Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Dogs of Avalon
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.lauraschenone.com/
CITY:
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://thebark.com/content/qa-laura-schenone-author-dogs-avalon
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2003002511 |
| HEADING: | Schenone, Laura |
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| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d OCoLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Schenone, Laura |
| 670 | __ |a Schenone, Laura. A thousand years over a hot stove, 2003: |b ECIP t.p. (Laura Schenone; freelance writer; this is first book) |
| 953 | __ |a jf03 |
PERSONAL
Born in NJ; married to Herb Schaffer (an editor at HarperCollins); children: two sons.
EDUCATION:College education.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked formerly as a freelance writer for national and regional magazines and newspapers.
AVOCATIONS:Reading, gardening, walking her dog, spending time with family and friends.
AWARDS:James Beard Book Award, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances, 2003; Newsday Cookbook of the Year, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, 2007.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Laura Schenone is a writer and contributor to periodicals. Schenone was born and raised in New Jersey. Her father was a plumber in the family business and her mother was a claims officer at the unemployment office and later transitioned to a career in corporate America.
Schenone showed an interest in writing at a young age. She decided, by age twelve, that she would be a writer- either a poet or a novelist. Following college, she worked as a freelance writer for national and regional magazines and newspapers. Schenone eventually began writing nonfiction novels. Her books have been featured in many news outlets, including New York Times, NPR, Saveur, Food and Wine, Good Housekeeping, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, and Reader’s Digest.
Schenone lives in Monclair, New Jersey with her family and dog, Lily. When she is not writing, she likes to read, garden, go on walks, and spend time with family and friends.
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove
Schenone’s first book won her a James Beard Book Award. Ron Kaplan in January Magazine website wrote, Schenone “manages to squeeze a millennium’s-worth of history, social commentary, anecdotes and recipes into one literary stewpot.” A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances was inspired by the time Schenone spent living in a pre-Civil War farmhouse. The book opens with her recalling those two years. She recalls growing and cooking her own pumpkins, tomatoes, eggplant and cucumbers, an experience that led her to reflect on the other women that had gardened and cooked in the one hundred fifty year-old home before her.
Schenone begins the history with a speculative description of a prehistoric ‘All-Woman;’ Schenone’s own theories about how the first human women existed in the world. She then describes the history of cooking in America as far back as has been documented. She starts with an examination into the roles women played in early Native American cultures, gathering food, helping hunters, and developing innovative cooking techniques that allowed meals to be more accessible. She moves onto the problems the Pilgrims faced, such as their lack of planning and bad timing for planting, and then describes the extremely difficult expectations of enslaved women, who had to both cook for their masters and provide meals for their own families.
Schenone’s narrative follows the expansion West, describing the ways in which Mexican and Native culinary practices were integrated into colonists’ cooking. She then moves onto the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s, which, despite claiming to simplify life, created additional work for female food providers. During WWI and WWII, women had to adjust to the shortages in food and other materials, and the Great Depression led to women using their cooking skills to provide additional income to the family. Schenone examines the ways in which cooking practices have shaped each generation, and concludes the book by discusses her own relationship with cooking. She describes American women’s relationship with cooking as paradoxical, as it has been both a source of power and connectivity, as well as a means of oppression.
Alongside the narrative, the book is peppered with recipes, black-and-white photographs, trivia, anecdotes, and interviews. Michaela Crawford Reaves in Historian described the book as, “intriguing and accessible analysis,” while Debra Galant in New York Times website described it as “a lavishly illustrated compendium of women’s cooking from Native American times to present.”
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family documents Schenone’s quest to find her great-grandmother’s hand-rolled ravioli recipe. The five-year journey took her to Genoa, Italy, to learn the forgotten art of ravioli making.
Schenone yearns for a culinary time before modern technology and Americanized ingredients, romanticizing the purity of her grandmother’s cooking. The ravioli recipe has been lost, due to confusing family feuds, and what is left is a changed version of the original, with modern ingredients such as grocery store cream cheese. In Italy, Schenone meets people that knew her great-grandmother, and she receives lessons from numerous chefs in the region on proper ravioli rolling, filling, pressing and cutting techniques.
As Schenone embarks on her journey, it becomes clear that the thing she seeks is just as much a sense of familial connectedness as it is a quest for a recipe. In connecting with relatives, she helps bridge familial divides, in both her immediate and extended families. The book includes many ravioli recipes, including Schenone’s much sought after great-grandmother’s recipe. Deborah Smith in Jersey Bites website wrote, “you are going to salivate through the entire book,” while a contributor at Culinary Cellar website described the book as “poignant and fascinating.”
The Dogs of Avalon
In The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril, Schenone starts off by explaining that she never was a ‘dog person.’ She could not understand why someone would dedicate themselves to animal welfare causes. That changed when, at the insistence of her sons, her family adopted a Lurcher from Ireland. The process of adopting the dog inspired Schenone to being an investigation into the history of dog adoption, documented in this book. Claudia Kawczynska in Bark website wrote, “in exploring Greyhound rescue, [Schenone] has written a work that merits high praise and appreciation.”
Schenone gives a history of Greyhound racing, starting with the establishment of the Greyhound Racing Board in Ireland in 1958. She describes stories, some heartwarming, some disturbing, of the treatment of the dogs. By 1974, there was pushback against the poor treatment of the dogs, and both England and the US created rules to make the sport more humane. Ireland held out, though. At this point in the book, Schenone shifts the focus of the narrative to Marion Fitzgibbon of Limerick Animal Welfare and Johanna Wothke, two major leaders of the animal welfare cause in Ireland. Through their efforts, the approach to Greyhound racing in Ireland has changed drastically. Sam Litzinger in Washington Independent Review of Books website wrote, “the book is deeply felt but not sentimental or cloying, which makes it both accessible and important,” while a contributor to Kirkus Reviews described it as “an engrossing account of greyhounds, their owners, and their champions”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2003, Margaret Flanagan, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances, p. 199; October 15, 2007, Mark Knoblauch, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family, p. 16; August 1, 2017; Joan Curbow, review of The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril, p. 8.
Bookwatch, February 2008, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources, 26.2-3, 2005, Amanda J. Swygart-Hobaugh, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, p. 4.
Historian, 2004, Michaela Crawford Reaves, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, p. 848.
Internet Bookwatch, 2008, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of The Dogs of Avalon.
Kliatt, November, 2008, Shirley Reis, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, p. 46.
Library Journal, September 15, 2003, Andrea Dietze, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, p. 83; June 15, 2017, Meagan Storey, review of The Dogs of Avalon, p. 102.
Publishers Weekly, August 4, 2003, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, p. 71; September 3, 2007, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, p. 47; June 19, 2017, review of The Dogs of Avalon, p. 102.
Women’s Review of Books, June, 2004, Jan Zita Grover, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, p. 1.
ONLINE
Austin Chronicle Online, https://www.austinchronicle.com/ (May 28, 2004), MM Pack, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove.
Bark, https://thebark.com/ (June 1, 2017), Claudia Kawczynska, author interview; (June, 2017), review of The Dogs of Avalon.
Culinary Cellar, http://theculinarycellar.com/ (August 9, 2010), review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Entertainment Weekly, http://ew.com/ (November 9, 2007), review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Historical Novel Society, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (March 24, 2018), review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove.
Italian Dish, http://theitaliandishblog.com/ (February 12, 2010), review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
January Magazine, https://www.januarymagazine.com/ (January 1, 2004), Ron Kaplan, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove.
Jersey Bites, https://jerseybites.com/ (August 12, 2008), Deborah Smith, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Miami Herald Online, http://www.miamiherald.com/ (October 17, 2017), Connie Ogle, review of The Dogs of Avalon.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (February 1, 2004), Debra Galant, review of A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (December 8, 2007), Dan Epstein, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ (October 2, 2017), Marc Bekoff, author interview.
Story Circle Book Reviews, http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/ (January 17, 2008), Linda Wisniewski, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (August 29, 2017), Sam Litzinger, review of The Dogs of Avalon.
Wow! Women on Writing, http://wow-womenonwriting.com/ (December 1, 2007), Angela Mackintosh, review of The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.*
What can I tell you about me? I was born and raised in New Jersey. My dad worked in the family plumbing business, and my mom took claims at the local unemployment office, then worked her way up in corporate America. The Sisters of Charity educated me, and at home I had two younger sisters and two Doberman Pincers, beloved sweet girls, all.
I decided to become a writer when I was twelve. A poet, I thought, or perhaps a novelist, or journalist. I wasn’t sure. After college, I freelanced for national and regional magazines and newspapers. I eventually began writing nonfiction books because real life is so unbelievable, and I have a lot of questions.
I am the author of three books of nonfiction published by W.W. Norton & Co. The first, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances (2003) was inspired by the time I spent living in a pre-Civil War farmhouse wondering about all the women before me who cooked for and fed the human race. The book was featured in many national and regional news outlets including The New York Times and NPR. It won a James Beard Book Award. Al Roker even came to my house to make pudding.
Next, I wrote a memoir about my quest to find a long lost family recipe. It was a project that conveniently required travel to Italy. The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken (2007) was featured in Saveur, Food and Wine, Good Housekeeping, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and Reader’s Digest. It was selected as a Newsday Cookbook of the Year, and Newsweek called it “a feast for the mind and the heart, as well as the palate.” The time I spent exploring Genoa and learning from pasta makers there was a joy beyond measure.
My latest book takes a new direction. It came about when, perhaps symbolically, I was selling a vintage stove. The woman who came to buy it told me she brought over greyhounds from Ireland who needed homes. We became friends and eventually, she and my husband convinced me to adopt an Irish sight hound named Lily for my animal-loving oldest son. Through Lily, I met Marion Fitzgibbon in Ireland and many animal rescue people around the world. For the most part, I thought they were out of their minds. And yet, I was fascinated by their passion and sense of justice for those who cannot speak for themselves. The world is radically changing its views of animals. Who were these people who were leading the way?
The Dogs of Avalon: The Race To Save Animals in Peril, will be published by W.W. Norton, August 22, 2017. Kirkus has called it “an engrossing account of greyhounds, their owners, and their champions.” The Bark has said it “merits high praise and appreciation.” Library Journal writes that “Schenone’s lovely prose captivates” and “. . . in Fitzgibbon, readers have a true animal champion.” The book has received blurbs from scientists and writers Marc Bekoff, Greogory Bern, Frans De Waal, Christina Baker Kline, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and Dale Russakoff.
I live with my family in New Jersey, where I love to read, grow vegetables in my front yard, walk Lily, and spend time with my family and friends.
Schenone, Laura: THE DOGS OF AVALON
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Schenone, Laura THE DOGS OF AVALON Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 8, 22 ISBN: 978-0-393-07358-4
The story of the author's adoption of a greyhound as a companion for her son and how she became involved with a fascinating group of animal rescuers.It began in New Jersey when the author sold a vintage stove to a woman named Elizabeth, who had recently returned from a visit to Ireland. She suggested that the author's son might like an Irish greyhound dog that she had recently rescued. He did, and she became a cherished member of the household, and a friendship between Schenone (The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family, 2007, etc.) and Elizabeth was born. Through Elizabeth, the author met Marion Fitzgibbon, the leader of a remarkable animal rescue group in Ireland, the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The members of the ISPCA first came together because of a shared concern to find homes for stray street dogs. Over time, their goal became more ambitious: to create an animal sanctuary. An anonymous donation of 20,000 pounds enabled Fitzgibbon to purchase land for the establishment of a Limerick Animal Welfare Circle. For a time, greyhound racing had been a popular sport in Australia, England, Ireland, and the U.S. Throughout the narrative, Schenone smoothly interweaves her personal story with a history of the breed. As she notes, "images of greyhound-like dogs--with their deep-chested, slim-waisted, long-legged forms--appear in Western art going back thousands of years. They race and hunt and pose on Egyptian pottery and tombs, and in ancient Greek and Roman sculptures." Cruel treatment of the dogs when they could no longer race or hunt provided the original basis for concern by animal activists who sought adoptive homes for them. Fitzgibbon was also an advocate for itinerant Travelers. As a result of bigotry toward them, she received threats that her dogs would be killed, but fortunately, they were never acted upon. An engrossing account of greyhounds, their owners, and their champions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Schenone, Laura: THE DOGS OF AVALON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427554/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=15e9ddb8. Accessed 23 Mar.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427554
1 of 17 3/23/18, 10:19 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: a History of American
Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances
Andrea Dietze
Library Journal.
128.15 (Sept. 15, 2003): p83. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances.
Norton. Oct. 2003. c.416p, illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 0-393-01670-4. $35. COOKERY
Fusion cooking is often defined as the blending of traditional preparation techniques with locally found ingredients to create new dishes or even cuisines (e.g., Tex-Mex and Creole). Without labeling it "fusion," this is the type of home cooking that freelance writer Schenone describes in her thoroughly researched and inviting history of how native and immigrant American women have fed their families from pre-European times to the. 21st century. Sometimes, the food served from their kitchens and fires changed in response to inventions like the cast-iron stove and canned milk. In other eras, economic depressions and rationing programs determined which foods and how much of them ended up on the table. The many recipes, black-and-white photographs, anecdotes, and interviews included here amply illustrate how American cooking evolved and, indeed, how it continues to change. Highly recommended for most public libraries, especially those with culinary studies collections or a need for student report resources.--Andrea Dietze, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Dietze, Andrea
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dietze, Andrea. "Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: a History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2003, p. 83. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A109269615/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=07065e6a. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A109269615
2 of 17 3/23/18, 10:19 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove: a History of American Women
Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances
Margaret Flanagan
Booklist.
100.2 (Sept. 15, 2003): p199. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2003 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Oct. 2003. 416p. illus. index. Norton, $35 (0-393-01671-4). 641.5.
For centuries, society has dictated that one of a woman's most important roles is feeding the family. The integral process of feeding the family often involved more than merely cooking meals. For many women, food preparation might have also included planting, gathering, foraging, storing, shopping, socializing, serving, and cleaning up. In America, as in most other countries, women have traditionally been perceived as natural nurturers responsible for providing both food and comfort in large quantities. Schenone interweaves more than 50 diverse recipes with a wealth of historical anecdotes, trivia, and illustrations. Drawing from a wide variety of backgrounds and recipes, this lively, loving tribute to the female culinary experience crosses cultural and socioeconomic divides in authentic American fashion. Fascinating social history with a heaping helping of home cooking thrown in for good measure.
YA/L: A rarely covered subject that will fit neatly into the women's history curriculum. SZ. Flanagan, Margaret
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove: a History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2003, p. 199. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A110027070/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=38fb1e71. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A110027070
3 of 17 3/23/18, 10:19 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril
Joan Curbow
Booklist.
113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p8. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril. By Laura Schenone. Aug. 2017.320p. Norton, $26.95 (9780393073584). 798.8.
Schenone (The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, 2007) admits she sometimes thought of animal advocates as having misplaced allegiances--until she met a few dedicated people, women mostly, who have raised worldwide awareness of animal welfare. In Ireland, greyhound racing has been popular for decades, but the racing life for a greyhound is short, and, until quite recently, the Irish have considered greyhounds mean and unfit for adoption. A staggering number of retired dogs are euthanized. Sometimes, though, retired greyhounds are shipped to other countries, where they race for a few more years but are often ill-treated. Enter Marion Fitzgibbon and women like her who have worked tirelessly for decades to improve the lives of greyhounds, and all animals. Fitzgibbon's advocacy has helped to bring better living conditions for working dogs and, best of all, has helped change public perception about greyhounds. Now, greyhound adoption is widely accepted; Schenone owns one such dog. Though this is sometimes gut-wrenching in its vivid depiction of animal suffering, animal lovers will find it an eye-opening must-read. --Joan Curbow
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Curbow, Joan. "The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 8. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718662/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
xid=88a83103. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718662
4 of 17 3/23/18, 10:19 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Science & technology
Library Journal.
