Last week I got to spend time with Robrt Pela while he made Italian Wedding Soup. It was uncharacteristically rainy in Phoenix and moody and our conversation rambled across many topics: family, memory, marriage, the loss of treasured family recipes.
We also talked about his mother’s cookbooks. Lovingly annotated and with hand written notes to herself, they were actually three ring binders, some retrieved from her kids. “My brother’s math binder with some girls name written in a heart.”
And of course, all of this brings to mind my mother working for weeks (despite feeling really lousy) on three-ring binder cookbooks that she gave to my brother and me, and a few cousins, in the last year of her life. She wrote “This is a collection of some of my favorite recipes. I have collected them from family, friends, magazines, and recipe books. I hope you enjoy having them. I love you. Mom.”
I can’t tell you how valuable this cookbook is to me now. I’m so glad to have it.
Here is my piece on Robrt.
