Something Italian

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>For what is food but the greatest expression of joy and hurt in the world</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> Annette Januzzi Wick writes in this blending of history memoir and cooking. In response readers are taken to the cherished place where her Italian ancestors and immigrant grandparents meet her mother's recipe binders written by hand-the family table.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Three decades following Italy's 1861 reunification and subsequent fallout members of four Italian families two in Abruzzo and the others in Calabria cross the Atlantic Ocean. In America they work the coal mines railroads and steel mills. They establish shoe stores and bakeries churches and social clubs. Along the way they face poverty and tragedies Mafia temptations and labor recruiters knowing that forging ahead is their means to survive. In Lorain Ohio these dynamisms finally collide.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> What does food signify on their journey? What does it mean to the father left behind in Calabria who writes to his shoemaker son in the States if not for you your mother and I would be beggars? To the first-generation Italian American mother who holds tight to tradition annotating recipes </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>di dolci </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>with commentary like my mother's recipe use this one? And to her daughter the author as she touches down on Italian soil to consume abundant rustic meals prepared with love by newly discovered cousins? </span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>When ancestors disappear die or declare themselves missing food is the impetus for subsequent generations to gather at the family table and become something Italian again.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> </span></p><p></p><p></p>