142.11 (June 15, 2017): p102+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
AGRICULTURE
Schenone, Laura. The Dogs of Avalon: The Race To Save Animals in Peril. Norton. Aug. 2017. 320p. photos, bibliog. ISBN 9780393073584. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393248784. PETS
What motivated James Beard Award-winning food historian Schenone (A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove; The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken) to write a book about animal welfare? It began with her selling an old stove and her ensuing encounter with animal rescuer Elizabeth. From the start, Schenone shows that the heart of the animal welfare community lies in people, mostly women, who possess an innate drive to help animals and who connect with others in order to accomplish this. Through Elizabeth, Schenone adopts Lily, a lurcher (a mix of sighthound and other breeds), and meets Irishwoman Marion Fitzgibbon, whom she chronicles for much of the book. Along the way, readers learn about Irish history, including the subculture of Travellers (Irish nomads), whom Fitzgibbon also aids. The author perfectly captures the ethos of veteran animal advocates and the obstacles in their work. Schenone's lovely prose captivates, and her mostly pragmatic perspective complements the subject matter. In Fitzgibbon, readers have a true animal champion. VERDICT While other important aspects of the global animal welfare and rescue movements are addressed, this book is most engaging in its focus on Fitzgibbon's crusade to bring animal welfare issues to mainstream Irish culture.--Meagan Storey, Virginia Beach
HEALTH & MEDICINE
Fitzharris, Lindsey. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest To Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. Farrar. Oct. 2017.304p. illus. notes, index. ISBN 9780374117290. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780374715489. MED
Our understanding of health and medicine has developed rapidly in the last 200 years. This book looks at a pivotal time in that development and one of the leading figures of modern medicine, Joseph Lister (1827-1912). Through observation, experimentation, and a passion to keep patients alive, Lister eventually overcame the prevailing beliefs of his day and saved countless lives. Readers will learn how breakthroughs such as pasteurization and the use of ether as an anesthesia led to a greater comprehension of bacteria and infection. Examples of cases, including personal accounts by patients, reveal frightening and painful surgery experiences. Descriptions of cringe-worthy hospital wards demonstrate how far we have come in our understanding of sanitation. Providing insight into Lister's character as well as detailing his life and death in England and Scotland are his personal relationships with colleagues, students, and his father. VERDICT A slightly gory, occasionally humorous, and very enjoyable biography of a man whose kindness, care, and curiosity changed medicine forever. An engaging read for history lovers.--Susanne Cam, Univ. of Montana Lib., Missoula
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
HOME ECONOMICS
Patterson, Daniel & Mandy Aftel. The Art of Flavor: Practices and Principles for Creating Delicious Food. Riverhead. Aug. 2017.288p. illus. bibliog. ISBN 9781594634307. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780698197169. COOKING
Most cookbooks focus on the techniques of cooking, with little attention given to the subtle art of creating flavor. In this collaboration, Michelin-starred chef Patterson (Coi: Stories and Recipes) and artisan perfumer Aftel (Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent) introduce the concept of the latter. They aim to help cooks develop their creativity and ability to respond to the available ingredients, as well as how to adapt recipes to bring out the best taste. The authors explain how to think about ingredients, encouraging cooks to use a contrasting flavor when working with similar ingredients or a unifying one when working with multiple ingredients. They also recommend different herbs, spices, citruses, and flowers to formulate complex tastes, along with suggestions for which foods are best suited to which flavors. Recipes are included with each example. VERDICT How to create flavor is a challenging concept to convey in words, and this work is quite text-heavy; however, adventurous cooks who are interested in trying something new will find some unique ideas and recipes.-- Melissa Stoeger, Deerfield P.L., IL
Ross, Marissa A. Wine. All The Time: The Casual Guide to Confident Drinking. Plume. Jun. 2017.304p. illus. index. ISBN 9780399574160. pap. $20; ebk. ISBN 9780399574177. COOKING
Books about wine can sometimes seem stuffy or exclusionary. Blogger and Bon Appetit columnist Ross (wine-allthetime. com) is anything but, essentially telling readers that if she can learn about and appreciate wine, they can, too. A light, often amusing read, this book includes colorful anecdotes; for example, getting caught drinking wine on a beach by police who used what she calls an alcohol-detecting police tampon. There are also plenty of helpful sidebars and joking asides. Ross wants her audience to understand that wine is no big deal; that they can start by enjoying what they like, which will make it easier to explore more varieties. She peppers her writing with profanity, which won't suit all who pick the book up, but her attitude does help distinguish this title from many of the other wine guides available. VERDICT With a hip, casual tone that will find fans among those who are less familiar with wine, this book will appeal to aficionados and novices alike.--Peter Hepburn, Coll. of the Canyons Lib., Santa Clarita, CA
SCIENCES
Costa, James T. Darwin's Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory. Norton. Sept. 2017.496p. illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780393239898. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393249156. SCI
Most readers will be surprised to learn of the incredible amount of field research, observation, and experimentation that Charles Darwin did in the many years after his famous voyage. Costa (biology, Western Carolina Univ.; Wallace, Darwin, and the Origin of Species) argues that those experiments are not only foundational but also educational: they explain evolution better than any classroom lecture. To that end, each chapter focuses on a different obsession of Darwin's, from orchids to seed migration, and is followed by an experiment that demonstrates a principle of evolution. These examples are of the quick and simple variety, and a well-equipped high school science class could perform them easily. Costa's secondary goal is to place Darwin in the context of his family and friends, many of whom he deputized to help with his observations; in this, the author is less successful. Although there are frequent mentions of Darwin's children, only rarely do their own voices or inclinations shine through. VERDICT For students or teachers of biology or for readers looking for another side of Darwin.--Cate Hirschbiel, Iwasaki Lib., Emerson Coll., Boston
Dawkins, Richard. Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. Random. Aug. 2017.320p. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780399592249. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780399592256. SCI
These 41 short pieces suitably capture evolutionary biologist Dawkins's (The Selfish Gene; The God Delusion) reputation as a fierce proponent of rationalism, who possesses an exacting and questioning scientific mind and an acerbic wit. Mostly speeches and published letters, these selections are presented with minimal editing: editor's notes introduce each topical section, and contextual footnotes have been added by Dawkins throughout. Readers will find concise arguments of how mutation plus natural selection provides the best explanation for the diversity of life we see today but also the hopeful recognition that human beings have evolved minds capable of long-term planning that may mediate the negative effects of genetic adaptations to an environment now changing much faster than evolutionary timescales. Dawkins's staunch defense of rationalism, especially against the antisocial outcomes he sees arising from religion, comes through in several often sarcastic pieces. But he writes as well of the transcendent awe that science can inspire and gives admiring tributes to mentors who have fostered such insight. VERDICT An excellent option for Dawkins fans and science lovers; those unfamiliar with the author's work may want to seek out his full-length books. [See Prepub Alert, 1/9/17.]--Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.
Fountain, Henry. The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet. Crown. Aug. 2017. 304p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781101904060. $28; ebk. ISBN 9781101904077. SCI
The Good Friday earthquake in Alaska struck at 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964. Measuring 9.2 on the Richter scale, it is considered the biggest earthquake ever recorded in North America. In this meticulously researched book, New York Times reporter and editor Fountain tells the story of the earthquake through the experiences of the citizens of Alaska, focusing specifically on the village of Chenega, which was obliterated; Valdez, which was destroyed, forcing the town to move; and heavily damaged Anchorage. The earthquake completely changed the Alaskan landscape, in some places lifting or subsiding the land six feet or more. The author alternates these personal accounts with an examination of how the earthquake ended one of the greatest controversies in geology. As shown through the fieldwork, analysis, and insights of geologist George Plafker, the earthquake entirely changed scientific opinion in favor of the theory of plate tectonics. VERDICT This is an ideal option for those who enjoyed Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm, though Fountain's book isn't as gripping as Larson's. Lay readers may be intrigued as well, but natural disaster aficionados and geology fans are the best audience for this work.--Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO
Goodell, Jeff. The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World. Little, Brown. Nov. 2017. 336p. notes, index. ISBN 9780316260244. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780316260237. SCI
Rolling Stone contributing editor Goodell (How To Cool the Planet) looks at sea-level rise caused by Earth's melting ice caps and its effects on coastal settlements. He visited shrinking Greenland and the shores of Alaska, New York City, Virginia, Venice Beach, the Netherlands, the Marshall Islands, and Nigeria, concluding that the inexorable rise is a "slow-motion catastrophe" for low-lying cities and for ports. Some elaborate engineering works are being built to counter higher tides and storm surges for the next few decades. However, most of the present seacoast infrastructure will have to be abandoned eventually. Goodell spent quite a bit of time in Miami Beach, FL, where king tides regularly flood sewers and streets. He interviewed developers and politicians who understand but refuse to discuss the issue. The author offers sensible suggestions for dealing
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with this difficult situation, but will anyone act on them? Delay will foreclose the option of a managed retreat from the water's edge. VERDICT Anyone worried about the planet should check this one out, and coastal residents in particular should read this and consider their options.--David R. Conn, formerly with Surrey Libs., BC
Hanes, Stephanie. White Man's Game: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden, and Other Myths of Conservation in Africa. Metropolitan: Holt. Jul. 2017.304p. maps, index. ISBN 9780805097160. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780805097177. SCI
Christian Science Monitor foreign correspondent Hanes spent more than a year reporting on the effort to restore Gorongosa National Park, a reserve that once teemed with wildlife and tourists until it was destroyed during Mozambique's 15-year-long civil war. The park's restoration is the brainchild of Greg Carr, an American philanthropist who hopes to return the reserve to its former status as an ecological and tourist paradise and improve the lives of local Mozambicans in the process. While impressed with Carr's lofty goals, Hanes found significant discrepancies between the Carr Foundation's glowing progress reports about the restoration and the views of locals and academics she interviewed and events she witnessed. Behind the foundation's upbeat stories lurked some less appealing realities: angry locals, animal relocation failures, and growing political unrest in the region. Hanes concludes that the park is an ambitious but perhaps misguided project and a typical example of the Western world's tendency to hide the setbacks and miscalculations of African conservation programs instead of acknowledging them. VERDICT This insightful, well-written expose should appeal to readers interested in the complexities underlying conservation agendas in Africa.--Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc, Flemington, NJ
Maddox, Brenda. Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life. Bloomsbury. Nov. 2017. 272p. ISBN 9781632869128. $28. SCI
How did Darwin write On the Origin of Species without knowledge of genetics or biochemistry? Maddox (Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA) offers an answer. Using Victorian geologist Charles Lyell's career as a central theme, the author supplies vignettes that explain evolution's foundations through three 19th-century geological principles: the Earth is extremely old; the biblical flood never occurred; and species come and go. With silky prose, Maddox opens the world of gentleman geologists, enriching the text with social and historical background, quotes, and poetry. She also emphasizes the contributions of women and those not independently wealthy. However, there are several minor flaws: Maddox does not mention that uniformitarianism allows for natural cataclysms and asserts that genomics, not big data and computer simulation, revolutionized modern paleontology.
Despite these issues, this is an accessible, enjoyable, and authoritative read. VERDICT Anyone curious about evolution, geology, or paleontology's roots won't want to miss this work, especially fans of Rob Wesson's Darwin's First Theory and Edmund Blair Bolles's The Ice Finders.--Eileen H. Kramer, Georgia Perimeter Coll. Lib., Clarkston
CALL FOR REVIEWERS
LJ is seeking reviewers in the following areas: Health and Medicine, especially men's health and women's health (contact efrench@mediasourceinc.com); Home Economics (contact ssendaula@mediasourceinc.com); and Science (contact mdar@mediasourceinc.com).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Science & technology." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 102+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668325/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7e7dd6e3. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668325
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The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril
Publishers Weekly.
264.25 (June 19, 2017): p102. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril
Laura Schenone. Norton, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-393-07358-4
Schenone (The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken) wasn't much of an animal lover until she met Daisy, a rescue greyhound who introduced her to the seamy underworld of dog racing and the thousands of former racing dogs discarded or euthanized once their performances began to wane. Interest piqued (and greyhound adopted), Schenone set off to meet the pioneers of the greyhound rescue movement, whose victories and struggles are shared here. The author is clearly a champion of her cause, extolling the virtues of the breed and excoriating the dog-racing industry--now in decline due to greater awareness. Schenone's dramatic account of the major and minor events in the evolution of the animal welfare movement in general and greyhound rescues in particular is truly moving. The book gets bogged down, though, as Schenone tries to weave in numerous subplots, such as the futile attempts to bring abusive dog racers and puppy mill breeders to justice and a Hatfields-and-McCoys battle between Irish Traveller clans that spans an entire chapter. Animal-welfare advocates and dog lovers are sure to appreciate Schenone's reportage as well as the courage of the men and mostly women who led the greyhound rescue charge, but the book is circuitous and, as a result, slow. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 102. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643910/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
xid=754761a8. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A496643910
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Schenone, Laura. The lost ravioli recipes of Hoboken; a search for food and family
Shirley Reis
Kliatt.
42.6 (Nov. 2008): p46. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 Kliatt http://hometown.aol.com/kliatt/
Full Text:
SCHENONE, Laura. The lost ravioli recipes of Hoboken; a search for food and family. Norton. 331p. illus. bibliog. c2008. 978-0-393-33423-4. $15.95. A
Laura Schenone decided to find the original family recipe for Christmas ravioli, starting with a cryptic scrap of paper. Her culinary sleuthing took Laura to Liguria, Italy, and the hope of unlocking the secrets of her great- grandmother's culinary legacy and her family's history. There Laura discovered a whole new lexicon of Italian tastes and flavors and slowly uncovered a story of love and loss. She even charmed her way into the kitchens of ravioli-making elders in Liguria. The book features comprehensive, easy-to-follow instructions on rolling your own pasta as well as simpler recipes for pasta and other favorite Genoese dishes. Laura is the author of the James Beard Award-winning book A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, Shirley Reis, IMC Dir., Wilson Elementary Sch., WI
Reis, Shirley
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Reis, Shirley. "Schenone, Laura. The lost ravioli recipes of Hoboken; a search for food and family." Kliatt, Nov. 2008, p. 46. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A189598307/GPS?u=schlager&
sid=GPS&xid=4787053f. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A189598307
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A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: a History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances
Publishers Weekly.
250.31 (Aug. 4, 2003): p71. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
LAURA SCHENONE. Norton, $35 (416p) ISBN 0-393-01671-4
As the title implies, in her first book, freelance writer Schenone has attempted to cover more than a millennium in women's history, tossing in historically interesting recipes along the way. The results of this ambitious project, however, can't help but be broad, and the book is full of sweeping statements such as, "As cooks, Native American women lay the first claim to some of the greatest ingredients in the history of the world." A turgid introduction reaches even further back than 1,000 years to conjure a figure Schenone names "All Woman," whom she imagines as the first female on earth and imbues with all kinds of knowledge and curiosity. Later chapters are more fact-based and reliable. Indeed, when Schenone delves into the specific, her writing immediately improves. For example, a section in a chapter on the 19th century that details the development of urban peddlers and more specifically "hot corn women," is rich with description, evocative and offers information that is probably new to most readers. The author also does a commendable job of drawing the often- ignored connections among politics, women and food when describing events such as the 1917 food riots in New York City and lunch counter sit-ins in the 1960s. The book is chockablock with recipes (often for oddities such as Apple Crisp Pronto from 1943, a concoction of packaged bread, margarine, honey and apples meant to help Rosie the Riveter get dinner on the table), period illustrations and sidebars, including one on Sara Josepha Hale, who standardized the Thanksgiving holiday. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: a History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances." Publishers Weekly, 4 Aug. 2003, p. 71. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A106732966/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bf77df71. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A106732966
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The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family
Publishers Weekly.
254.35 (Sept. 3, 2007): p47. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2007 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
** The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family LAURA SCHENONE. Norton, $26.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-393-06146-8
Hand-rolled ravioli ate ephemeral things, taking ages to prepare only to be devoured in minutes. And yet for Schenone (the James Beard Award-winning A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove) their taste encapsulates an entire domestic history and the promise of happiness, however fleeting. 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, where the dish abruptly changed, breaking with tradition. In search of enlightenment, Schenone charms her way into the kitchens of ravioli-making elders in Liguria (whose recipes she shares in this book with admirable precision), then spends years trying to teach her hands the difficult art of stretching dough--an endeavor that tests her most cherished ideas of home and family and self. 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 historian's knack for sketching the big picture in a few broad strokes allows this poignant book to transcend the specificity of its subject matter. (Nov.)
