The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken by Laura Schenone

With Thanksgiving next week, the holiday wish-list may be starting. If you are a lover of food, a lover of old recipes, a lover of the connections food makes with family and friends, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: a Search for Food and Family by Laura Schenone is a treasure waiting for you. Laura Schenone embarks on a journey to discover the authentic recipe of her great-grandmother's ravioli recipe. For generations, the family has added cream cheese. Cream cheese? Is it possible? Is that Italian? What was it in the old country?

Schenone writes,

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"A little square of ravioli is like a secret. You look at the outside and see the neatly crimped dough, puffed up in the center with a lovely pillow of something mysterious inside. It is an envelope with a message. Before you bite into it, all is unknown. And much still is possible."
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That lyrical sentence of longing is akin to opening the pages of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. The beauty of the book is that long after the the ravioli is consumed and the book is read, the feast stays with you. And as you will doubtless have another meal of ravioli, you will also reread this book.
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Schenone's journey to discover the truth of her family's recipe brings her to family members who have been distanced from her. She travels to Italy more than once and learns about making ravioli in the way Italians have made it for hundreds of year. (Only to be disconcerted when she finds that many Italians admire and prefer using a pasta machine rather than rolling out the dough on a board with a rolling pin!) In Italy, she is warmly welcomed into the homes and restaurants of the guardians of old Italian tradition. Strangers who generously pass their knowledge to her.
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The twists and turns of Schenone's quest for her family's definitive recipe is a search for self as well as a search for new understanding of her family. She is sometimes Don Quixote tilting at windmills - looking for her inner being - trying to figure out the contentious nature of her own family as she nourishes the family she created. Schenone quietly muses why she is possessed to find the source of a ravioli recipe when the life she has made for herself is its own source of joy.
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Schenone's pilgrimage takes her to mountains of chestnut trees that provided nourishment for hundreds of years, through meals of gnocchi and pesto. And as she tasted and learned, she questioned. Was this what her great grandparents ate? Was this the vista they saw? In her mind, she time-travelled to her grandparents time. Searching for the connections to her. To her core. To her sensibilities. But of course, sensibilities have greatly changed since her great-grandparents left Italy. A point she brings up often in the book. There is the nitty-gritty realism of life today speckled with the lure of tradition, of the fairy dust from the past.
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Schenone's meeting with Giovanni Rebora who is well known for his knowledge and work in Italian food history brings insight and passion.
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"We modern people make so much time to do so many stupid things," booms Rebora. "People don't have time to read a book. They don't have time to cook. I don't understand how they don't have thirty minutes a day to care about what they eat." And Rebora later surprises with,
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"We don't worry so much about saving traditions. Traditions change all the time. We want to save the culture of food here."

You will read the book actively. With smiles, with nods, a few shakes of the head and in my case with some touches of envy. Why did I not embark on such a journey? And the answer is - of course, I have. With my blog, with my research, with my mother, with my cooking. Listening to the stories of my mother sitting in my grandmother's lap as Grandma Gresio shaped the dough.
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"Can you feel when it is right - do you feel that?" asked Grandma Gresio.
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Sadly my mother told me, "I never could."
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It was a skill that I would not learn from my family. I took for granted the meals served by my aunts and grandmother. I thought they would always be there. You can understand why I sometimes relentless pester my mother. Whose clarity of recollection is always a pleasure.

My parents married at 19. For the first few months they lived in the basement of my grandmother's home. My father worked full time and was in college - a feat that had never been done in his own family. He came home tired one day with a can of Chef-boy-ar-dee ravioli. My grandmother walked into the kitchen, grew wide-eyed, grew taller and threw out the makeshift food.
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"I will show you real ravioli," exclaimed this tiny but quite formidable woman.
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She gathered flour and eggs, went down to her board and quickly made some cheese ravioli (of course the ingredients were always at hand), boiled it up and served it with a little butter and cheese.
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My father never ate ravioli from a can again.

The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken ends with almost 30 pages of ravioli recipes which do not disappoint.
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For a sneak peak of what this book has to offer, watch Ms. Schenone make ravioli here. Do seek out the book. It nourishes both body and soul. It's a trip many of us are taking in our kitchens every day.