For what is food but the greatest expression of joy and hurt in the world, Annette Januzzi Wick writes in this blending of history, memoir, and cooking. In response, readers are taken to the cherished place where her Italian ancestors and immigrant grandparents meet her mother's recipe binders written by hand-the family table.

Three decades following Italy's 1861 reunification and subsequent fallout, members of four Italian families, two in Abruzzo and the others in Calabria, cross the Atlantic Ocean. In America, they work the coal mines, railroads, and steel mills. They establish shoe stores and bakeries, churches and social clubs. Along the way, they face poverty and tragedies, Mafia temptations and labor recruiters, knowing that forging ahead is their means to survive. In Lorain, Ohio, these dynamisms finally collide.

What does food signify on their journey? What does it mean to the father left behind in Calabria, who writes to his shoemaker son in the States, "if not for you, your mother and I would be beggars"? To the first-generation Italian American mother who holds tight to tradition, annotating recipes di dolci with commentary like, "my mother's recipe, use this one"? And to her daughter, the author, as she touches down on Italian soil to consume abundant, rustic meals prepared with love by newly discovered cousins?

When ancestors disappear, die, or declare themselves missing, food is the impetus for subsequent generations to gather at the family table and become something Italian again.