** = PW starred review * = Children's titles
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family." Publishers Weekly, 3 Sept. 2007, p. 47. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A168509436/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
xid=e57f5eb1. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A168509436
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The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
Mark Knoblauch
Booklist.
104.4 (Oct. 15, 2007): p16. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. By Laura Schenone. Nov. 2007. 384p. illus. Norton, $26.95 (9780393061468). 641.8.
Recipes inherited from one's forebears have a way of imprinting themselves indelibly on one's self-identity. Schenone attempts to uncover the origins of the incomparable ravioli her immigrant grandmother Adalgiza assiduously prepared for her family's celebratory dinners. A trip to Genoa, her grandmother's birthplace, confirms the antiquity of the recipe, seasoned with borage gathered wild from the mountains. But this search leads also to an interior journey and to a reexamination of Schenone's relationship with her sister and other family members. The book concludes with the ravioli recipe, generously illustrated with photographs to give more intimate insight into the steps required to produce these ravioli. Schenone also presents a helpful glossary of ingredients and a list of sources. 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
Knoblauch, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Knoblauch, Mark. "The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2007, p. 16. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A170279745/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=16f48565. Accessed
23 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A170279745
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The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
The Bookwatch.
(Feb. 2008): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
Laura Schenone
W.W. Norton & Company
500-5th Avenue, New York NY 10010
9780393061468 $26.95 www.wwnorton.com
Lending libraries strong in culinary history, particularly American regional dishes, will delight in THE LOST RAVIOLI RECIPES OF HOBOKEN, based on the author's quest for a great grandmother's recipe for ravioli. Her journey takes her to family history and archives, surveys conflicting ideas of culinary history, and journeys from New Jersey's suburbs to her Italian ancestors' home. The result's a lively food history not to be missed.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken." The Bookwatch, Feb. 2008. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A174640289/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7fc3d14d. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A174640289
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Home cooking
Jan Zita Grover
The Women's Review of Books.
21.9 (June 2004): p1+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2004 Old City Publishing, Inc. http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Laura Schenone. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 412 pp., $35.00 hardcover.
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro. New York: The Viking Press, 2004, 306 pp., $24.95 hardcover.
As Laura Shapiro wisely notes in the acknowledgments to Something from the Oven, "everybody has a '50s, even those who experienced the decade only through their parents." True to this observation, the '50s that Shapiro constructs are different from those in Laura Schenone's A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. They're different from mine.
Shapiro, author of the admirable Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986), has again focused on the influences of America's food industry on home cooking. In her earlier book, Shapiro traced the rationalization of cooking through the rise of cooking schools, laboratory nutrition studies, academic home economics/domestic science, and standard measurements for ingredients--the many ways in which food production became more consistent and scientific: "What gave scientific cookery its staying power," Shapiro explains in her new book, "was its partnership with the food industry, which was becoming an ambitious new player in the American kitchen." Something from the Oven picks up Shapiro's narrative in the post-World War II era, which, despite her book's title, Shapiro does not confine to the decade 1950-1960 but rather expands toward that portentous landmark, the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
In the immediate postwar period, Shapiro writes, America's food industry faced its greatest challenge yet: to convert its immense wartime capacity for production to domestic use. This would be done by creating "a peacetime market for wartime foods.... factories were ready to keep right on canning, freezing, and dehydrating food as if the nation's life still depended on it." Baldly put, "What the industry had to do was persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations."
Spam and Treat (fatty canned pork that had been used in C rations), frozen vegetables and fruit (not part of domestic rationing during the war), instant mashed potatoes, frozen ("TV") dinners, and foods subjected to vacuum processing ("originally developed to make penicillin and blood plasma") were war products that made their way onto post-war grocery shelves and into newly installed grocery-store freezers. That, however, was only half the manufacturers' battle: How were they to persuade home cooks to use these foods?
Food historian Harvey Levenstein, in his Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (1992), noted another battlefront that Shapiro does not mention: what a February 2, 1956, New York Times story termed the problem of "the fixed stomach." "Americans could not be persuaded to eat more food," wrote Levenstein. As we now know, the fixed stomach has expanded considerably since 1956, but that's another story--one recounted acerbically by Marion Nestle in Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002). On the way to supersizing fast food and thaw-and-serve restaurant meals, the food industry made considerable inroads via the home kitchen, and it is to it that Shapiro mostly turns. (I say mostly because she has uncovered some cracking good stories about food celebrities of the 1950s-1960s, and she lays down her main story of home cooks almost too readily to recount theirs.) "That moment when the burgeoning food industry confronted millions of American women and tried to refashion them in its own image is the one I explore in this book," she writes.
The efforts of Kraft, Hormel, Swanson's, and other big food manufacturers to remake Americans' home cooking in their own image have already been capably described by Harvey Levenstein. Shapiro is after more elusive prey. She wants to understand how the industrial siege was met by those under attack: American homemakers. This is not so easy to fred out as it might seem; how should a historian go about determining the ways that home cooks prepared meals for their families 50 years ago? Few wrote about it. The magazines that many of them picked up in grocery stories--the famous Seven Sisters (Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Women's Day, Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, and Women's Home Companion)--reflected their advertisers' priorities, not their readers'. Other magazines, like Gourmet, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Town and Country, emphasized more fashionable cooking, yet their recipes' and columns' relationship to what readers actually cooked is unclear.
Shapiro's approach to finding home cooks' voices is threefold: she turns to newspaper food columns, like The Boston Globe's "Confidential Chat," a long-running recipe-and-advice swap among readers; community cookbooks; and "hardworking classics [like] Joy of Cooking or the Betty Crocker cookbooks." She also makes use of food industry, government, and advertising market research, which provides some of the book's most interesting data: For example, as late as 1960, a US Department of Agriculture study found that "popular convenience foods--everything from canned spaghetti and frozen orange juice to devil's food cake ... accounted for no more than 14 cents of every dollar spent on food." Similarly, a 1960 Parents Magazine reader survey found that "more than half of the subscribers ... still baked pies, cakes, and cookies from scratch every week."
Eventually, however, according to Shapiro, industrial food won its battle with American home cooks. Something from the Oven doesn't have a lot to say about this purported victory, perhaps in part because much of the book is given over to Shapiro's discussion of high profile women cookbook writers, real and imaginary: Betty Crocker (Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book [1950]), Poppy Cannon (The Can-Opener Cookbook [1952]), Peg Bracken (The I Hate to Cook Book [1960]), and Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking [1961]). Interesting as this material is, it constitutes a diversion from the story Shapiro promises in her introduction-- it explains little about "the question that drove my research ... how ... women began to renegotiate the terms of domestic life in the context of [paid] work." Unless readers are to assume that the writing careers of Cannon, Bracken, et al. are object lessons in this renegotiation, the unfolding of their paid work says little about how "middle-class women" (Shapiro does not define this term) cooked before, during, and after the postwar era. Poppy Cannon's and Julia Child's grasp of the women they wrote for presented the same conceptual problems that Shapiro faces in her research.
Oddly enough, if anyone seemed to have a grounded, lively, and informed sense of who America's home cooks were, it was that serene specter, Betty Crocker. Like God, Betty Crocker seemed omniscient. And with good reason: General Mills' popular Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book was based on extensive correspondence, interviews, and field observations among home cooks and members of General Mills' staff of home economists.
By the close of Something from the Oven, the rout of home cooking seems assured, writ by Betty Friedan: Apres moi, le Hamburger Helper. Shapiro doesn't hint much at the nationwide shift back toward more natural foods and immigrant cuisines, but this is by no means the inevitable result of her research. Shapiro's view of the US seems similar to the view cartoonist Saul Steinberg satirized in his well-known March 29, 1976, New Yorker cover, "View of the World from 9th Avenue." Shapiro ignores the population shift toward the West that began occurring in the 1930s and that by 1960 made California almost as populous as New York State. California's foodways barely figure in Something from the Oven. Had Shapiro looked at what was occurring in home cooking in the West during the postwar years, she would have found, for example, that Sunset Magazine--begun early in the 20th century by the Southern Pacific Railroad, then sold to the Lane brothers, who turned it into a visionary testament to western food and gardening--greatly exceeded Gourmet's circulation, promoted the use of a vast number of fruits and vegetables unused elsewhere in the US, and emphasized cooking that was simple (lots of grilling, lots of salad) and based on the freshest ingredients. As far back as the 1933 Sunset All-Western Cook Book, the magazines food writers had touted regional specialties, farmers' market fruits and vegetables, and recipes for the Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and Japanese foods popular in the West. If the culinary 1950s and 1960s look bleak to Shapiro, in part that's because she does not look much farther west than 9th Avenue.
Laura Schenone's first book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, also uses recent studies in social and cultural history, recipes, and excerpts from popular magazines and cookbooks to tell its story. Along with her considerable library research, Schenone apparently spent a great deal of time visiting home cooks in every corner of America and cooking alongside them. Most of her informants seem to cook outside the pale of advertising-driven women's magazines; they don't measure their ingredients, and they don't write them down, either: they exude them. Many are country women or women from American subcultures that retain traditional foodways, at least for ceremonial occasions: Nez Perce, Navajo, Creole, Low Country, Japanese, Ashkenazic Jewish, Italian.
One of A Thousand Years' finest achievements is its selection of illustrations, about which I wish Schenone had written. These range from photographs in the Library of Congress' WPA collection to ones from small historical societies to engravings and woodcuts from old cookbooks to reproductions of holographic recipes.
Like Shapiro, Schenone addresses the gains and losses in American kitchens of the 1950s and 1960s. Because she paints with a far broader brush--her book attempts to touch on women's cooking from the close of the last North American ice age to the present--Schenone offers only generalizations about the post-war period, along with her mother's recipe for--a dessert? a salad? maybe both?--Blueberry Cream Salad (lemon gelatin, blueberry pie filling, sour cream, sugar, lemon juice).
I'm struck by how little either writer has to say about the recipes she mentions or reproduces. In Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking (1996), Anne Mendelson provided an admirable demonstration of the social and cultural history that can be teased out of attentive recipe reading. Applying her method to, say, Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book and the other familiar cookbooks Shapiro cites reveals a great deal about the perceived competencies of their audiences. A close reading of Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Book could have saved Schenone from quoting Bracken's book as if it were an anti-cookbook. Bracken, as Shapiro's careful reading of her recipes and advice reveals, was clearly an accomplished cook adopting the conventions of what Shapiro shrewdly terms "the literature of domestic chaos."
The view from 9th Avenue is a partial one. Besides leaving out the West and the kind of cooking that Easterners would get around to terming California cooking only in the 1980s--better late than never, I guess--it delves insufficiently into the effects of postwar suburban housing and suburban supermarketing on domestic cooking: It wasn't only food manufacturers who reshaped how American women shopped and cooked. But as Laura Shapiro writes, everyone has her '50s. If yours was suburban, southern, or western, I hope to read about it one day.
Grover, Jan Zita
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grover, Jan Zita. "Home cooking." The Women's Review of Books, June 2004, p. 1+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A118278843/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=00d6eb43. Accessed 23
Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A118278843
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(En)gendering cooking
Amanda J. Swygart-Hobaugh
Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources. 26.2-3 (Winter-Spring 2005): p4+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies
Full Text:
Laura Schenone, A THOUSAND YEARS OVER A HOT STOVE: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN WOMEN TOLD THROUGH FOOD, RECIPES AND REMEMBRANCES. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003 (cloth). 412p. bibl. index. $35.00, ISBN 0-393-01671-4; pap., $18.95, ISBN 0-393-32627-6.
Jessamyn Neuhaus, MANLY MEALS AND MOM'S HOME COOKING: COOKBOOKS AND GENDER IN MODERN AMERICA. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003 (cloth). 336p. notes. bibl. index. $42.95, ISBN 0-8018-7125-5.
In her preface to A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove, Laura Schenone muses, "I have days in my very own kitchen when I am a high priestess of life" (p.xv). She then confesses,
On some days I detest cooking, for it makes me a wretched woman.... How I curse that Susie Homemaker plastic oven I loved as a child and the cooking badge I labored for as a Girl Scout--raised to be a kitchen slave by my culture, my mother--tricked into this bondage. (pp.xv-xvi)
I believe this passage encapsulates the conflicted relationship many self-proclaimed feminists have with the cultural practices that are oft-deemed "feminine," e.g., sewing, crafts, and, of course, cooking. In my opinion, while offering differing approaches and perspectives, the authors of both books under review here seek to explore the historical, social, and cultural context from which this discord arises and, if not to reconcile, then to more fully understand this struggle. In this sense, both works offer meaningful insights sensitized by feminist/gender perspectives and would thus be valuable additions to women's/feminist studies collections.
Schenone presents a sweeping narrative of the social history of food and women's seemingly inexorable tie with cooking in America, from pre-colonization to the present day. A journalist/freelance writer by trade, Schenone relates this captivating history using a narrative style rather than a traditional academic treatment; however, she draws on various scholarly sources to buttress her arguments, thus adding credence to her account. (1) Also, the various recipes--including Native American "Moose Butter" (p.28), of African-origin but oft-anglicized "Hoppin' John" (p.79), the Women's Christian Temperance Union's "Temperance Punch" (p.127), Italian-immigrant "Italian Easter Cake" (p.221), and Depression-era "Poor Man's Cake" (p.293)--and illustrations interspersed throughout this history lend an artistic flair as well as fuller body to the narrative.
When first reading the introductory material, I was somewhat leery of Schenone's overarching purpose, fearing that her celebratory approach to women's link with food/cooking would fail to also critique this relationship from a feminist perspective. However, my mind was set at ease with this: "Throughout history, cooking reveals itself as a source of power and magic, and, at the same time, a source of oppression in women's lives" (p.xv).
Schenone adroitly balances this "consistent paradox" (p.xv), at once celebrating the "power and magic" that cooking has brought to American women's lives as well as highlighting how women's relationship with cooking has throughout history been a "source of oppression." For example, although she details the grueling household responsibilities of the colonial housewife and her concomitant social/legal inferiority under English law, she then segues into a discussion of the housewife's necessity to the colonial family's survival. Similarly, she shows how racial/ethnic groups, when faced with various social inequalities--colonization, indigenous people being forced from their lands, enslavement, the relegation of domestic labor to African-American and immigrant women--and/or targeted for "Americanization" to serve white, middle-class values/interests, attempted to preserve their cultural identities and resist those social inequalities via their foodways. Schenone also notes the nineteenth-century separation of the public/economic and the private/home spheres and the concomitant "middle-class 'cult of domesticity'" ideology (p.125), wherein a woman's true worth was illustrated by her ability to conform to the ideals of perfection in housekeeping, motherhood, and, of course, cooking--an ideological rationale for the domestic science/home economics movement, which created a professional and educational niche for women.
Whereas Schenone extols the creativity, sacredness, and power of food in American women's lives throughout history. Neuhaus turns a chiefly critical/analytical eye toward this subject matter. Analyzing cookbooks published in the U.S. from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, she explores the medium's role in prescribing traditional gender norms and roles for men and women in relation to cooking as a household responsibility. (2) Neuhaus's opening chapter on cookbooks from 1796 to 1920 echoes much of Schenone's discussion of separate spheres, the cult of domesticity and "Republican Motherhood" (p.12), and the domestic science movement during the nineteenth century. Moreover, and again like Schenone, Neuhaus notes the growing middle-class desire to "Americanize" immigrants in the early twentieth century to "groom students for future employment as maids and cooks" (p.19) in middle-class homes, and discusses the impact of the processed/prepackaged foods boom, the food industry's targeting of women as consumers, and the dwindling 'domestic labor market on (middle-class) women's expected cooking role in the home during the early to mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, both Schenone and Neuhaus note how the rhetoric of patriotism permeated cookbooks during the World Wars, manifesting in the call for rationing foods, the backlash against canned/processed foods, and the campaign for "victory gardens."
