Heritage recipes and stories from immigrant women
NEW CANAAN CHEF TURNS TO FEMALE IMMIGRANTS FOR ‘HERITAGE KITCHEN’
Some people cook from a place of hunger or desire. For New Canaan’s Anna Francese Gass, cooking is her passion and a tie to her family’s heritage. Growing up, her mother, Gina Crocco Francese, was a first-generation immigrant from Calabria, Italy, and her mother prepared recipes from her own childhood to share her Italian culture with her children, thousands of miles away in the family’s new home in Rhode Island.
Gina, like many women before her, prepares her recipes from memory and when Francese Gass, a professional chef and recipe tester, realized she didn’t know how to prepare her mother’s dishes, she set out on a mission to record her family’s favorite meals, which she called her Meatball Project. Nearly five years later a project that began with a meatball evolved into her cookbook “Heirloom Kitchen: Heritage Recipes and Family Stories from the Tables of Immigrant Women,” which was released on April 23. The book features more than 100 recipes from dozens of women from around the world who shared their immigration stories and recipes with Francese Gass. Her story of how a single meatball snowballed into a diverse cookbook, left us asking questions.
Q: What inspired you to create this cookbook?
Anna Francese Gass: The book was all inspired by my mother; I grew up in an Italian-American home, my mother is an immigrant from Calabria, Italy. One day almost five years ago now, I realized I didn’t know how to make most of my mom’s recipes because she still makes them all for us. So we started what we called the ‘Meatball Project’ — so it all started with a meatball. We got in the kitchen, my mom and I, and we cooked up all the recipes, I translated all the pinches into teaspoons and the handfuls into cups and we went from there. But then I realized I have so many friends with parents who are also first generation and I thought maybe, they also have mothers who don’t have everything written down and I could provide a service. I could go cook with these women — just like I did with my mom — and write their recipes down. It’s mutually beneficial because I get to learn all these recipes from around the world and all my friends get a recorded recipe. So I sent out an email, just hoping to get five or six people to respond and instead I probably got 20 responses.
Q: What made you want to incorporate their immigration stories into the book?
AFG: I was going out and meeting these women, I just happened to ask the very first woman, ‘why did you come to the U.S.?’ and she told me her beautiful immigration story. So I was jotting the recipe down in a notebook on one side and on the other side, I was writing her story down, because it was interesting to me. I thought it made the recipe even more rich to know the woman behind it and why she came here.
Q: What did you learn from these women?
AFG: The simple answer would be I learned over a hundred amazing, delicious recipes that are from the women of all these different countries. I think the bigger takeaway is the perspective that I gained from cooking with these women because we talked about this food and why they came here and it made me think about my own life and my own mother and why she came to the U.S. and the challenges they faced on their way to get here. I came out with all these different recipes and amazing stories that taught me about life.
Q: What unifies all these women in the way they cook?
AFG: I think they all cook from a place of love and care and I know that might sound cliche or hokey but it is the truth. None of these women cook for accolades or post it on Instagram or for any other sort of reward. Basically, they came here and they wanted to contain and maintain their traditions from their homeland. They didn’t want anyone in their family — their children, their future generations, their grandchildren — to forget where they came from. They all moved around the kitchen the same way, they all talked about their dishes with the same passion and the end result of every dish was nourishing their family and educating their family on what those foods mean to them, their grandparents and to their great-great grandparents.
Q: In your book, you refer to food as “magic” and it can “transport” people. What did you mean by that?
AFG: When these women came here in a new land, speaking a new language, trying to get a job and trying to raise American children, all the different challenges they faced and everytime they recreated the dishes of their mothers they were transported back, they felt like they were back in their home countries. And that made them feel safe, it created that safe haven in the comfort of their home. You’re here and you’re living this new life which is very brave, but they were able to transport back and feel safe.
“ONE DAY ... I REALIZED I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MOST OF MY MOM’S RECIPES BECAUSE SHE STILL MAKES THEM ALL FOR US. SO WE STARTED WHAT WE CALLED THE ‘MEATBALL PROJECT’ — SO IT ALL STARTED WITH A MEATBALL.”