Laura Schenonereads from The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family (W.W. Norton, 2007)

In The Lost Recipes of Hoboken, Laura Schenone undertakes a quest to retrieve her great grandmother’s ravioli recipe. In lyrical prose and delicious recipes, Schenone takes the reader on a journey from New Jersey’s postindustrial landscape and its suburbs’ disposable, fast-food culture to the family’s ancestral home on the Ligurian coast, with its pesto, smoked chestnuts, and beloved ravioli. Schenone discovers the persistent importance of identity and place, all the while pursuing the perfect circle of filled pasta.

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

—Louise DeSalvo, author of Vertigo: A Memoir