Neuhaus departs from Schenone in her nuanced analysis of the gendered rhetoric pervading cookery instruction between the 1920s and mid-1960s. For example, Neuhaus reveals that in response to women's increased social, economic, and educational freedoms during the 1920s and 1930s as well as to the shrinking domestic labor market, cookbooks dispensed a domestic ideology that promoted (middle-class, white) women's proper place as in the kitchen cooking. (3) Furthermore, she observes, the cookbooks of these decades encouraged women to approach cooking as a creative or artistic outlet--admonishing them that their husband's happiness, which was to be their utmost concern, depended upon their ability to be creative in the kitchen, day after day, week after week.
Neuhaus points out that cookbooks--constructing inherent differences between men's needs/desires for "manly" foods such as steak and potatoes and women's propensity for "dainty" foods such as salads and finger sandwiches--advised women to sacrifice their tastes to please their potential or current husbands, as the following excerpt from a cookbook illustrates: "[L]earn how to cook a steak properly as 'He' likes it. The girl who can broil a steak well, make good coffee and light fluffy biscuits, will be forgiven many sins and omissions" (p.78). She finds that many cookbooks (particularly those targeting male audiences) attested to men's superiority in the kitchen due to their adventurousness and daring (to which women were to aspire)--quickly banishing any question of male cooks' masculinity by constructing cooking as a masculine hobby akin to sports and the prepared meals as the acceptable manly fare.
Neuhaus next examines cookbooks published during the WWII years. She notes that while the domestic ideology of the kitchen as women's proper place persisted, patriotism, duty to country, and national security became the rallying cry. With women's traditional gender roles being challenged by "Rosie the Riveter," cookbooks responded accordingly:
What accounts for this outpouring on the centrality of a woman's home cooking to the safety of the nation?... [A]nxiety about gender norms at a time when "traditional" gender roles seemed threatened created the need for such messages, though now that threat came from wartime upheavals and uncertainties rather than "the new woman" and processed foods.... [L]oaded with rhetoric about domesticity, cookbooks demanded far more of their readers than simple patriotism.... [T]hey also insisted that a woman's wartime duties included creating a relaxing atmosphere at the dinner table, where war-weary families could rest and enjoy delicious, satisfying meals. They insisted, in short, that women belonged in the kitchen. (p.137)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Moreover, while some pre-WWII cookbooks questioned women's cooking abilities, WWII-era cookbook authors were reluctant to criticize: "In a time when soldiers really and truly went into battle 'for Mom and apple pie,' cookery authorities could hardly criticize mom's piecrust" (p.153).
Neuhaus turns to the post-WWII years through 1963--the year Betty Friedan exposed the "feminine mystique" to the nation (4)--proclaiming that a comparably intense and vehement domestic ideology, dubbed the "cooking mystique" (p.161), saturated cookbooks of this era. Men once again were deemed superior to women in cooking ability, and cooking remained masculine as long as it was relegated to a hobby and conformed to prescribed notions of masculine tastes and practices. In ways reminiscent of the WWII era, Cold War anxieties were intertwined with the domestic ideology permeating cookbooks, as the following cookbook excerpt illustrates:
The world today needs people with stamina and courage. Good meals can help to supply them. Each homemaker has a part to play through seeing that her individual family is provided with the essentials for giving it health and vigor. Family security, as well as national security, results from good management of meals. (p.224, emphasis in original)
Many cookbooks, Neuhaus argues, asserted that a woman's primary fulfillment in life should come from providing her family three square meals a day--eerily reminiscent of Mrs. Brown's thoughts from Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (5):
She is going to produce a birthday cake.... The cake will speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of comfort and
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safety.... At this moment, holding a bowl full of sifted flour in an orderly house under the California sky, she hopes to be as satisfied and as filled with anticipation as a writer putting down the first sentence, a builder beginning to draw the plans....
The cake is less than she'd hoped it would be. She tries not to mind. It is only a cake, she tells herself. It is only a cake.... She'd imagined it larger, more remarkable. She'd hoped (she admits to herself) it would look more lush and beautiful, more wonderful. This cake she's produced feels small.... (pp.77, 99)
Neuhaus also observes, "Cookery experts usually did not attempt to validate women's feelings of lethargy or weariness--rather, they exhorted women to overcome dullness and boredom and to 'be pretty, be bright, and be a good cook'" (p.232). However, while a "cooking mystique" permeated many of the examined cookbooks, some--notably, Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Book--reflected a "discontent" with this domestic ideology by not wholeheartedly embracing the tenets but recognizing cooking as a "necessary bore" (p.239) fated to be a woman's lot in life--perhaps foreshadowing the second-wave feminist movement soon to erupt.
Both of theses works offer nuanced insights into the gendered aspects of cooking and would thus be welcome additions to feminist/women's studies collections. While Schenone's writing style lends itself more readily to a general versus an academic audience, I would not necessarily exclude her book from college/university collections. In fact, I believe her accessible writing may encourage readers to go on to more academic treatments of the subject matter, such as Neuhaus's, which I highly recommend for college/university collections in gender and social history.
In closing, I believe the following excerpts from the authors' concluding remarks bring us full circle:
Cookery clearly offers innumerable Americans the opportunity for creative expression, for demonstrating care and affection, and for sensual, satisfying pleasures. But we should be aware that the cookbook we casually consult for a favorite recipe has a history. We should remember that ... food manufacturers, cookbook authors, editors, and publishers used this medium to sell their products and their magazines. In the process, they helped establish links between gender and food preparation that remain strong to this day. (Neuhaus, p.267)
We can be ashamed of our wars and flaws, our capacity for evil as human beings. But cooking and caring for one another--this is our bright side. In cooking, we find our creativity, ingenuity. And I believe women want to embrace this connection because of our special history with food. If men want to join us in the kitchen, I think that's great. We need all the hospitality and caring we can get. (Schenone, p.349)
[Amanda J. Swygart-Hobaugh, Ph.D., is Consulting Librarian for the Social Sciences at Cornell College, as well as an instructor in and Chair of the Women's Studies Program. Her doctoral research examined anti- prostitution crusades in Progressive-Era Chicago, devoting significant attention to the permeation of gendered discourses throughout the crusaders' claims about prostitution.]
Notes
1. The academic in me was somewhat put off by Schenone's lack of precise source citation; however, her chapter-by-chapter "select bibliography" (pp.355-78) lists several useful sources geared toward both general and academic audiences, some accompanied by brief annotations.
2. See Neuhaus's "Essay on Sources," pp.320-23, for a detailed discussion of her sampling procedures.
3. Neuhaus acknowledges that as the primary audience assumed by most cookbook authors/publishers excluded racial/ethnic minorities, the domestic ideology conveyed was thus decidedly targeting white, middle-class women.
4. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974). 5. Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Picador, 1998).
Swygart-Hobaugh, Amanda J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Swygart-Hobaugh, Amanda J. "(En)gendering cooking." Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources, vol. 26, no. 2-3, 2005, p. 4+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
/A137889070/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=819ff6d8. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A137889070
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A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through
Food, Recipes, and Remembrances
Michaela Crawford Reaves
The Historian.
66.4 (Winter 2004): p848+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2004 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
Full Text:
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. By Laura Schenone. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. Pp. xxxvi, 392. $35.00.)
In this intriguing and accessible analysis, the author examines the role of food, food production, and cooking in the lives of women from American prehistory to the modern era. She suggests that cooking, a task commonly assigned to women and defined by women, "reveals itself as a source of power and magic, and, at the same time, a source of oppression in women's lives" (xv). Arranged chronologically, the book presents a readable multicultural history of the lives of many women, including Amerindians, English Puritans, enslaved Africans, and nineteenth-century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The book is lavishly illustrated with period photographs, and, in addition, sidebars present a variety of recipes that augment the text and include valuable comments.
Laura Schenone investigates food and its preparation from a variety of viewpoints. One theme she explores is the economic role of food control, with examples from a myriad of Amerindian cultures. Her most original work, however, deals with the role of women as innovators and harbingers of change and new technology. She argues that this role typically is assigned to men, thereby devaluing and ignoring the contributions of women. One example is nixtamalization, a process by which women in Central America made corn more edible and therefore usable. An additional theme explores food as a sacred ritual of the cultures that includes ceremonial meals, like Judaism. In addition, cooking and cookbooks become a way of female empowerment. From the "poor solitary orphan," Amelia Simmons, to the unmarried Irish female immigrants who journeyed to a new land to find work as domestics, cooking became a "way out," a method of achieving upward mobility (99).
This is not to say that the book does not present some other versions of cooking besides the wholly sanguine. Food production also includes hard work and drudgery, and has even been a tool for indoctrination and control, particularly when American "cooking norms" were forced on minority groups including Amerindians, Italians, and Latinas. Unsavory views of industrialization are also included, as are changes in food consumption, exercise, and nutrition, particularly in the era of home economics, post-1880. Beyond the aspects of cooking, Schenone devotes a quirky moment to "gelatin longings" in the 1950s and "ready-made" food delights like dried cereal (319). One topic briefly mentioned, but inadequately explored, is the role of food in protest, from food riots to modern feminists who eschew cooking.
This book presents a succinct and readable overview of women in history. The author consistently includes references to the historical and cultural experts in the field. If Schenone's work has shortcomings, they exist in the last quarter of the book where the entire twentieth century is explored, defined, and seemingly explained. The first centuries of American women's history are far more complete. Yet this omission does not diminish the scholarly contribution of the work. Schenone's original, if somewhat cursory, glance at this topic makes for an enjoyable read and would be an interesting supplementary text in a high school or college history class.
California Lutheran University Michaela Crawford Reaves Reaves, Michaela Crawford
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Reaves, Michaela Crawford. "A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances." The Historian, vol. 66, no. 4, 2004, p. 848+. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A135425339/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c62ad06e. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A135425339
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The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
Internet Bookwatch.
(Feb. 2008): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
Laura Schenone
W.W. Norton & Company
500--5th Avenue, New York NY 10010
9780393061468 $26.95 www.wwnorton.com
Lending libraries strong in culinary history, particularly American regional dishes, will delight in THE LOST RAVIOLI RECIPES OF HOBOKEN, based on the author's quest for a great grandmother's recipe for ravioli. Her journey takes her to family history and archives, surveys conflicting ideas of culinary history, and journeys from New Jersey's suburbs to her Italian ancestors' home. The result's a lively food history not to be missed.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken." Internet Bookwatch, Feb. 2008. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A174750928/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=97ce61a8. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A174750928
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Q&A with Laura Schenone, author of The Dogs of Avalon
By Claudia Kawczynska, June 2017
Laura Schenone’s new book, The Dogs of Avalon, is a quite departure from her two previous works, both of which focused on food. (Her first, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, won the James Beard Foundation Book Award for culinary writing.) When she adopted an ex-racing Greyhound-mix from Ireland, all that changed. Bark editor-in-chief Claudia Kawczynska talks with her about the humane activists she profiles.
Bark: Why did you write this book, which is basically about the recent history of the Greyhound rescue movement?
Laura Schenone: When my oldest son was around 10, he really wanted a dog, but I had been putting him off because I didn’t want the trouble. Then I happened to meet a woman who was bringing Greyhounds over from Ireland and finding them homes in the U.S. because, as she explained, no one wanted them there. It seemed very strange to me, and I wasn’t interested.
But she got my attention when she sent me an email about a dog named Lily who needed a home. Lily had been found in terrible condition on the side of the road in Cork and brought to a sanctuary. The email came with photos chronicling her recovery from a bloody mess to the most beautiful dog in the world. I was captivated, and agreed to adopt her.
Later, I had the chance to meet Marion Fitzgibbon, former head of the Irish SPCA and one of the people responsible for Lily’s recovery. Marion told me about her decades rescuing animals and her fight against the Greyhound racing industry. When she said, “Every living being has the right to live and die with dignity,” I was quite taken aback. I’d never considered this. In many ways, the book is my effort to understand whether or not such an idea could possibly be true.
BK: What did you find most surprising about the movement’s Irish leaders?
LS: How brave they are. Marion and the women of Limerick Animal Welfare received calls on an emergency hotline that sent them to dangerous places to investigate reports of abuse. They found themselves in housing projects where there was frequent gunfire, and they went into camps of Irish itinerant people known as Travellers. I was also surprised by how big their concerns were. There is a stereotype of animal-rescue people being interested in helping animals to the exclusion of humans, but this wasn’t the case at all. Marion was clear that animals were her priority because they are at the bottom of society, but she saw people as a responsibility, too, and she demonstrated this in some very surprising ways.
BK: What did you find the most difficult to write about?
LS: The suffering of animals was very difficult for me. I had not been aware. But I really believe that if we look away from abuse, we continue the cycle. I coped by focusing on the compassion of people who were trying to make a difference, and also some of the comic foibles I found along the way.
The other difficult topic was the complexity of rural versus urban culture. I met dogmen who had very traditional values and believed, without reservation, that they were doing nothing wrong by breeding and racing dogs. A lot of these guys had grown up in racing and learned from their fathers, so there were deep emotional connections to the whole business. Many dogmen and women treat their animals well. I wanted to be fair and give them their due as human beings, but still be true to the reporting, which revealed enormous and needless animal suffering.
BK: Avalon sounds like an ideal sanctuary. Can you tell us more about Johanna Wothke and her Pro Animale organization, which helped fund and develop Avalon?
LS: Back in the 1980s, Johanna Wothke was an ordinary schoolteacher and mother of two young children living in a small village in Bavaria. She began taking stray animals into her home, and raised funds for their care by writing a little newsletter that described her work. Over the years, she got such tremendous support that she was able to expand and start sanctuaries all over Europe. Her daughter Natascha now runs Pro Animale with her. Today, they have 30 sanctuaries that give safe haven to abused and abandoned horses, cows, sheep, cats and dogs. These places are in beautiful settings and highly enriched; the level of care is extraordinary. Each sanctuary is a utopian paradise for animals. When Johanna learned about the plight of the Irish Greyhound, she called Marion to ask if she needed help. She is a very unusual person, greatly influenced by her father’s persecution under the Nazis. Marion calls her a miracle worker.
BK: How did Ireland became the leading breeder of Greyhounds and why/how does the government support this industry (including the race tracks)?
LS: Greyhounds have been in Ireland and England since the Celts brought their ancestors thousands of years ago. Because of the agricultural nature of Ireland, with its farms and open spaces, it became the leading Greyhound breeder. In the 1950s, the government got in the business and invested huge amounts of taxpayer money to subsidize it and create jobs. This continues today, even though there have been many reports and exposés about corruption, misguided financial decisions, dog abuse and doping. Somehow, the Irish parliament manages to protect the industry and make it untouchable even when it’s losing money. Most critics say that this is because so many high-ranking politicians own racing Greyhounds themselves and are personally and emotionally involved in the industry.
BK: What changes can you attribute to Marion’s work?
LS: When Marion became involved in the 1990s, she was a lone voice. Now, there are many more advocates, and several Greyhound adoption groups in Ireland now find the dogs homes in Europe. Because of this, the Irish Greyhound Board cannot ignore welfare issues, and has made greater investments in adoption. And that’s great. I do believe that the government will eventually have to give up its addiction to Greyhound racing if for no other reason than it simply does not make financial sense.
BK: It seems that the U.S. is ahead of Ireland in making these improvements in the lives of racing Greyhounds. Is that true?
LS: Yes. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, tens of thousands of dogs who couldn’t run anymore were put down in the United States, England and Ireland each year. People didn’t think that Greyhounds were suitable pets. They were considered high-strung and possibly dangerous. But then some people—largely women—in England and the U.S. began to change that, diverting the dogs from death into family homes. As more Greyhounds showed up on leashes in parks and on streets, people began to understand the dogs better and see them differently. Greyhounds have a natural prey drive, but otherwise, they are docile and sweet creatures and make great pets. This still hasn’t happened in Ireland for many reasons, some of which are related to the fact that Ireland didn’t escape British colonialism until 1922.
BK: What’s your goal for the book—what would you like readers to pay special attention to or help with?
