If Sadam Hussein had not invaded Kuwait I may never have gone in search of my ancestry. I was too busy and too happy unraveling life in Egypt’s Western Desert. The day my book on the desert and its oases was published, the Kuwait war began. My small publishing venture did not last long after that. Tourism hit bottom in Egypt. After 17 years, I was forced to return to the United States.

 During the frantic period between my publication date and my departure date I kept asking myself, “What am I going to do in the United States?” Finally, I wrote my mother and told her to gather the family’s recipes. Three years, a few pounds, a few debts, and an amazing number of eye-opening experiences later, Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian hit the market. I had met my past head on and I would never be the same again.

 My grandparents, Nazareno and Santa Carolina Parigi, came from Quarata, a small village three kilometers north of Arezzo in Tuscany. In America, they kept alive the traditions of their village and I am the happy benefactor of warm memories: sipping wine in Nonno’s wine cellar, helping Nonna make ravioli, and buying the Christmas panforte at Colangle’s Italian Store. Most of my memories of my grandparents revolve around food.

 Logistically, a cookbook of old recipes requires a lot of effort. To gather all the recipes, I reproduced our calendar year: lentils for New Year’s Day, rice fritters on Saint Joseph’s. Next, I did seasons: bean soups in winter, artichokes and lamb in spring. Finally, I did the chores: butchering the hog, canning the fruits and vegetables. Finally, we had them all.

 It became apparent that women were not the only food providers in the family. Men played a major role in immigrant households. They planted gardens, butchered hogs, and made the wine. It took the entire family to manage the Immigrant’s Kitchen. The men brought the food to the kitchen; the women took it to the table. Our book would not be complete without the male contributions to our heritage.

 Next, we tested. The written instructions had to produce the culinary excellence we always enjoyed. We worried about everything from oven temperature variations to the cooking experience of the reader. We enlisted the help of our cousin Vivian Pelini Sansone of New Castle, Pennsylvania, whose family also came from Quarata. Her mother, Sandrina Parigi Pelini, was my Nonno’s cousin. We had shared many holiday meals together.

 The work moved at a snail’s pace. My mother would begin to make a dish and as she picked up her “pinch of this,” I would collect it in a measuring cup. Then we would move on to “a pinch of that.” Once we had the correct amounts, I would rewrite the recipe. Then we made the dish following the instructions, changing them again. Finally, we enlisted a volunteer. Our instructions were clear: follow the written recipe (which they did not always do), then deliver the final dish to us. We would look at color, texture, and taste. We did this for every recipe. There are over 260 in the book. It took a long time.

 On one Sunday in New Castle we sat down at table and taste tested three different soups: Pasta Grattata, Stracciatella, Passatelli alla Toscana; and continued with Endive Parmesan, and Stuffed Escarole. A few weeks later we repeated this tastefest in Monessen: cannelloni with bechamel sauce, cotechino with lentils, stuffed veal pocket, and pork loin in porchetta. As we tasted and tested the stories flew. We were reliving the past: Remember the time Nonna cooked the baccala in joy liquid detergent? Remember how Nonno’s eyes would shine when he tapped the new wine, or cut the first slice from a new prosciutto?

 There is more involved here than good eating. Food is the fabric that holds our traditions together. Food celebrates all rites of passage: births, communions, confirmations, weddings, and deaths. We labor over it for every holiday, at every season. Often times a specific dish is made only on a specific holiday -- once a year. We spend more time over the gathering, preparation, and consumption of food that we do over any other aspect of a holiday. The culinary threads weave us into the tapestry of the past. Any book about our foods must be a tribute to our ancestors. Once I realized this, I had to research how we fit into the culinary experience of Tuscany and how Tuscan foods fit into what Americans called Italian cooking.

 The next phase in preparing the book was the production. I had contacted a university press and they offered me a contract but I had to decline it. I had spent three years full-time on the project. Although they were generous by university press standards, their offer was too meager. The average bookseller offers the author 10% of the wholesale price of a book. If the book sells for $10.00 and discounts at $4.50 (45%), the author realizes 45 cents per book. If the book sells 10,000, a huge amount by university press standards, the author gets $4,500 for three years work. You cannot eat porchetta on that.

 I am the former Marketing Manager of The American University in Cairo Press. I know the ropes. I wrote a contract for my mother and my cousin. I hired an editor and completed the editorial process. I got an ISBN. I registered with copyright. I got estimates from three printers. I did the layout. I hired an artist for the cover, another for the interior line drawings. I checked out the competition at the local bookstores. I fixed the price of the book knowing that major bookstores only buy from distributors (distributors want 55% of the retail price of the book: 40 for the bookstore, 15 for themselves).

 The game is to get the printing costs below $2.00 a book, balancing quantity with realistic sales potential. If you order 10,000 copies of a book, you should sell them within a year or two. You must balance the number of pages, number of illustrations, amount of color inside and out, and quality of the paper against the unit cost, keeping the magic $2.00 in mind. (This figure holds only for a standard 6x9 book.) Whatever the unit cost, you multiply by eight to get the retail price of the book (which must be competitive on the market). Now all discounts and expenses are covered and the book covers costs at 50% sold (at discount).

 For Immigrant’s Kitchen we had 300+ pages, 160 illustrations, and a full color cover. We sacrificed a second color on the inside and accepted average paper to keep the cost under $2.00. We printed 6,000, what we could afford and sell in two years. For pricing, 2x8 is 16. The book is $16.95.

