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.

"Dazzles like the harbor of Portofino." —Adriana Trigiani Laura Schenone's original goal was simple enough: to find her great-grandmother's recipe for ravioli. But things get more complicated as she reunites with relatives and digs up buried family stories. Taking readers from New Jersey's industrial wastelands and fast-paced suburbs to the coast of Liguria—homeland of her ancestors and of ravioli—The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken is a story of the comedies and foibles of family life, of love and loss, of old homes and new, and of the mysteries of pasta, rolled on a pin into a perfect circle of gossamer dough.

An essential tool for assisting leisure readers interested in topics surrounding food, this unique book contains annotations and read-alikes for hundreds of nonfiction titles about the joys of comestibles and cooking. Food Lit: A Reader's Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction provides a much-needed resource for librarians assisting adult readers interested in the topic of food—a group that is continuing to grow rapidly. Containing annotations of hundreds of nonfiction titles about food that are arranged into genre and subject interest categories for easy reference, the book addresses a diversity of reading experiences by covering everything from foodie memoirs and histories of food to extreme cuisine and food exposés. Author Melissa Stoeger has organized and described hundreds of nonfiction titles centered on the themes of food and eating, including life stories, history, science, and investigative nonfiction. The work emphasizes titles published in the past decade without overlooking significant benchmark and classic titles. It also provides lists of suggested read-alikes for those titles, and includes several helpful appendices of fiction titles featuring food, food magazines, and food blogs.

Celebrate Your Family Recipes and Heritage From Great-grandma's apple pie to Mom's secret-recipe stuffing, food is an important ingredient in every family's history. This three-part keepsake recipe journal will help you celebrate your family recipes and record the precious memories those recipes hold for you--whether they're hilarious anecdotes about a disastrous dish or tender reflections about time spent cooking with a loved one. The foods we eat tell us so much about who we are, where we live and the era we live in. The same is true for the foods our ancestors ate. This book will show you how to uncover historical recipes and food traditions, offering insight into your ancestors' everyday lives and clues to your genealogy. Inside you'll find: • Methods for gathering family recipes • Interview questions to help loved ones record their food memories • Places to search for historical recipes • An explanation of how immigrants influenced the American diet • A look at how technology changed the way people eat • A glossary of historical cooking terms • Modern equivalents to historical units of measure • Actual recipes from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks

Filled with classic recipes and inspirational stories, this stunningly illustrated book celebrates the power of food throughout American history and in women's lives.

Home cooking is a multibillion-dollar industry that includes cookbooks, kitchen gadgets, high-end appliances, specialty ingredients, and more. Cooking-themed programming flourishes on television, inspiring a wide array of celebrity chef–branded goods even as self-described “foodies” seek authenticity by pickling, preserving, and canning foods in their own home kitchens. Despite this, claims that “no one has time to cook anymore” are common, lamenting the slow extinction of traditional American home cooking in the twenty-first century. In Look Who's Cooking: The Rhetoric of American Home Cooking Traditions in the Twenty-First Century, author Jennifer Rachel Dutch explores the death-of-home-cooking narrative, revealing how modern changes transformed cooking at home from an odious chore into a concept imbued with deep meanings associated with home, family, and community. Drawing on a wide array of texts—cookbooks, advertising, YouTube videos, and more—Dutch analyzes the many manifestations of traditional cooking in America today. She argues that what is missing from the discourse around home cooking is an understanding of skills and recipes as a form of folklore. Dutch’s research reveals that home cooking is a powerful vessel that Americans fill with meaning because it represents both the continuity of the past and adaptability to the present. Home cooking is about much more than what is for dinner; it’s about forging a connection to the past, displaying the self in the present, and leaving a lasting legacy for the future.

