The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family

James Beard Award-winning author Laura Schenone undertakes a quest to retrieve her great grandmother's ravioli recipe, reuniting with relatives as she goes. In lyrical prose and delicious recipes, Schenone takes the reader on an unforgettable journey from the grit of New Jersey's industrial wastelands and the fast-paced disposable culture of its suburbs to the dramatically beautiful coast of Liguria--the family's homeland--with its pesto, smoked chestnuts, torte, and, most beloved of all, ravioli, the food of celebration and happiness. Schenone discovers the persistent importance of place, while offering a perceptive voice on immigration and ethnicity in its twilight. Along the way, she gives us the comedies and foibles of family life, a story of love and loss, a deeper understanding of the bonds between parents and children, and the mysteries of pasta, rolled into a perfect circle of gossamer dough.

"Hand-rolled ravioli are ephemeral things, taking ages to prepare only to be devoured in minutes. And yet for Schenone (the James Beard Award — winning A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove) their taste encapsulates an entire domestic history and the promise of happiness, however fleeting. In this marvelous family memoir, which considers the immigrant experience from the vantage of food, Schenone, longing for 'an inner life where advertising cannot reach,' sets off on an idealistic quest to reclaim the ravioli recipe that her Genovese great-grandmother brought with her at the turn of the last century to New Jersey, where the dish abruptly changed, breaking with tradition. In search of enlightenment, Schenone charms her way into the kitchens of ravioli-making elders in Liguria (whose recipes she shares in this book with admirable precision), then spends years trying to teach her hands the difficult art of stretching dough — an endeavor that tests her most cherished ideas of home and family and self. Her fierce honesty and relentless questioning ('at what point is this an egotistical labor?'), skillful handling and dismantling of family myth, refusal to romanticize Italy and historian's knack for sketching the big picture in a few broad strokes allows this poignant book to transcend the specificity of its subject matter." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Can a recipe change your life? A quest for an authentic dish reveals a mythic love story and age-old culinary secrets.

Can a recipe change your life? A quest for an authentic dish reveals a mythic love story and age-old culinary secrets.

A NewsdayBest Cookbook of 2007: can a recipe change your life? A quest for an authentic dish reveals a mythic love story and age-old culinary secrets.

James Beard Award-winning author Schenone undertakes a quest to retrieve her great-grandmothers ravioli recipe, reuniting with relatives as she goes. In lyrical prose and delicious recipes, Schenone takes the reader on an unforgettable journey. 90 illustrations.

Laura Schenone is the author of the James Beard Award-winning book A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. She writes for Saveur, New Jersey Monthly, and other magazines. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey