Sometime in the 90’s, while I lived in Italy, American restaurant service style changed. I came back in 2000 and now all wait persons had names they needed to share. Go to a restaurant and be “taken care of.” Managers…

When Maurizio and I were first dating, he proposed a “cena bollita” (boiled dinner), a.k.a. “cena della mamma” (Mom’s dinner) on a cold winter night. Posed thus, with the aura of “la Mamma” and being the new girlfriend, naturally I…

My mother grew up in the Depression on a small farm on a plot of land now absorbed into Houston.  She was by long habit frugal with family food and given to meticulous planning, even if my father’s income no…

What was on the table in the early 1900s? And what about way before that? I found a great timeline of food history. Here is an excerpt from the era of my novel, 1900-1911: cook books, PB&J, and the rise…

My first November in Naples was cold and wet. We lived in the basalt-dark center of the city. Our tiny apartment had no refrigerator to hold a turkey, no oven to cook it in, no American friends to invite us…

Marco Polo’s claim to have imported the pasta concept from China is pretty much sauced with ego. For thousands of years, flour, water, salt and ingenuity have made pasta-like foods for the poor. In the first century BCE, Horace wrote…

One of joys of writing historical fiction is the researching of it. It was thus that I discovered which 19th C researcher popularized the pie chart. And who was that? While you imagine the “Wait, wait, don’t tell me!” sound…

As Irma was moving west and discovering herself, our food technology was creeping along. I found a site which gives some of the advances of the 1880’s. Here’s an edited list, based on the unscientific principle of things most interesting to…

One of my favorite pasta dishes is also the most comforting: pasta with cauliflower, pasta al cavolfiore. It has that subtle blend of sweetness and substance that marks so many American comfort foods: rice pudding, vanilla ice cream, mashed potatoes,…

Here in steaming Knoxville, I’m reading about medieval gardens for my next novel, set in 1190 in what is now Italy and Germany. From my study I look over the little crescent of sunny land that Maurizio and I precisely…