In the autumn of 2002, after my maternal grandmother died, my sister found a cache of my grandmother’s recipes ensconced in a black leather purse and stashed in the back of her closet. Even as she sifted through my grandmother’s belongings, a part of the process to consider what family members would preserve and discard, my sister knew it was odd to have unearthed these recipes in the specific place she discovered them and in the form they assumed—most scrawled in my grandmother’s characteristic script on the back of curtain tape or bits of curtain fabric. Eventually, my aunt made copies of the recipes, framing them with photos from various parts of the life of Maria Altobelli, my grandmother, and placing them in a notebook for each of her six grandchildren, including me. Over time, I returned to read and to puzzle over them. Some of the recipes I recognized: panettone, a light sponge cake that I loved dipping in espresso and celli pieni (literally translated as “stuffed birds”), traditional Abruzzi biscuits made in the shape of little birds to honour the Festival of St. Antonio in Aquila. Filled with a tart jam, at one time made from local Montepulciano d’Abruzzo grapes, celli pieni were my favourite. She baked these with only some assistance from my sister and me: we ate as much of the dough as went into the cookies. She baked without recourse to the recipes in her closet, which meant that she worked from memory. Some of the recipes were written in shorthand. Others missed key information related, for example, to the temperature of the oven. A few had measurements I could not calculate (two bicchieri or “glasses” of an ingredient made me wonder which glass from her kitchen was the one to be used). Still others did not cite the cooking time. She developed an intuitive sense of how long to bake certain desserts, what ingredients were needed, and at what temperature she needed to bake them. I have since learned that this form of cooking is typical of Abruzzi women. However, perhaps my grandmother also baked so often for her grandchildren that it became part of her memory’s repertoire. But what were they doing in her closet, and in her black purse in the first place? And why were they written on the back of curtain tape or curtain fabric? As I mused over these questions, the answers I found were rich and interesting, bearing witness to facets of my grandmother’s life of which I had previously only had glimpses. The recipes thus offered what Marlene Kadar has elsewhere referred to as an unconventional form of autobiography. They not only tell the story of my grandmother’s life, but also showcase the “larger story” of the “life” of a community. When I initially approached my mother about the recipes, she explained that she too had been surprised to learn of their existence. When I pressed her for more information about why my grandmother used curtain tape or fabric, she offered greater insight. My grandmother, she explained, worked for almost her entire life in Canada in a curtain factory for Eaton’s. I knew that working outside the home was not entirely unusual for Italian women in postwar Canada. These income-earning roles, however, have customarily been seen as supplementary to the role of husbands, the real breadwinners. Women were assigned (or confined) to the domestic sphere, and were more greatly appreciated for advancing spiritual and cultural matters within the family and for their reproductive value. It should be noted that this view about Italian women extended beyond …