Wax poetic if you must about the good old days, but some of great-grandmama's recipes should probably not be revived - even for Mother's Day, says writer and food historian Laura Schenone.
Perhaps best known for her James Beard award-winning book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove (W.W. Norton & Co.), Schenone traveled to Genoa in search of her grandmother's - and ultimately her own - culinary roots and writes about the journey in her memoir, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken (W.W. Norton).
Now Schenone, 45, and painter/writer/pastry chef Nancy Gail Ring, 51, are launching Jellypress.com, a Web site devoted to lost recipes - with a special feature called the Not-to-Be-Forgotten recipe club.
The site explores the ancestral pantries all women share, looking for precise recipes as well as broader life lessons.
"We explore the past because it is a foreign culture we can learn from," Schenone says. "But it is likely the recipes we find will have to be tailored for today's tastes."
And frankly, some of their findings fall into a Better-to-Be-Forgotten category. Schenone has come across recipes for Feet and Ears (of pigs, that is) and Cod's Head, for example. She does not recommend either.
She and Ring met and became pals when Ring, then a food columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, reviewed Schenone's first book. In addition to both being food historians and home cooks, they discovered they lived in neighboring towns (Montclair and West Orange).
They also share an abiding appreciation for the power of food in family life - past and present. In Schenone's kitchen recently, the women spoke about food and how it roots us, as they casually sliced and sauteed their way through three recipes.
On one hand, when you get right down to it, we're mothers and we do have to decide what to make for dinner most, if not every, night, Schenone says. "And in every generation, that has meant learning anew the roots of our sustenance and our role in providing sustenance.
"This has given us, as women, a privileged relationship with food over the centuries."
They made hand-rolled ravioli stuffed with ricotta and goat cheese, dabbed (not drowned) in a tomato sauce. They made cacciucco, a fish stew circa 1891, which is featured on Jellypress.com; and Grandma Roe's Rugelach (her spelling), a Ring family specialty. (See accompanying recipes.)
Like Schenone, Ring turned her search for her grandmother's lost recipe into a mouthwatering memoir, Walking on Walnuts (Bantam Books).
