Laura Schenone - The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family

In Schenones capable hands, her searchat times, she admits, obsessionwith a ravioli [recipe] becomes a vehicle for taking on some of lifes big themes: the immigrant experience, contemporary American values, as well as love, friendship, regret and reconciliation. In the space of a few pages, we learn about the regional differences in the herbs used for ripeno (ravioli filling), we are treated to a reverie on intimacy in middle age and were offered a meditation on loving and forgetting. Yes, this book is about pasta, but, Schenone reminds us, food is life. The conclusions that Schenone guides us to are unsentimental and unexpected. She has produced a book about food if you understand food to mean all that nourishes us. This is [a] feast for the mind and the heart, as well as the palate.

Peg Tyre, Newsweek

Schenonea powerful and ever-so-literate storyteller, asks the question, Can a recipe change your life? and answers in the affirmative. The thread by which this wonderful story hangs is the quest to get the ancestral ravioli just right. Along the way, much else enters in: family feuds, gnocchi, pesto, the search for smoked chestnut flour in New Jersey, recipes timed by saying two Our Fathers. A handed-down ravioli pin turns out to be a key part of the secret.

Sylvia Carter, Newsday , selected as one of the eight best cookbooks of 2007

Illuminating, personal, and even suspenseful.

New Jersey Monthly

E delizioso.

Good Housekeeping , December 2007 Book Pick

Always inviting, Schenones prose is as light as the dough she keeps trying to perfect. And the appended recipes will help satisfy appetites stimulated by her toothsome narrative.

Barnes & Noble Review: Spotlight

Laura Schenone has written an elegant masterpiece about her complex and fascinating Italian heritage. This personal journey, woven together with delicious recipes framed by her family history, dazzles like the harbor of Portofino. This is a treat for anyone who is Italian American, and if youre not, when you finish this book youll wish you were.

Adriana Trigiani, New York Times best-selling author of the Big Stone Gap series and Lucia, Lucia

In this marvelous family memoir, which considers the immigrant experience from the vantage of food, Schenone, longing for an inner life where advertising cannot reach, sets off on an idealistic quest to reclaim the ravioli recipe that her Genovese great-grandmother brought with her at the turn of the last century to New Jersey. Her fierce honesty and relentless questioning (at what point is this an egotistical labor?), skillful handling and dismantling of family myth, refusal to romanticize Italy and historians knack for sketching the big picture in a few broad strokes allows this poignant book to transcend the specificity of its subject matter.

Publishers Weekly , starred review

So compelling a story as Schenone relates can resolve itself only as the now-famished reader marches into the kitchen to reproduce these perfect pasta pockets to share with whatever family presents itself.

Mark Knoblauch, Booklist

What unfolds in the pages of this wonderful book is a search for meaningfor family and home and a sense of belonging; it is a search for authentic values in a modern world. I am most certainly not the only reader who wants to follow in her footsteps and take the same tripif Laura Schenone ever starts leading culinary tours to Italy, I will be the first to sign up. Schenone has a knack for weaving place and people and food together in a way that is simply gorgeous.

Tara Weaver, Tea & Cookies (teaandcookies.blogspot.com)

By the last page I was ready to buy a plane ticket to Italy. I had become completely obsessed with tasting the perfect ravioli.

Jen Murphy, Food & Wine

Who knew that pasta could be so transporting? Read this with a big hunger, for panoramic story and glorious food both; finish it satisfied in every way.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love Is Gone

I thoroughly understood and enjoyed the authors obsession with tracking down the details of her family history. Her words took me to places she visited, and made me want to go there myself. All in all, a delightful and engaging book.

Linda Wisniewski, Story Circle Book Reviews

In The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family , Laura Schenone writes that a ravioli is like an envelope with a message. So too is her unusual book, the message being that authentic recipes are as difficult to come by as happy families. Mouth-watering passages describe Schenones culinary adventures through Liguria in search of her great-grandmothers ravioli. Schenones truthful portraits of celebratory meals are rife with subtext and are a welcome deviation from the usual fluffy food memoir.

Mara Zapeda, Philadelphia Weekly

A triumph of culinary sleuthing that takes award-winning Laura Schenone deep into the interior of her ancestral Liguria in a quest for a grandmothers secret, but that takes her, unexpectedly, deep into the mysteries of the human heart.

Louise DeSalvo, author of Crazy in the Kitchen

Laura Schenone stirs things up with a skillful hand. The combination of family, food, secrets, revelations, ghosts, and a search for what is good in life has never been so brilliantly and poignantly mixed.

Regina Barreca, author of Dont Tell Mama!: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing

A lively food history not to be missed.

Midwest Book Review

This hunger-inducing memoir follows the search for an authentic family recipe as it delivers delicious imagery and satisfying armchair travel.

Hallmark Magazine

Laura Schenones search for food and family in her book The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken is a journey Im very glad I took.

Joe Mantegna, actor

With recipes and exquisite illustrations, the book is a celebration of family, memory and the redemptive power of food.

Edible Jersey

Who knew that the hunt for decent ravioli could unearth so much?Buy it for a family history, keep it for the pasta tips.

JoyHog.com

[A] mesmerizing narrative that immerses one in a heady world of slow-stewing meat and hand-rolled pasta. Part memoir, part cooking instruction, the book shows that some of the more rewarding aspects of life require time and patience.

Diana Schwaeble, Hudson Current

When New Jersey food writer and mother of two Laura Schenone decides to track down her familys ravioli recipe, shes really searching for home, connection, and a cooking and eating experience that feels both sacred and real. Schenone skips the flowery nostalgia and plunges into the authentic dilemmas of food and family. The result is sweet and savory, tender and true.

Body and Soul