the pan all the way. Straight to jail! We are divorced. He’s a great guy. We broke up for other reasons, but you had to hear the scream I let out. “We have people coming! I can’t serve soap!”
Which nostalgic foods from childhood bring you the most comfort?
My mother was Sicilian and brought up in New York, and she picked up recipes from different people. One of our neighbors taught her to make ribs by putting them in the oven covered in foil, then taking it off, letting them cook more, and finally adding sauce. That’s how I’ve always done it, and I’ll never do it any other way. We used Open Pit Barbecue Sauce, and that tastes like home to me.
When you’re playing dinner party DJ, what’s spinning?
I don’t. Maybe I should! It’s all about the conversation for me.
What is your biggest entertaining flex to impress guests?
People know they’re gonna get great food and a lot of it. My family used to call it “whopping out” when you got so full you had to lay down on the floor and open your pants.
I only almost ran out of food one time ever while hosting in my life, and it was when I invited Gronk to Easter. We were doing a movie together, and he couldn’t get home to his family, so I invited him over for dinner. He called me and asked if he could bring some friends, and they showed up, and they were all giant football players. I had an entire leg of lamb, an entire half a ham, and two pans of baked ziti, and they demolished everything except for a little ham. Gronk took a whole pan and put it in front of himself and said, “I don’t know what y’all are eating!” He was also twerking in the kitchen.
Tell me about a meal so good you would hop on a flight to relive it.
It was in Sicily at the Grand Hotel Timeo. I was told I had to try their granita, which I had never had before. The options were almond, lemon, and coffee, and coffee ice cream was my favorite as a kid, so I got that. The waitress said that I had to try it with brioche, and I said no. Carbs in the morning can make me dizzy and fuzzy, and I had a big day planned. She didn’t let me refuse. The coffee granita is blended with cream and served in a cup, and you dip the brioche in. I took one bite, and my eyes rolled back in my head. It was the best thing I have ever put in my mouth.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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