LS: I hope the book will surprise people and make them think in new ways about how much animals contribute to our lives and the planet. I would be happy to know that people are inspired by the Greyhound advocates in my book and take some kind of action to build a more compassionate world. I include the web addresses of the organizations I wrote about so that my readers could learn more if they want to help.
BK: Since finishing this book, do you have any news (ideally, good) to share with us?
LS: More Greyhound tracks have closed down in both the U.S. and England, and even in Ireland, one track has been shut down. Overall, the world is moving toward a dramatically improved understanding of animals. I have complete faith that people like Marion Fitzgibbon will continue to carry us forward.
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interviews
Article first appeared in The Bark, Issue 90: Summer 2017
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Claudia Kawczynska is The Bark's co-founder and Editor-in-Chief.
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Woman's Work is Never Done
Reviewed by Ron Kaplan
"A man may work from sun to sun, but woman's work is never done."
This old adage serves as the basis for Laura Schenone's marvelous account of the role of women as providers of nourishment in A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. She manages to squeeze a millennium's-worth of history, social commentary, anecdotes and recipes into one literary stewpot.
Beginning with the Native Americans, she relates the importance of women in tribal life, gatherers to their distaff hunters (although in some cases they served in that capacity as well), using their resourcefulness to make sure nothing went to waste.
Scrutinizing the many hardships through the centuries as it does, Hot Stove is certainly not always upbeat. Each generation had to deal with a new set of problems. For example, the Pilgrims' lack of planning, coupled with their debilitating voyage, put them ashore in the fall, too late to plant any crops. Only the intervention of the Indians saved them from total destruction.
She also tells of the extra burdens of African-American women in times of slavery, working for their masters and still expected to provide comfort for their own families. Nevertheless, their influence on the dining habits of generations to come was undeniable. Schenone observes that aside from preparing dishes from their native lands and learning "American" cooking, "[S]lave woman brought many other food-related skills with them to the Americas. For one thing, [they] excelled as entrepreneurs of food, a role that harkened back to their work as hawkers and truckers in the markets of West Africa." Such acumen allowed some lucky ones to eventually buy their freedom.
(Even the act of cooking posed dangers, as Schenone notes: "On a purely practical level, the colonial woman needed to know what she was doing so she wouldn't burn down the house. Hearth cooking is not to be confused with grilling hamburgers over a campfire.")
As the population expanded westward, new difficulties necessitated further adjustments in dealing with food procurement, preparation, hygiene, etc. Mexican and Indian cultures were incorporated out of necessity, although the concept of "Manifest Destiny," which, simplistically put, held that "white Americans knew best," made this is a slow process.
With the onset of the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s, one would expect a reduction of burdens. Ironically, that was often not the case. "For middle-class women, industrialism brought a different set of new conditions -- most notably the innovations of commercial foods, kitchen tools, and appliances -- and with these new aspirations." But did these newfangled ways really help, or simply bind women to the kitchen even more? Certainly the influx of immigrants strengthened the notion that "a woman's place was in the kitchen," often denying their daughters' access to a meaningful education.
During the Civil War and World Wars I and II, women had to contend with shortages in foods and other materials, as well as the necessity of working outside the home, in professions typically attributed to men ("Rosie the Riveter" immediately comes to mind). Some wished to remain in these roles, enjoying the concomitant independence, but the return of men from war meant the return of women to domestic life. Similarly, times of economic hardship forced many to find ways of stretching a food budget by any means possible. As the author puts it, "When the bank account is low and there is a wonderful pot of soup made if bones, vegetable scraps, and herbs, how do we measure this value? When the boredoms and sorrows of being human weigh us down to despair, how do we measure the value of food, in its comfort and simple physical pleasure? During the Great Depression, women used cooking to create economic value. They also made daily life better, more gracious and humane."
Aside from technological improvements in all aspects of kitchen life, Schenone discusses other social ramifications. How is the family dynamic disrupted by each new "generation" of culinary development? A hundred years ago, many women were churning butter by hand, an arduous and time-consuming process. What part did the advent of mechanization have on the way wives and mothers were perceived? Did the conveniences of gelatin molds and new storage containers, ushered in by the age of plastics, detract from their status as caregivers?
Writing on a personal level, Schenone notes her reliance on one-step dinners, either on the stove or popped into the microwave. "Frozen lasagne [sic] gives a woman some options, and that is what my generation is all about." Family dinners have become a "catch-as-catch-can" proposition, with everyone fending for themselves according to need and convenience. The family sit-down meals outside of holiday gatherings are becoming more and more rare. If Hot Stove was a work of fiction, one could almost sense a diabolical plot to destroy the family unit by making it easy for everyone to be totally self-sufficient. With ready or easy to prepare foods, cell phones, personal music players and the Internet, who needs to actually be with other people?
The author scatters examples of recipes of the various eras, in their vernacular, with commentary and, in some cases, translation, throughout Hot Stove. This is obviously not a cookbook, per se, which could prove a source of some confusion to the browser who does in fact choose a book by its cover.
Hot Stove is extremely well researched and presented, and, despite a sometimes-dour nature borne of the realities of the passing eras, is an entertaining and informative look at one role of women that is too often taken for granted. | January 2004
Ron Kaplan, a freelance writer from Montclair, New Jersey most recently reviewed Leonard Koppett's The Rise and Fall of the Pressbox for January.
A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove
By Laura Schenone
Find & buy on
Subtitled “A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances,” Schenone examines the foods and food-related traditions of native Americans, early immigrants to New England as well as later immigrant groups, slaves, and pioneers to the West. She also probes changes brought about by early professional cookbook writers and new technologies for cooking. This handsome volume is studded with evocative pictures and period recipes.
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances
by Laura Schenone
Norton, 416pp., $35
Taking on the social history of American women in terms of food is a task of mind-boggling scope, and Laura Schenone's efforts to do so provide a very mixed bag of results.
"Throughout history, cooking reveals itself as a source of power and magic, and, at the same time, a source of oppression in women's lives." Schenone attempts to demonstrate this "consistent paradox" specifically through the experience of American women, beginning with pre-Columbian Native Americans and including Puritans, slaves, Westward pioneers, and European, Asian, Latino, and Caribbean immigrants, related in roughly chronological order.
While the author's enthusiasm is evident and admirable, the book is ultimately neither fish nor fowl, neither in-depth scholarly treatment nor comprehensive popular storytelling. Necessarily focusing on selected areas, it falls somewhere between a history survey textbook without the footnotes and a Ken Burns-style documentary without the fiddle music. The beautifully designed volume contains wonderful sepia photos and drawings on creamy paper. Topical sidebars include quotes and anecdotes, and revealing, sometimes amusing, period-specific recipes.
Unfortunately, the speculatively vague, early chapters are almost painful to read, particularly where the author engages in such fanciful mythmaking as the prehistoric "All-Woman," used to illustrate ideas about the earliest American women caring for their families by learning to manipulate seeds and fire, roots and berries.
However, some later sections of the book are quite compelling; the treatment of the late 19th- and early 20th centuries is particularly interesting. The author commendably describes how cooking clubs, settlement homes, and the home economics movement functioned in the "americanization" of Native Americans and immigrants. I was fascinated by the significant (but non-military) roles of women during World War I, including voluntary and widespread food-conservation campaigns, and by the political causes of the post-war food riots of 1917. The processed convenience-food era of the 1950s takes on new meaning when placed in the context of the large numbers of women juggling WWII jobs with homemaking for the first time. For those wanting to explore the politics of food during those eras, this is a reasonable place to begin; the chapter bibliographies provide paths to more in-depth resources.
IN PERSON; Food Stories Galore, And Here Is One
By DEBRA GALANTFEB. 1, 2004
EVEN though she grates her own nutmeg, grows her own herbs and owns a mezzaluna -- a fancy Italian knife shaped like a half moon -- Laura Schenone isn't a ''foody,'' at least in the conventional sense. She does not, for example, have anything resembling a designer kitchen, and she had such ''bad cooking karma'' the other day that she burned her favorite All-Clad pot while stewing apples for breakfast.
In fact, Ms. Schenone, who recently came out with ''A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove'' (W.W. Norton, $35), cooks on an unremarkable and, in her word, ''ugly'' Tappan gas stove, which came with her house here.
Although Ms. Schenone, a freelance writer and mother of two, is interested in food and always has been, her interest goes well beyond what she refers to as ''how it tastes in your own individual mouth.'' What really interests her are the stories behind food -- and what food says about the women who serve it up. And she is more interested in the products of everyday working kitchens than she is in what is cooked up by the world's finest chefs.
''I was always the kind of person who liked to sit in the kitchen with my grandmother and my mother,'' she said.
The granddaughter of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Croatia who all found their way to Hoboken, Ms. Schenone spent her early childhood in a working-class Latino neighborhood in West New York. ''They were hard workers those women, often busy busy busy,'' she said. ''But the place I could get close to them was in the kitchen.''
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Ms. Schenone is the kind of cook and food writer who tracks down old family recipes, both on her side of the family and on her husband's, with the tenacity of a detective. ''I'm a little obsessed with ravioli right now,'' Ms. Schenone said. She traveled to Genoa last summer, partly in search of her family's recipe for genuine Genovese Christmas ravioli, which is made from slow-cooked beef and veal.
And if you give her a recipe or even name a type of food, her mind immediately starts spinning to place the food in a historical and sociological context.
If you say ''corn pudding,'' for example, she will immediately think of Abby Fisher, an African-American woman who published an 1881 cookbook, ''What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Southern Cooking,'' which included many slave recipes. Corn was a staple of the slave diet.
If you say ''borscht,'' she riffs about societies where women had to make root vegetables last all winter to feed their families.
''My mind goes through a whole thing,'' she explained. ''Connections fire away. I see the world that way.''
She can't even watch a movie without noticing who is cooking what and in what kind of kitchen.
''A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove,'' with the subtitle ''A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes and Remembrances,'' is a lavishly illustrated compendium of women's cooking from Native American times to present.
But it is also, at least partly, the story of Ms. Schenone's 41-year relationship with food. Tucked in between the accounts of slave cooks like Abby Fisher and a page from Molly Katzen's handwritten ''Moosewood Cookbook'' is a recipe for her mother's ''Blueberry Cream Salad,'' a 70's-era Jell-O mold. ''Back during the 70's, we called it 'mold' without even a smirk,'' Ms. Schenone wrote. ''Sometimes it was a dessert and sometimes a side dish, sometimes a 'salad.' You could never tell.''
The book starts by recalling Ms. Schenone's admittedly romantic adventure living for two years as a ''vegetable goddess'' in a 150-year-old farmhouse in Cranbury with her husband, Herb Schaffer, who is about to start a job as a senior editor at Harper Collins, before they had children. There she grew and cooked her own pumpkins, tomatoes, eggplant and cucumbers. It was, she writes, ''a lark'' - a lifestyle that made her city friends envious, and that she could try on and discard like an old pair of shoes.
Still, the farmhouse experience filled her with curiosity about the ghosts of the women who had lived there before, and ultimately led her to consider other ghosts, like her own foremothers.
''One day, while I was steaming the skins off some tomatoes in that hot August kitchen, it dawned on me that I could tell my life's story through food,'' she wrote. ''Since food is such an eternal thread through women's lives, I wondered, perhaps naïvely, if I could tell other women's stories that way too.''
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After Ms. Schenone traced her own family's food history to the 19th century, she decided she could go further back still. And that led to the idea for the book. ''I felt like nothing had ever been done before to tell the story of women and food,'' she said.
Originally, she wanted her book to encompass the history of women and food worldwide, but a friend talked her out of it, suggesting she concentrate on America instead.
Even so, the project was so vast that it took a year just to write the book proposal and four more years to research and write it. ''There was a certain point,'' she said. ''Where I was in over my head.''
Although her book celebrates the accomplishments of women who cooked in simpler eras, she tries to avoid being sentimental.
''I have to constantly police myself on the romanticism of it,'' she said. Moreover, she is aware that the kitchen has imprisoned women, as well as showcasing their creativity. ''I do really acknowledge that cooking has oppressed women,'' she said. ''And it has given them power. The labor and the love are two sides of one coin.''
Even in her own life, Ms. Schenone can feel that contradiction. During a party, she will sometimes resent standing in her kitchen, preparing food, and ''missing some great conversations'' going on elsewhere. But she also acknowledges that there are times when she carries a special dish out to her guests, ''and the whole atmosphere changes'' because of her creation.
Just as she tries to avoid sentimentality, Ms. Schenone also resists the urge to smirk at previous eras and the foods they produced. Though she doesn't like Jell-O, for example, she concedes in her book that it was ''light-hearted and comforting, perfect for a generation struggling with the memories of war, fear of communism, and worry that an atom bomb might fall.''
''You do have to watch yourself making fun of other eras, because some day they'll be making fun of us,'' she said.
The same goes for current absurdities, like the obsession with carbohydrates (''eat less, eat well, move your body,'' the slim author advises) and $100,000 designer kitchens with granite countertops and Viking stoves. But rather than condemn Viking idolatry, or worse, succumb to it, ''I always remind myself of all the good cooking that has been done with the simplest means possible,'' she said.
Ms. Schenone smiles as she recalls an unforgettable salad that she and her husband ate during their honeymoon in 1989, while driving mopeds on the Greek island of Naxos. They stopped in a mountain village and ate at a tiny cafe flanked by lemon trees. After, they looked into the house where their meal had been prepared. ''It was like a cave, practically, and it was this beautiful food,'' Ms. Schenone said.
Ms. Schenone's own kitchen features white Formica countertops, open shelving that allows visitors to see her mixing bowls and an original porcelain washboard sink from the 1920's or 30's, the bottom of which is painted buttermilk yellow. The kitchen window is adorned with simple curtains in a 1950's-inspired flower motif -- ''except the flowers are black -- a little piece of irony to amuse myself,'' she said.
The kitchen is not big enough for a table, but it does have a plastic toy kitchen-set for her two sons to play with while she cooks.
She says that when she meets her readers, at book signings and other events, they often want to talk about their own mothers.
''People want to talk to me about their relationships about mom and food. People talk about over-boiled vegetables,'' she said. ''People come up to me with tears in their eyes.''
Search for Authentic Ravioli Forges Family Bonds
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Transcript
December 8, 200712:01 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
New Jersey food writer Laura Schenone spent five years finding and perfecting her great-grandmother's authentic ravioli recipe.
Dan Epstein
Read a recipe for hand-made ravioli dough.
For Laura Schenone, finding her roots meant crossing the globe for ravioli.
The New Jersey writer set off on a quest to find her great-grandmother's hand-rolled ravioli recipe. Along the way, she reunited with relatives and helped mend frayed relations with others around the dinner table.
Her new memoir, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family, chronicles her five-year journey to reclaim her Genoese great-grandmother's recipe, which had been altered since the turn of the last century. Schenone, who writes about food for major publications, travels from New Jersey to the tiny Italian region of Liguria.
In the kitchens of her family elders, she painstakingly learns the art of making ravioli dough. Schenone then spends years perfecting her dough technique. As she relentlessly works the dough, she shares her family's story — its losses, problems and foibles — and helps bridge familial divides.
Schenone showed Andrea Seabrook how to make her great-grandmother's ravioli in NPR's kitchen.
Excerpt: 'The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken'
Laura Schenone
Book cover 'The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken'
A Basic Pasta Dough for Ravioli
Sfoglia per i ravioli/Sfogie per i ravieu
Yield: 1 pound pasta
1 cup 00 flour (if not available, use all-purpose)
1 cup all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting work surface
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 egg
tepid water, beginning with 4 to 6 tablespoons, adding a little at a time; you may need more depending on your flour
Making Dough By Hand
1. Pour the flours into a hill on your work surface and mix them together. Sprinkle the salt on top. Make a hole in the center so it looks like a volcano. Be sure to leave some flour at the bottom of the hole.
2. Add the oil into the hole. Next, crack the egg into the hole. Use a fork to lightly scramble the egg and then gradually pull in flour from the inside walls of this volcano. As you do this, cup your hand around the exterior walls to keep the sides from collapsing and the egg from running all over the pasta board. (If this happens, however, don't panic; just use some flour to quickly pull the egg back into the flour as best you can.)
