Ravioli Lost, Adventure Found

In The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken (reviewed Sept. 3), Laura Schenone's search for her great-grandmother's ravioli recipe takes her to Genoa and back to New Jersey.

Your father's Italian, but your mother is of Croatian descent. How much do you consider yourself Italian or Italian-American?

I was raised with an Italian bent.I never considered myself Italian because of the Italian patriarchy. I had a hard time with the Italian machismo growing up. I was raised in the female culture of the kitchen—and that was not part of the Italian side.

But your inspiration here is through your father's family, not your mother's.

That was a surprise. It was not my plan to go to Italy. I wanted a recipe, and I couldn't get what I wanted from Croatia. I couldn't find anything on my mother's side, so I looked to my father knowing that there was this ravioli recipe. And there was a pasta making tool that hung on the wall, and that had long been a part of the family. The ravioli was the only thing of the family that's left—and that's all I had to link me to the Old World. So in researching, I did discover my Italianness.

One of the ingredients in question was cream cheese, which is definitely not Italian. But when you went back to Genoa, you actually found a cheese that was similar.

Yes, in dialect the cheese is called prescinsêua. I ended up finding a cheese maker in Italy who taught me to make the cheese—and in the end, it tasted, well, like cream cheese. It's just a little sour. I actually found other Genoese who use cream cheese. I came to the conclusion that when my family came to the U.S., they suddenly felt free to do what they wanted and to use ingredients that they wanted to use. I mean there is something unctuous about cream cheese. Yet at the same time it's wonderful—rich and sweet.

And the other ingredient?

The ravioli was filled with raw meat, which cooked when it was boiled [rather than precooked]. So perhaps my great-grandmother, who lived above a Chinese delivery place in Hoboken, saw this was how they cooked their dumplings. Maybe she could, too? After all, it saves a step. Again, I think she felt that she lived here and that she could be like an American.