Mary Yolanda Trigiani

Subtitle: One Hundred Years of Family Recipes from Bari to Big Stone Gap

Trigiani is well-known for her fiction, frequently drawing from her family history to draw her characters and launch her plots.

This book is a combination of memoir and cookbook, in which she relates many family stories from how her grandparents met, to Easters spent on her grandfather’s farm, to raucous family gatherings, to her parents’ words of wisdom, and that special time of year when she and her siblings and cousins would be sent out into the fields to pick the dandelion greens for a special dish. (Note: My own “adopted” Sicilian grandmother made delicious “dandelion patties” each spring, making sure the greens were harvested before her sons came to treat the yard with weed killer. I really miss that dish!)

I like how there are asides by her sisters sprinkled throughout, adding bits of advice or alternate ingredients for a particular dish.

This is a delicious treat. It's a fun read and has some great recipes, some of which are simple for even a beginning cook, and others of which are quite complicated and best done with an assembly line of helpers. One thing is clear, though, the main ingredient in any good family kitchen is love.… (altro)