3. Continue to scramble the egg and pull in flour a little at a time. As the egg absorbs the flour, begin to add the water, gradually. At some point soon, you will no longer have a volcano but a mass of sticky dough. Don't be shy. Abandon the fork and use your hands with confidence to gather the dough up into a ball, adding enough water as necessary, little by little, so that the dough is workable and elastic but not too sticky, as you continue to pull in the loose bits of flour on the board. If you must err with your liquid, better to be too wet than dry. You can add a little more flour later, while kneading. It's much harder to add more water.
4. As your dough comes together, it will be sticking to your fingers. (Did I say to remove your rings?) Scrape your fingers with your dough scraper. When you have a dough that you can knead, wash your hands and scrape the pasta board clear of crusty bits and gumminess so that it is smooth.
5. Knead the dough for about 8 minutes (longer for a larger batch). Generously sprinkle flour on your board as needed so that your dough is strong and absolutely not sticky. I suggest using the heels of your hands to push, then fold the dough in half, then rotate your lump a quarter turn and do it again. Everyone has a different kneading style. Get yourself into a nice rhythm. Push, fold, turn, push, fold, turn, etc.
6. When your dough is satiny, soft, and elastic, cover it with plastic wrap and let it rest for at least 20 minutes if you plan to use the pasta machine, but at least half an hour if you plan to roll on a pin. You can let it sit longer, too, as much as 2 hours. It will continue to develop flavor as it rests, and the glutens will relax so you can roll the dough without having it snap back at you.
Copyright © 2007 Laura Schenone. All rights reserved.
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
Jennifer Reese November 09, 2007 AT 05:00 AM EST
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
type
Book
Current Status
In Season
author
Laura Schenone
publisher
W.W. Norton
genre
Memoir, Nonfiction
We gave it a
B
You sometimes wish Judith Jones had delved deeper in her culinary memoir, The Tenth Muse; Laura Schenone goes to the opposite extreme in her lovely but rambling memoir, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. (Gotta love that title.) ”I wanted something Enduring — a recipe of my own that did not come from a cookbook or a culinary expert on a television show,” Schenone writes of her decision, in midlife, to track down her family’s hallowed ravioli recipe. But when a relative sent her the ingredient list, she was appalled to see supermarket cream cheese. Her quest for a more ”authentic” ravioli takes Schenone from suburban New Jersey to the Ligurian mountains with countless digressions — some scintillating, others less so — on chestnut flour, the deeper meaning of dumplings, and the vicissitudes of marriage. B
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
12 Aug 2008
/Deborah Smith, Executive Editor
Cookbook Reviews, Italian
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken by Laura Schenone
If you’re a food enthusiast (and you must be if you’re stopping by here from time to time) you need to get yourself a nice glass of wine, tea, whatever your fancy and a copy of Laura Schenone’s The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, A search for food and family. This family saga takes you on a trip back in time and across the Atlantic as the author sets out on her quest to find the true, authentic recipes of her Northern Italian great grandmother. This is a woman obsessed, and I can totally relate. She brings to life both turn of the century Italy and Hoboken as well as the sounds, smells and tastes of old world kitchens where pasta is hand rolled by Italian nonnas into paper thin “gossamer dough.” Trust me, you are going to salivate through the entire book.
I met the author at the Ocean County Library’s cookbook event last fall. She is a James Beard Award winner for her book A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove; A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes and Remembrances. Laura lives in Montclair with her family and was gracious enough to allow me to reprint one of her recipes. This is a family recipe that has been “Americanized.” The true Italian recipe, a version of which is also included in the book, calls for Italian bietole and a yogurt like cheese called prescinseua.
There are many more recipes provided at the end of the book which of course thrills the obsessive cook side of me to no end. It’s such a treat to actually get the recipes for the dishes that Laura lovingly describes throughout this beautifully written book. (Oh, and she provides supplier names and contact information for the hard to find ingredients like Chestnut flour and cookware. Love her.) She also provides pictures to accompany all the step by step instructions for pasta making, rolling, filling, cutting, etc. (What I’d really love is to get Ms. Schenone to come do a pasta making class in my kitchen. I’m sure some of the Jersey Biters would be all over that. I don’t know, sounds like a press opportunity to me and a fun party. 😉
Spinach Torta via Hoboken
Yield: serves 10 to 12 as an appetizer or side dish
4 packages frozen chopped spinach
8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
8 eggs, beaten
1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
salt and pepper, to taste
parsley, to taste
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Brush about 2 tablespoons of olive oil on the bottom and halfway up the sides of a 9 x 11 inch pan or Pyrex-type dish.
3. Begin with three mixing bowls; large, medium, and small. In the largest bowl, defrost the spinach very well. Expedite this with heat or the microwave if you wish. Place the cream cheese (or other fresh cheese) in the medium bowl. Beat the eggs in the small bowl.
4. Cream the cream cheese, using a handheld electric mixer. Add the beaten eggs to it, then the Parmigiano-Reggiano, salt and pepper, and parsley. Mix well, then pour half this mixture in to the spinach. Evenly spread the spinach mixture into the oiled pan. Cover the spinach with the remaining half of the lizuid egg mixture.
5. Bake about 45 to 50 minutes, or until the top is golden.
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family
by Laura Schenone
W.W. Norton, 2008. ISBN 978-0-393-06146-8.
Reviewed by Linda Wisniewski
Posted on 01/17/2008
Nonfiction: Memoir; Nonfiction: Cultural/Gender Focus; Nonfiction: Food/Cooking/Kitchen
Laura Schenone calls her search for her great-grandmother's ravioli recipe an obsession. Estranged from her extended family by 'feuds' she didn't understand, the award-winning food writer decided to connect with her ancestors through—what else?—their ravioli, "the dish of happy times."
"A little square of ravioli is like a secret," she writes, "...an envelope with a message." As a young woman, Schenone was not so interested in her Italian roots. She speculates this may have been a reaction to her strict Italian father and the machismo of the neighborhood Italian men who went out at night and left their wives home to cook and clean. Twenty years later, at home with two young sons, she realized how intimately the cooking of pasta was woven into her family history and began the search for the authentic ravioli recipe. She stocked the freezer with frozen meals for her husband and sons and left for Italy, first for a week and the second time longer. Eventually, the whole family went to Italy. Everyone, including the kids, loved it. Schenone's husband was inspired by the beauty and slower pace to want a smaller house with 'less stress' back home.
On her travels to Liguria, the area in Italy where her ancestors came from, Schenone studied old cookbooks and talked to the relatives who knew Adalgiza, her great-grandmother. This was the woman she never met, who followed her young husband Salvatore across the ocean and began the family history in Hoboken, New Jersey. Schenone's story also takes us to Recco, where Adalgiza and Salvatore came from, and to the nearby town of Lumarzo, where "everyone is Schenone." In private homes and trattorias, we get vicarious lessons on rolling, flipping, turning, cutting, filling and pressing ravioli. Finally, Schenone brought her video camera and filmed the ravioli making so she could practice at home.
Back in New Jersey, Schenone's neighbor Lou Palma, who hangs smoked meats in his garage, encouraged her quest. Throughout the book, we watch them work in Palma's kitchen, using an electric pasta machine to turn out hundreds of ravioli, working to get it just right. I learned that there are many types of ravioli, and many types of ripieno (filling.) The author researched the history of pasta in the New York Public Library back to the 13th century. There are many different ways to roll the dough, and various styles of pins and presses and cutters. Schenone folds all this information into her story as easily as we imagine Adalgiza folded her fresh pasta dough.
Reading about the author's efforts to make ravioli as her Genoese relatives did, I admired her perseverance. So much of the secret is in the technique, the rolling and flipping and pressing. In the end, she had to acknowledge that she could never be sure she had found Adalgiza's recipe. Indeed, there are many recipes and many family stories. The book includes includes recipes for ravioli as well as other Italian dishes, photographs to illustrate the recipes, resources for buying cookware and ingredients, and for travel in Liguria.
As an ethnic writer myself, I thoroughly understood and enjoyed the author's obsession with tracking down the details of her family history. Her words took me to the places she visited, and made me want to got here myself. All in all, a delightful and engaging book.
Laura Schenone is the author of the James Beard Award-winning work, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, where she writes about food and other topics for major newspapers and magazines. Visit her website.
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The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
DateFebruary 12, 2010
When The Daring Kitchen asked me to review “The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken” by Laura Schenone, I was excited because I had seen the book before and I have quite an interest in making ravioli. This particular ravioli is made with a special rolling pin that has a checkerboard pattern which makes ravioli very quickly. It's a fun method to try and I think if you are a beginner to ravioli, it is an especially easy method.
Laura Schenone is a food writer living in Hoboken, New Jersey who becomes a little obsessed in her search for the origins of the family ravioli recipe. The ravioli was originally made by her Italian great grandmother, Adalgiza, who immigrated to New Jersey from Italy. Her quest for this recipe leads her to long lost cousins and aunts across the country who finally send her the original ravioli recipe.
When she receives the original recipe, however, it contains a surprising ingredient – Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Laura is stumped by this – why on earth would her Italian ancestor make her ravioli with this very American ingredient? The recipe also contains ground veal and ground pork, but they are left raw in the assembly of the ravioli. She had never heard of leaving the meat raw in ravioli. She even consults Marcella Hazan and Giuliano Bugialli for answers. They are just as mystified. Her curiosity consumes her and in her search for the answers, she travels to Liguria, from where her great grandparents immigrated and learns ravioli making from all sorts of people. She realizes the absurdity of her quest to find the authentic recipe when she finds herself interviewing Sergio Rossi, director of the Genoa chapter of the organization devoted to conserving the culture and foods of the Mediterranean. He is a little confused about her search for such an authentic recipe and tells her, “There is no one taste,” he says. “Each village has its own way. Each family has its own way. Things vary even within a family. I can share with you my tradition, but not the tradition.” And there lies the great lesson of the book – there is no one way to make something.
I made the family’s traditional cream cheese ravioli recipe. I was anxious to know what the cream cheese would be like in the filling. This recipe calls for the raw meat, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that so I did cook it and then put it through my meat grinder so it would be very fine, which is important when making a filling for ravioli. Otherwise, I made the recipe exactly from the book and it was delicious. I loved the tanginess of the cream cheese. I also liked using the checkered rolling pin because I believe you can make ravioli faster this way and my husband liked the fact that there were no “borders” around the individual raviolo and so the ravioli were mostly stuffing.
The meats need to be ground fairly fine for ravioli. I used my KitchenAid meat grinder attachment. If you don't have one, you can use your food processor.
If you would like to read the full review I wrote of the book, please go to The Daring Kitchen.
Adalgiza and Tessie's Ravioli
Add this recipe to ZipList!
adapted from The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
for a printable recipe, click here
Makes 250-300 ravioli. (I cut the recipe in half when I made it and had over 100 ravioli)
The recipe is printed exactly as it was in her original recipe. The notes in parentheses is just how I changed it a little when I made it.
Ingredients:
For the pasta:
5 cups of flour
3 teaspoons of salt
2 eggs (I doubled the amount of eggs)
1-1/2 cups water, approximately (start slow and use judgment)
For the Filling:
8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
1 or 2 boxes frozen chopped spinach, thawed, cooked, and all water squeezed out (I used fresh spinach, about 10 ounces, steamed, water squeezed out and then finely chopped)
1 pound veal, ground finely
1 pound pork, ground finely
salt and pepper
dash freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
2 teaspoons fresh marjoram, finely minced, or 1 teaspoon dry (optional)
1 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano
3 eggs
Instructions:
Make your pasta dough, wrap in floured plastic, and let it rest.
Brown the meats in a fry pan. Let cool. Run the meat through a grinder (or food processor), so it is very fine.
In a large bowl, cream the cheese with an electric mixer until it is soft. Add the spinach, meats and seasonings. Mix well with a wooden spoon to combine. Add the cheese and eggs.
Roll out the dough very thin (on my rollers, I do not go past #5 for ravioli - otherwise the ravioli can break).
When you have two sheets of dough (or one very long sheet, cut in half) lay one sheet on your workspace, spread some of the filling thinly on the pasta, leaving a half inch border. Lay the other sheet on top. Roll firmly with the checkered pin. Cut the ravioli apart with a fluted pastry wheel.
Place the ravioli on a floured sheet pan. (If you want to freeze these, pop the pan into the freezer and place the frozen ravioli in ziplock bags. No need to thaw when you cook them). If you are not cooking the ravioli within an hour, place them in the refrigerator.
Continue to make the ravioli until all your filling is used.
Cook in a large pot of salted water for about 2-3 minutes. Don't let the ravioli boil too vigorously or they may break apart. Remove with a slotted spoon and serve with a little marinara sauce.
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tagged Taghoboken, Tagravioli
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
August 9, 2010 in Uncategorized
Just the title and photo of this book would make me want to pick it up. Who wouldn’t enjoy reading about lost, treasured family recipes; but how many would go to the lengths author Laura Schenone did as she takes us across the ocean to Italy, deep into her ancestral family kitchens to find her great-grandmother’s ravioli recipe. Her original goal was so simple, but things got more complicated as she reunites with relatives. Little did she know when she left New Jersey she would find more than recipes; she found deep, Old World roots complicated with buried family stories and the illusive nature of tradition and memory. How could anyone resist a book with chapters titled, “The Summer of 1957: When Aunt Tessie came to Cook” or “In Lumarzo, All Persons are Schenone,” or “All the World’s a Dumpling,” and even “Ghosts.”
The reader is rewarded with the “lost” recipes in the last chapter of the book. They include ravioli with ricotta, spinach, or mushrooms, but also recipes for minestrone, gnocchi, and pandolce. After you finish the book, all you want to do is become Italian yourself and make the recipes! The book is so poignant and fascinating, it made me start to think about my own ancestry and that of my husband, whose family is from Finland. When our girls were in Helsinki visiting relatives, they learned how to make some Finnish staples such as pulla bread and Karelian pies with egg butter. They traveled up to the Arctic Circle to see the “real’ Santa and ate salmon in a sami tent. My husband was thrilled that the girls were learning about their heritage. I was thrilled that they were gaining family recipes. Recipes are a way of keeping family traditions alive. Many things can be passed from generation to generation, but traditional family recipes will never change. Recipes are real and enduring, and include a part of who we are and where we came from.
I wonder what these Finnish relatives made in their kitchens?
A Finnish Sami tent where you can have fresh salmon and a cup of coffee.
Kara at the Arctic Circle in Finland.
Kara with her Finnish cousins, Toni and Sini.
Laura Schenone, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
Cookbook Give-Aways for the Week of 8-9-10
One of the World’s Most Important Foods
By Angela Mackintosh
ust the name, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, peaks my interest and makes my mouth water. But Laura Schenone isn’t a flash in the pan—she’s a finely crafted author with a tremendous amount of determination. Yes, her books are about food and include scrumptious recipes, but they also provide more than your standard fare and delight even the most literary palate.
Laura Schenone was born and raised in New Jersey to a working- class family who were not readers. But her mom made sure she took her children to the library and bought some classic books, hoping that someone would read them. And it worked. Laura fell in love with books and decided at the age of twelve to become a writer. For many years, she wanted to be a fiction writer, but found it extremely hard to carve a path for herself. Then, when she was around thirty, she fell in love with food and got the idea for her first book, which took nearly ten years to write amidst having two children and working as a freelance writer. That book A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A history of American women told through food, recipes, and remembrances won a James Beard award. Now, she has a second book out, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. She also writes for magazines and newspapers.
Join us as we dish writing with Laura Schenone, a remarkable woman with a ton of determination.
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WOW: Before your latest book, you wrote a history book about the influence of food in American women’s lives A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, which won the 2004 James Beard Foundation Award for Food and Reference Writing. What a huge undertaking! Now, you’ve written something more personal—a food memoir—The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.
Was there an epiphany, or moment, that prompted the decision to write your own story?
Laura: No, there was no single moment, but rather a voice that had been inside my head all of my life. After I did one book that was a social history, I felt like I sort of earned the chance to write my own story. I understood better where my place was in history.
