That woman is as foreign to me as an "alien". It is equally suprising that this "type" of I-A women seems to receive such a disproportionate amount of attention. 
   
One last word. Food has such an important part of the I-A Culture, for so many justifiable reasons. It is a shame that so many of our fellow I-As think their I-A Culture begins and ends at the table. That so many are unwilling to explore all of the other rich and wonderful aspects of their Italian American/Italian History and Culture.   
==============================================
Thanks to H-ITAM, Prof. Ben Lawton, Editor

For Immediate Release: August 1, 2002
Contact: Franklin Dennis (212) 817-7928

"[An] impressive anthology...Editors DeSalvo (Vertigo) and Giunta (Writing with an Accent) have collected a vast, thoroughly wonderful assortment of poetry, memoirs and stories from more than fifty writers that define today's female Italian American experience....these pieces will undoubtedly prompt female readers to contemplate the influence of their own grandmothers, mothers and aunts; the comfort of their culture and cuisine; and their own place in the world."
-Publishers Weekly

COMPELLING AND PROVOCATIVE NEW COLLECTION 
DARINGLY REDEFINES WHAT IT MEANS TO BE 
AN ITALIAN AMERICAN WOMAN

The classic images of Italian American women nurturing loved ones with food melts away in THE MILK OF ALMONDS: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta. Using food as their organizing theme, more than fifty writers-some well known, some emerging-provide piercing critiques and loving celebrations of every facet of Italian American culture.

Award winning novelist Carol Maso opens the book with a piece about breastfeeding -the original act of feeding and being fed. In a story by American Book Award winner Dorothy Bryant, a daughter shares a meal with her elderly father, triggering memories of past meals and her mother's search for approval through her cooking. Author Chris Mazzo writes about her unusual upbringing in suburban California with her first-generation-American father who believed food should be grown, raised, hunted or foraged rather than simply bought at a supermarket. The role of food in Italian American culture permeates the textures of these richly diverse works.

Stories Untold
In THE MILK OF ALMONDS, food is a catalyst for exploring a constellation of issues. Writers reveal the painful legacies of prejudice and family violence, how women's unmet hungers are subverted into appetites for sex and drugs, and the ways in which food and the act of sharing meals can be diversions from facing painful truths...

Cheryl Burke tells of her struggle with eating disorders throughout her teenage years in a family that measured female worth in thinness and beauty, yet snacked on lasagna and sat down for four-hour Sunday meals.

Filmmaker Kym Ragusa recalls her father (who was) an army cook in Vietnam during the war-and the way cooking and feeding people became his only medium to communicate, to show love, and to disguise his own frailty. In all of these pieces, food plays an enormous part in defining familial relationships.

A Bridge to Lost Heritage
For many contributors to THE MILK OF ALMONDS, food serves as a bridge to a
lost heritage-to earlier generations, to the old country and the immigrant experience, to the deprivation and solidarity of the working-class. The slow decay and death of a family's garden symbolizes the delicacy of youth, the slow end to the traditional agrarian way of life in Sicily, and the ephemerality of life in Edvige Giunta's "The Giara of Memory." Yet her recollections of summers at the garden, and of the picking of the vegetables and the making of ragu, forever connect her to a land where, although despite constant struggle, modernity and antiquity coexist.

Within every Italian American family there is a story of why the family left Italy and emigrated to the United States. The inability to feed oneself and one's family is often at the heart of such stories. An abundance of good Italian food, then, in the New World, represents more than a devotion to culinary traditions; it represents prosperity and success. For many, food has been the strongest, if not the only connection to their Italian heritage.

Cultural Recovery and Reclamation
Food can also represent the struggle between the culture and values of the Old World and the drive towards assimilation in America. For some writers this has meant reclaiming the joy of cooking and reinventing old rituals to suit new realities. 

In their introduction to THE MILK OF ALMONDS, DeSalvo and Giunta write, "For many Italian American women, recipes-and the stories that surround them-represent occasions through which they explore the relationship to culture and through which they shape their creative vision."

Maria Laurino sums up the push and pull between the two cultures when she writes in her piece "Words," "My love for my mother's cooking and her expressive use of southern Italian provided the simmering flavors of life that I never knew but felt intimately connected to. At the same time, southern Italian food and dialect words, my closest links to our past, collided with everyday life on our suburban cul-de-sac." 

The kitchen itself represented the struggle between old and new in Louise DeSalvo's
childhood home. While her mother detested cooking, taking out all of her anger and
aggression in the kitchen, DeSalvo's Old World grandmother methodically
and lovingly baked traditional Italian bread three times a week under the watchful eyes of her granddaughters. To the mother, a 1950s modern, suburban housewife, the grandmother's traditional, peasant-like ways represented everything she was trying not be-everything she wanted to leave behind.

Years later, DeSalvo would teach herself how to cook traditional Italian dishes, reclaiming the kitchen and recovering her past. Tantalizing and appetizing, this collection is intellectually and politically provocative. These are the voices of Italian American women at the beginning of the 21st century who refuse to be overlooked, silenced, or stereotyped. Theirs is a literature that is multifaceted, soul-satisfying,
and nourishing. This book not only helps recover the voices of Italian American women, it helps to reclaim the rich heritage and tradition of Italian American Literature.

LOUISE DESALVO has published thirteen books, among them her critically
acclaimed memoir, Vertigo. She is professor of English at Hunter College
in New York City.

EDVIGE GIUNTA is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary
Italian American Women Authors. She is associate professor of English at New
Jersey City University.

The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture
Edited by Louise DeSalvo and Edvige Giunta                 

Distribution:Consortium Books
386 pp. / ISBN: 1-55861-392-7 /$26.95 cloth             
Publication Date: August 1, 2002
(800) 283-3572