 I began the promotion while the book was in final production. I mailed promo copied to 100 newspapers in the US. Food editors receive dozens of books a day and independent publishers are lost among the giants. On a local level, I followed up the mailing with a telephone call. We were in Pittsburgh Magazine and most local newspapers (another mailing of 100). The biggest plum in our area is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The stodgy Gazette does not write about self-published authors and offers limited coverage to local small presses (very stupid, the Post Gazette). I was lucky; the food editor did an article on community cookbooks and included mine. She was very kind.

 I also launched a pre-publication mail order campaign. It offered the book at a discount of 25%, if ordered before publication. This I mailed to family, friends, and Italians in and around our hometown. In mail order you can expect a 1% to 2% return on your effort. If you mail 100 flyers, you will get one order. On this mailing we averaged about 10%. It was terrific and helped me pay the printer. I did this every couple of months. I got the yellow pages for Allegheny and Westmoreland counties and simple went through them name by name, adding every Italian sounding name to the mailing list. I got a ton of orders. It was a bonanza. I got to keep the full amount of the book by eliminating the distributors and bookstores.

 The more I promoted, the more I sold. The minute I stopped promoting, sales plummeted. It is now 4+ years later and the book is still selling. I am still promoting, but on a limited basis.

 What have I learned from all of this? A lot! For instance, I believe Italian-Americans are not Italians. We are Italian-Americans and there is a difference (which widens with each generation). For the most part, Italian immigrants arriving in America 80-odd years ago brought regional Italian manners, customs, dialects, and foodways with them. For most, life was easier in America and they could have quickly discarded the time consuming traditions. Many did not. They maintained their food patterns because food helped define them and forge their ethnic and regional identity in an alien land. The garden could have been discarded, but it was not. Where would they get cardoons? or flat Italian parsley? or rich, red tomatoes? The maialatura was no longer necessary; yet, who would give up salami, prosciutto, and sausage? Italians wanted things Italian to eat, and they wanted them from their own region.

 Eventually, the Italian food on our table in southwestern Pennsylvania represented the food cooked in Tuscany around 1913. We preserved the traditions that accompany the foods, too. Our relatives in Italy did not have such a rigid rule. They modernized. We did not. They simply changed some of the food traditions. We fixed them into ritual.

  The giants of Italian cooking Ada Boni, Giuliano Bugialli, and Lorenza De Medici, as excellent as their books are, approach our cooking from an Italian point of view. I never find our family recipes in these cookbooks. The major cookbook publishers in the United States like Morrow and Harper Collins have never understood our identity either. They offer the ethnic cookbooks of foreign countries to ethnic America. How many Italian-Italians would buy a US cookbook in Italian about the cooking of Italy? Italian-Americans buy these cookbooks because that is all the market provides. There are 25 million Italian-Americans in the United States today, nearly 50% of the population of Italy (58 million) and most are looking for lost recipes mamma used to make. They seldom find them. Providing us with something that is not ours is as bad as viewing world history as a white man’s experience.

 Frustration has created a publishing subculture. A second industry of small publishers devoted to regional topics has emerged who do recognize ethnic differences and produce books like mine. In addition, there are specialized publishers who deal exclusively in community and church cookbooks. And, there is the world of “do it yourself.” Families have created their own cookbooks which they produce at Office Maxx and Kinkos. None hit the bookstore market. They are too expensive to produce, are priced without considering distributor discounts, and are seldom promoted.

 I have learned two other things: many scholars do not take the study of food and foodways seriously, and those who do are defining Italian-American food patterns as we once defined world history, in Anglo-Saxon terms. "After reading a folklore dissertation by Janet Theophano ("It's Really Tomato Sauce But We Call It Gravy), (1) I posted a query to H-Italy, one of the H-Net discussion groups on the internet. The use of the term gravy was new to me, and I wanted feedback from other experts in Italian-American studies. At first, a healthy discussion began. But then, a subscriber expressed contempt and amusement that such a "trivial" issue was under discussion.  He FLAMED, "Mention politics (cultural or otherwise) and the net goes dead. Throw a meatball out and they come out of the woodwork.” In response, another subscribers urged him to "lighten up!..... “My immediate response is to lighten up!  When I read the first entry on the subject last week, I also thought it was somewhat silly. However, it was after I read a few more letters that I was able to loosen up myself and APPRECIATE the silliness and humor of it.  Unquestionably, there are a great many serious subjects we can, and should, be discussing as a concerned and interested faction of our distinct cultural group.  However, let's be careful not to take ourselves so seriously that we are unable to have some fun with a little trivia, every now and then. . . . Gravy and Sauce is obviously trivial and I can have fun with something like that.”

 Obviously, not all Italian-Americanists think that the study of food is a serious dimension of our social history. Why not? Are we trivializing food or are we trivializing woman's work? Food is the road map of Italy's many regions leading to an Italian-American identity. If you tell me what food you traditionally prepare on any holiday including Saint’s days like Saint Joseph’s Day, or how you make your “sugo,” I can probably tell you the region of Italy you call home. In the future, after we share more about our lives, we will know the region in America that nurtured your Italian spirit.

 Theophano and her colleagues have gone on to identify a Basic Italian-American Group with the following criteria: they call red tomato sauce gravy, cook in one-pot, do not cook platter foods (roasted meat with vegetables), serve pepperoni sandwiches at weddings from bushel baskets, and eat all holiday foods buffet style. (2) Does your family traditionally fit into this Basic Italian-American Group? Mine does not. All I can say is read, yes, READ, my Tuscan-American cookbook, Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian, (3) or Vincent Schiavelli’s Sicilian-American cookbook, Papa Andrea’s Sicilian Table, (4) or Elodia Rigante’s Apulia-, Basilicata-, and Calabria-American cookbook, Italian Immigrant Cooking. (5) Then perhaps we can begin to write culinary history from an Italian-American, rather than Italian, point of view.