Food is such a friendly topic that it’s often thought of as a “hook” for engaging visitors – a familiar way into other topics, or a sensory element to round out a living history interpretation. But it’s more than just a hook – it’s a topic all its own, with its own history and its own uncertain future, deserving of a central place in historic interpretation. With audiences more interested in food than ever before, and new research in food studies bringing interdisciplinary approaches to this complicated but compelling subject, museums and historic sites have an opportunity to draw new audiences and infuse new meaning into their food presentations. You’ll find: A comprehensive, thematic framework of key concepts that will help you contextualize food history interpretations; A concise, evaluative review of the historiography of food interpretation; Case studies featuring the expression of these themes in the real world of museum interpretation; and Best practices for interpreting food. Interpreting Food offers a framework for understanding the big ideas in food history, suggesting best practices for linking objects, exhibits and demonstrations with the larger story of change in food production and consumption over the past two centuries – a story in which your visitors can see themselves, and explore their own relationships to food. This book can help you develop food interpretation with depth and significance, making relevant connections to contemporary issues and visitor interests.

This edited collection applies kinship as an analytical concept to better understand the affective economies, discursive practices, and aesthetic dimensions through which cultural narratives of belonging establish a sense of intimacy and affiliation. In North American and European ethnic literatures, kinship has several social functions: negotiating diasporic belonging in and outside of the perimeters of bloodlines and genealogy; positioning queer-feminist interventions to counter ethno-nationalist narratives of belonging; challenging liberal sentimentalist narratives, such as those grafted onto the bodies of transnational adoptees; re-formulating cultural heterogeneity through interracial and interethnic kinship constellations outside either post-racial assumptions about colorblindness or celebrations of racial and ethnic pluralism. In all of these cases, kinship features as a common theme through which contemporary authors attend to challenges of conscribing individuals into inclusive, counter-hegemonic cultural narratives of belonging.

Successfully navigate the rich world of travel narratives and identify fiction and nonfiction read-alikes with this detailed and expertly constructed guide. Just as savvy travelers make use of guidebooks to help navigate the hundreds of countries around the globe, smart librarians need a guidebook that makes sense of the world of travel narratives. Going Places: A Reader's Guide to Travel Narratives meets that demand, helping librarians assist patrons in finding the nonfiction books that most interest them. It will also serve to help users better understand the genre and their own reading interests. The book examines the subgenres of the travel narrative genre in its seven chapters, categorizing and describing approximately 600 titles according to genres and broad reading interests, and identifying hundreds of other fiction and nonfiction titles as read-alikes and related reads by shared key topics. The author has also identified award-winning titles and spotlighted further resources on travel lit, making this work an ideal guide for readers' advisors as well a book general readers will enjoy browsing.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, author of the Margaret Mead Awardwinning Dancing Skeletons, has written a compelling and original introductory text. Cultural Anthropology & Human Experience is suitable for use in Cultural and Social Anthropology courses, and its twelve chapters easily fit into quarter or semester terms, while leaving room for additional readings, discussions, or other projects. All the standard topics are covered, but with less emphasis on method and theory and more coverage of a variety of industrial and postindustrial societies. Auxiliary materialsbells and whistleshave been kept to a minimum to reduce distractions and maintain a reasonable price to students. The author has chosen all the photographs with great care to illustrate or amplify important points. The Instructors Manual includes summaries of each chapter, student exercises, and a test bank. Dettwylers upbeat tone inspires students to: develop the ability to think logically, objectively, and critically about different cultural beliefs, practices, and social structures; understand that humans are primates with culture, with a complex overlay of environmental and cultural influences; appreciate how powerful cultural beliefs and practices can be in shaping human perceptions of the world; realize that culture is not the same thing as social constructions of race, ethnic identity, or place of geographic origin; understand why/how cultural practices make sense within the cultures that practice them; articulate how an anthropological perspective helps discern everyday situations and interactions at the local, national, and international levels; understand that anthropology is not just an academic disciplineit is a way of looking at and understanding the world; appreciate the ways cultural beliefs and practices, social structures, and human lifestyles contribute to a meaningful life.