WOW: Yes, you sure did! In fact, both books required an extensive amount of historical research, which doesn’t come naturally to most writers; yet, you have a real gift for searching out details. Where did you learn this craft, or are you just naturally brilliant?
Laura: Not naturally brilliant—I wish, life would be easier—but naturally a question asker. That just seems to be the way I was born.
"I felt like I sort of earned the chance to write my own story."
WOW: (laughs) Well, that’s sure true! Publishers Weekly said that you have a "fierce honesty" and a style of "relentless questioning" in The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. They also said that you had a "refusal to romanticize Italy," which brings me to my next question.
Your book begins with your memory of an old, handcrafted, wooden ravioli press, which hung on the wall of your mother’s kitchen as a decoration. From there you set out on a journey to find the original antique recipe, and your family’s history. This leads you to one of Italy’s smallest regions, Liguria, a narrow ribbon that stretches west along the coast of France. This must have been an amazing trip! Was this your first visit there?
Laura: I was a Francophile as a young woman—and learned French quite well. I went to Italy at age 21, but didn’t make a great many connections. I explain in my book how I am not singularly Italian (I am an American mutt) and how I resisted the Italian parts of my heritage for various reasons. So at 21, I appreciated Italy and thought it was great, but I did not feel any big connection.
When I went back at 40 in search of the recipes, I still didn’t fall in love. Perhaps I was beyond that kind of rapture. It was really a much slower thing that had to do with studying Italian language and going to a deeper level of knowing a place and perhaps discovering my own "Italianness" as I went. It was on my second trip, when it was freezing cold winter weather—not what Americans consider "typical" Italy—when I really fell in love. I met people who were so kind to me and willing to share old recipes with me because they want to save their own heritage, and perhaps because they could tell I was sincere. Also, I have a Genoese last name. I began to discover my own Italianness over time. And, of course, the beauty of the place, particularly the rugged mountains beyond the Riviera.
"I researched images online of places I had been to help jog my memory and experiences."
WOW: That sounds wonderful. But one of the things I know from traveling, is that it can be frustrating to find an Internet connection, especially in remote areas. How did you record your journey?
Laura: I kept notebooks. A different color for every journey—there were three journeys for this book. I wrote down everything. Photographs helped a great deal, as well, when I was later trying to write. But also, back at home, I researched images online of places I had been to help jog my memory and experiences.
WOW: That’s an excellent idea, and I use that method too for some of my freelance writing. I also know you do quite a bit of freelancing and have for some time. Since many of our readers are freelancers, I’m sure they’d love to know how you got your first freelance gig!
Laura: I had a very scrappy way about me and still do. The same qualities that make you a good freelancer make you a good researcher and reporter. You use every lead and every connection. Sometimes you bluff your way into places. But in my young freelance life, I did a lot of nonprofit writing to help support my creative—i.e. nonpaying—work. I actually got a very meaningful steady freelance gig (lasted five years) by answering an ad in the New York Times. Of course, I probably answered hundreds. I also wrote freelance articles for the Jersey section of the New York Times when I was in my twenties. I got in there by bluffing when a change in editors occurred. I sort of acted like I had been part of the old guard—like I had already been writing there—and convinced the new editor to take a story. It was a good story, though, and that’s why he took it more than anything else.
"The same qualities that make you a good freelancer make you a good researcher and reporter."
WOW: (laughs) Laura, that’s too funny! I’ll have to remember that one if I ever find myself in that situation. So, do you have any other tips that our freelance women writers should know?
Laura: If a woman wants to have a family and children, it will mean a very different thing for her to be a writer than it does for most men who are fathers. It will be harder because you are choosing a risky career. And if you are doing creative work—it will be hard to turn away from kids who really need you, in order to write your own story. You have to have a certain amount of selfishness to do that. You also need a husband who will believe in you. Mine does. I highly recommend it. But everyone has to find her own way.
WOW: Having that support is fantastic. It’s even more needed when you set out to take on a monumental project, such as your first book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. Since that was a nonfiction book, did you write a book proposal to submit to agents/editors?
Laura: It took me at least a year to write the proposal. Then it took me a year to get an agent. Part of this was because I had a baby in the middle of all this and also moved to another state for my husband’s work. Once I had an agent, it took her nearly a year to sell the project. She tried first with a trial submission to four editors. They were afraid of it because it was heavily illustrated (expensive production) and I was writing a women’s history book without being a historian. When it didn’t sell quickly, my agent rightly advised me to rework the proposal. This took some time. But the next time it went out, it got more than one offer.
"They were afraid of it… I was writing a women’s history book without being a historian."
WOW: So, after your proposal was accepted, what happened next?
Laura: It took forever to get a contract and get the advance (typical)! And I began working. I completely overcompensated for my lack of a PhD by spending years in the library and reading everything. I also went out and interviewed living women for their memories of old recipes and food ways. This was very important because a lot of women’s history and especially domestic history and cooking—never gets written down. I worked hard at finding native women who would talk to me. And I also did some traveling to places like South Carolina where I could cook with Gullah women and go to plantation houses to see what they were like. Meanwhile, I researched one hundred historical images from library archives all over the country (much of it—but not all of it—online). Also, I wanted the book to be well written, so after reams of research, I wrote and rewrote and wrote again. As I write this, I can hardly believe I did it all.
WOW: You should be very, very proud. You did a wonderful thing for women everywhere by recording this history. So, from start to finish, how long did it take until you finally saw it in print?
Laura: From the first moment of inspiration to the finished book took ten years.
This was very important because a lot of women’s history and especially domestic history and cooking—never gets written down.
WOW: That’s what I call determination! And the topping on the cake had to be when you found out that you’d won the James Beard Foundation Award. Congratulations! How did it feel when you found out?
Laura: It was a joy and a shock. I never expected it. I was mostly glad for my husband and family, who did without a lot of stuff—my time and income—while I worked on this book for so many years. I somehow felt like the honor made it all seem worth it.
WOW: In The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken you search for purity in a recipe untouched by modern technology and Americanized ingredients, and the theme of redemption and beauty seems to be a thread in your books: "I’m not satisfied with the history I have, and I want to rewrite it. I want something beautiful from this beautiful place, something that can redeem me."
As writers, we know that "theme" is the hardest thing to pinpoint, and, most often, only revealed after we write the book. Do you purposefully incorporate themes into your writing, or do you make connections as you go along?
Laura: Both. There’s a glimmer of it, as you begin. But you only understand this after you get inside a deep place. Writing is like meditation. You need to sit and sit in silence so you can become aware.
WOW: That’s so true. But I bet it also has to do a lot with editing—cutting parts to make chapters and sections flow together. Can you recommend any editing techniques to our aspiring authors that you personally use?
Laura: I rewrite a great deal and edit myself constantly. I wish I didn’t. But I’m just relentless. I think my style is to write everything out as I know it and understand it. Then to cut back to the bare bone so I can find the parts that glow. I hate repetitions and try so hard to say what I mean only once. Beginning writers try to swipe at any idea many times. But you’ve really got to cut a thing down so you say it once and get it really right. This takes a lot of time.
"Writing is like meditation. You need to sit and sit in silence so you can become aware."
WOW: I can see that. So, how was writing this memoir different from writing your first book?
Laura: In my first book, I felt very proud to be resurrecting and giving space to women’s voices from history. But for this book I felt not at all "proud." Rather, it is very, very embarrassing to write a personal memoir. To do it, you can’t look up; otherwise you’ll never go back in. When I was done, I felt, and to some extent, still do, feel quite exposed. But I still know that this is what I had to do so I’m okay. In this book, there was some messy stuff to deal with about my family. This was also very hard.
WOW: Your books come from a real passion that is an eternal thread throughout the history of women’s lives: food and all the aspects that come with it—from growing, preparation, and serving, to nurturing, tradition, and culture. In a sense, it’s a way of defining our roots as women. What do you ultimately hope that readers will gain from your books?
Laura: I suppose I had a certain mission, especially in the first book, to say that cooking and domesticity are a part of history, just as important as wars and politics that get so much more attention. In my second book, there is some of this, as well. I like giving readers the truth about history, as best as I can figure, and dispelling myths. But really, I’m not sure that I write to give my readers any specific messages. I write to answer questions I have inside myself. Readers will all bring their own meanings. But ultimately, I would like to give them some hope I suppose, because that’s what books are for.
"I write to answer questions I have inside myself. Readers will all bring their own meanings."
WOW: You also love to cook, and really fell in love with food when you and your hubby moved into a pre-Civil War farmhouse in central New Jersey and you started a vegetable garden. It sounds so romantic, and also, the perfect setting to write. How did you set up your workspace, and what was your writing schedule like?
Laura: Now I live closer to the city, and I’ve got two kids. Back then, I could write whenever I wanted because I had a lot more time. I don’t think romantic settings really make a difference. I need quiet and organization. I write during the day when my kids are in school. It’s hard for me to get cracking in the morning because I seem to need a lot of start up time. I often wind up going back to my office at night—late at night. As to the workspace, I’ve always had some kind of an office with a door.
"I need quiet and organization. I write during the day when my kids are in school."
WOW: Laura, you’re a fascinating interviewee and author. I’ve only touched on a few questions I wanted to ask you today, so you’ll have to come back and visit us again! So, on the author-platform side, you’re out promoting The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken at various venues, such as bookstores, art festivals, and restaurants. I’d love to know how these totally different events have worked for you.
Laura: It’s always best to get media when you can reach the most people—and that’s national media. But recently, I did a wonderful event at the Philadelphia First Person Arts Festival where I demonstrated ravioli and told stories from the book at the same time. It felt like performance art. There were about 60 people who came to watch and then eat later. It was a very warm group. And many people came because they had relatives from the same region in Italy. One guy even had the same last name. I really liked the warmth of that crowd. Perhaps it was because of the food.
WOW: Food is always good in a crowd, but I’m sure it was ultimately your storytelling that made it a winning combination. So, Laura, what’s next in the works for you?
Laura: I’m starting a wonderful new blog with my friend who is a fine artist. It’s called Eat Think Cook (www.eatthinkcook), and it’s about old recipes and modern life. My partner does absolutely beautiful paintings of food—so it’s gorgeous to look at. And I’ll be posting a recipe from history every week. We’ll also answer questions people have about old recipes and toss out lots of ideas and attitude. You can sign up for a monthly mailing at my website: www.lostravioli.com.
WOW: I will certainly do that! Thank you Laura for fascinating interview. Both of your books sound like the perfect holiday gift for any woman who loves to cook and read.
To find out more about Laura Schenone and her fabulous recipes, visit:
Eat Think Cook: http://www.eatthinkcook.com
Laura’s Website: http://www.lostravioli.com
Book Review: The Dogs of Avalon
The Race to Save Animals in Peril
By Claudia Kawczynska, June 2017
The Dogs of Avalon
The Dogs of Avalon
The Race to Save Animals in Peril
Authored by Laura Schenone (W. W. Norton & Company)
Laura Schenone, author of The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril, was not always a dog person. Afraid of most animals, she couldn’t understand those who devoted themselves to animal welfare causes, especially in light of the number of people who needed “saving.”
But then proded by her sons and a chance meeting with a dog rescuer, she adopted a Lurcher from Ireland and was inspired to learn more about sighthounds—in particular, Greyhounds and their mixed-breed relatives. In exploring Greyhound rescue, she has written a work that merits high praise and appreciation.
In this country, the phrase “dog rescue” is almost synonymous with Greyhounds, an elegant breed that until about 50 years ago was rarely seen as a pet. Now, it would be hard to find a pet Greyhound who has not been rescued. Many devoted rescue groups focus on rehabilitating and rehoming these dogs and, as importantly, on exerting intense political pressure on the racing industry. As a result, many U.S. tracks have been closed, a development I heartily applaud. According to the author, this movement, “by and large created by and led by women,” has its origins in both the U.S. and England.
I learned many interesting factoids in this book. For example, I live within a stone’s throw of the world’s first Greyhound racetrack, which was constructed in 1919 at Emeryville, Calif., by engineer Owen Patrick Smith. Smith developed the mechanical lure that took the blood out of the coursing bloodsport and made it less horrifying to watch. By 1931, betting on dog races became legal in many states, especially in Florida (one of the six remaining states that still has active racing).
As Schenone writes, “Greyhound racing took a feverish hold in England, Ireland and Australia.” She also notes that Ireland quickly became the European leader in breeding as well as in exporting dogs to tracks in other countries.
The Irish Parliament established the Greyhound Racing Board (Bord na gCon), which, since 1958, has funded all aspects of this industry. It was, after all, a business that provided people with jobs and “entertainment,” regardless of what it did to the dogs. As an unfortunate consequence, the breed was stigmatized as high energy and fierce, making it hard for them to be considered as suitable companion animals. Thus, even within humane communities, their plight was easily overlooked. Until, that is, 1974, when the Retired Greyhound Trust was established in England and became the first formal Greyhound adoption organization in the world, funded in part, it must be noted, by the industry itself.
While adoptions became popular in this country and in England, Ireland was a holdout. Enter Marion Fitzgibbon of Limerick Animal Welfare. For years, Fitzgibbon had worked tirelessly, tending to animal welfare cases, but it wasn’t until 1994, when she was asked by Louise Coleman of the Massachusetts group Greyhound Friends about the welfare of Ireland’s racing Greyhounds that those dogs came into her purview. Friends cautioned Fitzgibbon that “the Greyhound thing is just too big,” but even though she was recovering from cancer surgery, she was game to take on their plight.
In her book, Schenone describes just how severe that plight was. The Irish racing industry was responsible for killing thousands of dogs (in some truly grisly ways) as well as multiplying the dogs’ misery by selling less successful racers to tracks in Spain. But as the press published exposés, increasing numbers of people joined the rescue ranks, volunteering to help the dogs. Fitzgibbon was the lynchpin. As the Schenone notes, “Once Marion got started on the Greyhound cause, it was as though she had a fever inside her brain.” What she and her colleagues were able to do with scant resources is truly remarkable, and makes for a very compelling read.
The book’s title references the sanctuary funded by another admirable woman, Johanna Wothke, former schoolteacher and founder of Germany’s Pro Animale. After reading a report about the Irish racing industry, she offered Fitzgibbon her assistance. Almost singlehandedly, Wothke rallied donors to contribute more than 200,000 euros for the construction of a paradisiacal, cage-free sanctuary on 38 acres in Ireland’s County Galway. Marion named it Avalon and they created a shelter in the truest sense of the word. In bright airy rooms grouped under names such as Patience, Tolerance, Faithfulness, Honesty and Strength, rescued racers are cared for until new homes can be found for them (oftentimes in Germany).
Work continues for Ireland’s animal protectors, who have accomplished a lot in a country where, as the author notes, “the government gives the racing business so much money.” Let’s hope that momentum for the Greyhound cause continues to build. With people like those profiled in this engrossing book still very much part of the effort, and with the publication of this book itself, things just might change. Schenone does a splendid job in providing a history of a movement that has important cultural significance worldwide. The stories of animal welfare leaders who have been able to achieve so much powered by their love for dogs is truly inspirational and definitely worthy of your notice.
See book excerpt and author interview.
The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril
By Laura Schenone W.W. Norton & Company 336 pp.
Reviewed by Sam Litzinger
August 29, 2017
An Irishwoman's quest to spare greyhounds the cruel fate that awaits most of them.
Greyhounds are the Katharine Hepburns of the canine world: lean and elegant, with apparent self-sufficiency bordering on haughtiness. The monk in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is very fond of them: “Greyhounds he hadde as swifte as fowel in flight/ Of prikyng and of huntyng for the hare/ Was al his lust, for no cost wolde he spare.”
That is the oldest known reference to these dogs in Western literature.
Greyhounds were born (and bred) to run. They can reach speeds of more than 40 mph, which means humans who gamble like to bet on which one of the animals finishes first in a race. Many of the greyhounds who compete professionally don't do well when they grow old and start to slow down. A few are lucky enough to find new lives as family pets, but thousands more are abandoned, killed, or given over for medical experimentation each year.
Laura Schenone recounts some of their stories in The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril. It's the kind of nonfiction book that makes you both despise and admire humans. A warning: Some of the descriptions of animal abuse will likely haunt the reader (one, the tale of "Demi the Graveyard Dog," actually gave me a nightmare).
