When my mother died in 2002, she willed me her cookbook. It has recipes going back to the World War I era when South Philly was an immigrant staging area. (It still is, but the immigrants are from Southeast Asia, not Europe.) Some of the recipes are Sicilian, some from other areas of southern Italy, and some come from rubbing shoulders with Poles and other eastern European nationalities.
I turned the recipes into a Word document and passed it on to various family members. It's an artifact from an earlier era when women were expected to be artists of the kitchen.
