Miscellaneous

The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken

Once, not drawn out ago, I dated a man who traced his lineage back to Italy. He was elevated, dark, and handsome. We drank red wine under shooting luminary showers; he cooked romantic dinners for me; and one day he told me about how his household gathers together each Christmas, to make ravioli. It wasn't the huge, warm Italian family of cliché—it sounded as if they had their spotless share of struggles and conflicts in act, perhaps even more than most, but they all gathered at the end of each year and made ravioli.

I loved that.

This relation wasn’t destined to last—our timing and necessarily were disastrously out of kilter. Once I realized this we had an harmonious parting, still sending the occasional email hello even now. The only being that truly saddens me about this story is that by fracture up in November I gave up any chance of being included in the lasting a year Christmas ravioli making sitting.

I thought of this as I read Laura Schenone’s volume The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. Schenone is descended from Italians, analogous my friend, but her family no longer gathers around the tablet at Christmas to make ravioli. They used to, but the parents and children tree had splintered and her branch not to be found the tradition along the way. It is this quest—a search for her parents and children’s authentic ravioli recipe—that she chronicles in her volume.

But a search for authenticity is a funny creature, at least where a recipe is concerned. Schenone reunites with remote family members as she tries to untwist the knots of family and immigration and get to the fountain-head well, but time and distance change things....

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