The Love of Cooking

I can still remember the day, when as a little girl I decided that what my Italian mother was doing in the kitchen was both magical and oh so important, but most of all fun! Like a magician, I’d see her mixing flower and water and eggs, sprinkle something into the dough, kneed the thick, tasteless lump of goo, set it aside, covered, to rise, into the oven, and an hour later a loaf of bread would miraculously appear! The whole house was filled with the most inviting aroma—the scents of love, family, security, and belonging. I knew way back then that my life would, in one way or another, be centered on what I saw my mother doing day in and day out in our kitchen in a modest home, in a working-class neighborhood, on Romayne Avenue, in Racine, Wisconsin, where I grew up just before the onset of and during the terrible Great Depression.