Occasional revulsion is, blessedly, counterbalanced by the often-moving stories of those who do all they can (and in some cases, perhaps more than they should; animal rescue can become an obsession) to save their fellow sentient beings.
The titular dogs are greyhounds in Ireland that have found good lives in Avalon, a shelter built in County Galway after years of work, frustration, fundraising, and luck. That these animals were in peril becomes obvious over the course of the book.
Schenone and the greyhounds have found their champion in Marion Fitzgibbon, head of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Fitzgibbon seems to be someone you’d want on your side during, for example, a difficult childbirth — or a firefight. Determination mixes with compassion to become the driving forces in her life.
Fitzgibbon unknowingly experienced the First Noble Truth of Buddhism — "Existence is suffering" — at about age 6, when she saw a working horse struggling in a rainstorm and begged her mother to let her shield the animal with an umbrella:
"She tried to explain to her parents that she wanted to hold it over the horse. She needed to at least try to protect him. When her bewildered parents said no, we don't hold umbrellas over horses, she began to sob. They tried to comfort her by explaining that a horse in the rain was perfectly normal because that's what a horse's life is. Animals don't feel things as we do. They're different from humans. She only cried harder because she knew her parents were lying."
Years later, Fitzgibbon decided that her own path out of suffering was to help as many animals as she could. "Every living creature has the right to live and die with dignity," she tells Schenone in what becomes a theme of the book.
That seems to be a particularly difficult mission in Ireland, where, as both Fitzgibbon and the author discover, many people still regard animals as things rather than fellow beings — although attitudes there, like in other countries, seem to be changing.
The Dogs of Avalon weaves several stories together, not only Fitzgibbon's and those who step in and out of her rescue circle, but the author's, as well. Despite having a fear of most animals, Schenone becomes the caretaker of a rescued lurcher (a greyhound crossed with another breed) named Lily. During a conversation with her (who among us doesn't talk to our animals?), the other overarching question of the book is raised: "'Lily, tell me' I said one morning when we were walking to the park, 'what do I owe you?'"
What do we owe any animal? A relatively peaceful life and a painless death, in the case of those we raise for food? Kindness, at minimum? Devotion? Respect? Love?
As she looks for answers, Schenone’s own views evolve: “For many years, I wrote about food and cooking. Animals, for the most part, meant meat, milk, cheese, eggs, fish. I believed they should be treated humanely, but they were food, nonetheless.”
In the course of researching and writing this book, her attitude is transformed.
But Schenone is never quite sure she’s doing right by Lily. She concludes that many of Lily’s early behavior problems after being rescued arose from the fact that she had been bred to do something: chase a hare, run like a flash.
She writes: “Dogs are in a prison of our making. We bred them so they could gladly be our servants in specialized jobs. Now we expect them to suddenly switch jobs and go against their genetic raison d’etre so they can be our companions, therapists, teachers and healers.”
So what does she owe Lily? What does she owe any animal?
In the end, a good part of the way we decide to treat greyhounds or any other beings with whom we share the planet comes down to the choices we make. Marion Fitzgibbon has chosen to devote her life to her belief that every creature deserves to live and die with dignity.
Many others have chosen to join in the effort, even though it can cost them everything, from personal relationships to huge sums of money. Laura Schenone was impressed enough by their stories that she chose to share them.
The Dogs of Avalon is not one of those How Adopting a/an (e.g., Dog, Cat, Aardvark, Wolverine) Changed My Life books. One thing that sets it apart is the reporting. Schenone, whose previous books are The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken and A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, has expertise in cooking and takes care to get her facts straight in Dogs. (Messing up the ingredients and proportions in a ravioli recipe, I suspect, would not go over well with certain Hoboken families.)
Want to know how many greyhounds were considered "usable" to race in 1952? The answer is 30 percent, which was not a good thing for the remaining 70 percent. What did the second-century writer Arrian think of his Celtic hound? He liked and admired her, telling us that when she was young, she could catch as many as four hares a day.
The history included here is both interesting and useful. This sort of information is imparted seamlessly over the course of the narrative. It is particularly effective in the sections on greyhound racing and the grim statistics on the long-term survival rates of the racers.
Schenone’s prose moves easily from journalistic to lyrical, as with her description of a town in Ireland she visited:
“The town of Kilfinane looked like it could have come from a picture book of charming Irish villages. Rows of buildings lined the Main Street, each tinted a different pastel hue of blue, orange, green, or yellow, stark against the treeless sky. Pubs, butchers, betting shops, and restaurants, one after the next, in an unbroken façade. Beyond the town lay the forested Ballyhoura Hills.”
The author has a way with words.
Those who are not as deeply concerned about animals as Marion Fitzgibbon (and, in the end, Laura Schenone) sometimes ask why those who are spend so much time, energy, and money on non-human creatures. The answer is partly revealed in The Dogs of Avalon: Once you understand animals, how could you not do something to help them? To let them suffer is a moral failure.
The hope — mine and, I suspect, Schenone’s — is that this book will find a broad readership. To prompt change in the way greyhounds are often mistreated, it is not enough to reach only “animal people.” A more general audience needs to find Dogs and consider the issues it raises. The book is deeply felt but not sentimental or cloying, which makes it both accessible and important.
The Greyhound Racing Association of America argues for the economic benefits of the 40 active racetracks its website shows are still operating in the United States. Anyone reading The Dogs of Avalon is unlikely to be persuaded.
Sam Litzinger is a correspondent for CBS News and the producer/host of the podcast "Talking Animals." He volunteers at Last Chance Animal Rescue in Waldorf, MD.
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The Dogs of Avalon and the Unsinkable Marion Fitzgibbon
A new book details how one woman made a huge difference for rescued greyhounds
Posted Oct 02, 2017
“Every living being has the right to live and die with dignity”
A few months ago I was asked to write an endorsement for a book by Laura Schenone called The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril (link is external). The moment I began reading it I was taken in and couldn't put it down. Part of the book's description reads, "After adopting an Irish sight hound, Laura Schenone discovers a remarkable and little-known fight to gain justice for dogs and for all animals. The Dogs of Avalon introduces us to the strong-willed Marion Fitzgibbon, born in rural Ireland, where animals are valued only for their utility. But Fitzgibbon believes that suffering is felt by all creatures, and she champions the cause of strays, baffling those around her―including her family―as she and a group of local women rescue any animal in need and taking on increasingly risky missions." Ms. Fitzgibbon went on to become director of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and was a tireless and selfless fighter for all kinds of animals.
"I hope readers come away from the book inspired by the impact ordinary people can make on the world."
Courtesy of Laura Schenone
Source: Courtesy of Laura Schenone
I learned a lot by reading The Dogs of Avalon so I reached out to Ms. Schenone to see if she could answer a few questions about her book. I was thrilled when she said she could. Our interview went as follows.
Why did you write The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril?
I was no great animal lover, but my son was, and he really wanted a dog. A friend was bringing over rescued greyhounds from Ireland and convinced us to take one. She explained that the Irish bred and raced these dogs in vast numbers, but no one over there wanted to adopt them. We fell in love with Lily, our greyhound mix.
A few months later, I had the opportunity to meet Marion Fitzgibbon of Limerick—one of the women behind Lily’s salvation and someone who had dedicated her life to saving animals of all kinds. When we met, she startled me with the way she talked about her work rescuing and advocating for animals. She had a seriousness I’d never considered, like a UN diplomat talking about children in war. She said to me, “Every living being has the right to live and die with dignity.” That idea really struck me. I wanted to know if it could possibly be true. I think I wrote the book to find out.
How does it build on your previous interests and books?
I was known as a food writer. My goal with this book was to not write about food but stretch myself into new territory. But, ironically, the more time I spent with Marion, the more I began to think about the welfare of all animals and the more concerned I became with the billions of animals used in factory farming—because of the suffering they experience, and also the impact on our environment. So there I was back to food again. In the book I describe the moment when I was so upset because I realized I could no longer eat prosciutto. For a cook who loves Italy, it was a loss, but one I knew I had to take.
What are you major messages?
I hope readers come away from the book inspired by the impact ordinary people can make on the world. I also hope they feel, as I did, a new appreciation for animals—who have given us so much—and the value of all life. The book tells of my own slow awakening to see animals as cohabitants of the planet—not things just here for our use. I’d be so happy of people read the book and consider this idea for themselves.
Can you please tell us a bit more about the amazing and inspiring work of Marion Fitzgibbon?
As a young woman in rural Ireland, Marion started picking up homeless and starving dogs that were filling the streets of Limerick. Along the way, she made friends with a group of likeminded women, and they founded Limerick Animal Welfare. Marion’s home phone became the hurt-animal hotline for the county, and she went out all the time to investigate reports of animal abuse, because no one else was doing it.
She and her colleagues rescued everything from hurt swans to abused circus tigers and found homes for countless dogs and cats. They also went into housing projects amid gunfire, and camps of Irish itinerant people, whose cause Marion eventually took on as well. After becoming director of the Irish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she stood up to the greyhound racing industry—an entrenched business in Ireland and backed by government money and power. So obviously she was incredibly brave and tireless. But she was also human. She had four children and a wonderful husband who had to put up with a lot because of her choices.
What can we learn from her efforts that can be applied today?
Right now there is so much worrying about the state of the world and so much time given to words and social media. Marion and the women of Limerick Animal Welfare rolled up their sleeves and got to work right in their own communities. They didn’t ask permission. They just did it. For most of us, our greatest opportunities to help others are closer than we think.
Who is your intended audience?
Animal lovers of all kinds. Anyone who has ever adopted and loved a dog or other kind of pet. But I also hope the book finds an audience among people who enjoy reading narrative nonfiction—which is to say, it is well reported but I wrote it to read like a novel so that anyone would find it to be a good page-turning story.
What are some of your current and future projects?
This book took many years of research and writing. I am still recovering! Right now I want to write essays and articles for a while. I like new challenges, but I’m sure that no matter what I do in the future, I will be interested in writing about animals for the rest of my life.
Is there anything else you'd like to tell readers?
We are at a crossroads in history. Scientists now tell that animals are smarter than we ever knew, and that they suffer more than we ever knew as well. What’s clear is that the way treat animals cannot be disconnected from climate change, the survival of the planet. Whether it’s through agriculture or habitat loss, our treatment of animals is having huge consequences. We will only make it if we have reverence for all living beings. I believe that we need to listen to scientists and people like Marion who have compassion and vision. They will help lead the way.
Layers of hope offered by the indefatigable and unsinkable Marion Fitzgibbon
Thank you, Laura, for taking the time to answer these questions and to tell us more about Ms. Fitzgibbon and yourself and your own transformation. Your story of her tireless and selfless efforts on behalf of street dogs, and then against the enormous Irish greyhound industry is incredibly moving. Readers likely will be asking themselves over and over again something like, "How can anyone do the horrific things they do to other sentient beings?" However, there's a wonderful upside to your remarkable and passionately inspirational book, because it also offers many different layers of hope. In addition to reading about the remarkable and courageous Marion Fitzgibbon, Ms. Schenone's personal journey also is a most inspirational story about how feeling for and doing something to help other animals who simply are trying to live in an ever-increasing human dominated world can change one's life in many unanticipated and positive ways.
I agree with how your book has been described, namely, "In this potent David and Goliath story, Schenone’s journey helps us understand our deep connection to animals and gives us inspiration in the form of the unforgettable Fitzgibbon, who grapples with compassion and activism and shows the difference we are all capable of making in the world." The life of every single individual matters (link is external), and this was so clear in Ms. Fitzgibbon's tireless work.
The take home message from The Dogs of Avalon is very clear, namely, every living being has the right to live and to die with dignity. The Dogs of Avalon is a life enriching game-changer that deserves a broad global audience. It is that good. And, if they could, I'm sure the animals would thank you and the indefatigable and unsinkable Marion Fitzgibbon for your efforts.
Marc Bekoff’s latest books are Jasper’s Story: Saving Moon Bears (with Jill Robinson); Ignoring Nature No More: The Case for Compassionate Conservation; Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence,Emotions, Friendship, and Conservation; Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence; The Jane Effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall (edited with Dale Peterson); and The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (with Jessica Pierce). Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do will be published in early 2018. Learn more at marcbekoff.com (link is external).
She adopted a starving greyhound. Then she learned about a true rescue hero.
By Connie Ogle
cogle@miamiherald.com
October 17, 2017 03:51 PM
Updated October 17, 2017 05:28 PM
Laura Schenone believes the time to talk about the plight of greyhounds is now.
“I think we are reaching a point in our civilization where the planet needs us to rethink how we care for animals,” says the author of “The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril.” Schenone appears Oct. 22 at Books & Books in Coral Gables.
Schenone, who lives in New Jersey and describes herself as a reluctant activist and “not a natural born animal lover,” was inspired to write the book when she adopted a dog named Lily for her sons. A friend involved with a group rescuing greyhounds in Ireland introduced her to Lily.
Lily, a lurcher abandoned and near death, had suffered from malnutrition and mange. But as is so often the case, meeting her was love at first sight for Schenone.
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Through the adoption, Schenone learned the story of Marion Fitzgibbon, who has made a career of rescuing animals in Limerick, saving wildlife, street dogs and circus animals. She eventually became the director of the Irish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
greyhound
The Dogs of Avalon: The Race to Save Animals in Peril. Laura Schenone. Norton. $26.95.
“The Dogs of Avalon” focuses on Fitzgibbon’s tireless efforts to improve conditions for greyhounds and to put pressure on a government that supported an industry that killed thousands of dogs each year. The story is especially relevant in Florida, where earlier this year, 12 racing dogs tested positive for cocaine.
Schenone does not present a one-sided argument. She interviewed “dog men” who raise and race greyhounds.
“Many of them do love the dogs, and many do treat their dogs well,” she says. “I wanted to get that across. But there’s a culture war, the old way of doing things and the new. They’ve been in the business for years, and it connects them to their dads. But we are at a crossroads in this world. We know dogs think and feel. We know they love us. But 10,000 are born every year, and they can’t all run. Many die. Many are injured.”
“The Dogs of Avalon” chronicles Schenone’s own animal rights awakening, too (she’s now a vegetarian, though a struggling vegan — “I hate black coffee,” she says, laughing). She writes about taking her son to Marineland near St. Augustine years ago and his refusal to go into the attraction because the dolphins were in “prison.”
“As a child, he could see what I couldn’t,” Schenone says.
But Fitzgibbon’s work to save animals is the heart of the book.
“I think in our time, when we are seeing so much hatred and vitriol, saying ‘Here are people who decided to make a difference locally’ is what we need,” Schinone says.
grey
Meet a dog from Friends of Greyhounds, a Miami rescue group that will be at the Books & Books reading.
Larry Warsh Photography
Making a difference locally is the mission of Miami rescue group Friends of Greyhounds, which will be at Schenone’s event with dogs available for adoption.
Michelle Weaver, who founded the organization with her husband in 2001, says greyhounds make terrific pets.
“They’re oriented to people,” she says. “ They already have a lot of training. A greyhound is a perfect large dog for South Florida. They don’t smell, they don’t have thick fur, and they desperately need someone to pay attention to them. It’s easy to walk into the Humane Society and see puppies and take home a puppy. These dogs have given it all to racing and training, and when they’re not making money they’re kicked out the door. ... and they’re such loving dogs.”
Schenone agrees. She’s besotted with Lily, who’s now 12.
“Greyhounds are so zen and chill and ask for so little,” she says. “They make the most wonderful pets for busy people.”
As for what she hopes readers learn from “The Dogs of Avalon,” Schenone turns again to Fitzgibbon.
“She said, ‘Every living being has the right to live or die with dignity.’ I think this book comes at a moment in time to ask ourselves this question and decide whether or not we believe it’s true.”
lilyandson
Lily and Schenone’s son Simon when he was 5 (he’s 16 now).
If You Go
Who: Laura Schenone and “The Dogs of Avalon.” Friends of Greyhounds will be in attendance with dogs available for adoption.
When: 4 p.m. Oct. 22
Where: Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables
Info: http://booksandbooks.com/
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