Keeping House: A Novel in Recipes

By Clara Sereni

Book Overview

Food and its preparation play an integral role in this novel of a young Italian woman struggling to find her own identity in a family of strong personalities and colorful figures.

Part autobiographical novel and part cookbook, Keeping House tells the story of a young Italian woman struggling to find self-definition and self-identity. Born into a prominent Jewish Italian family full of strong personalities and colorful figures, Clara narrates the humorous, dramatic, and often poignant events that inform her life. Intertwining recipes with her narrative, Clara uses food as markers for the cornerstones of her life, allowing her to discover and remember both public and private events-a Yom Kippur dinner, fascism and antifascism, the early years of the young Italian republic, the politics and culture of the Italian left, the openness of the 1960s and '70s, and the retreat into privacy of the 1980s.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791464792
• ISBN13: 9780791464793
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 162 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.4"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Good Recipes and a Story That's a Touch Confusing

This seems to be the start of a new trend in publishing. I don't know if you'd call this a cookbook, a novel, an autobiography, or maybe even history. I've now seen mysteries, novels, and memoirs written with this concept. In the book part of this work, the stories follow the courses in a meal: Appetizers, First Courses, Second Courses, Eggs, etc. The stories that go in each of these chapters are at best loosely connected to each other. Each stands on its own and presents a short succinct story. Likewise I don't see much connection between the recipes and the stories they accompany. What, for instance, does visiting with her mother while her father retreated into his room 'resting' have to do with 'Cream of Peas," the recipe that is next to it. I think that in truth the recipes somehow serve as a marker of the time. She cooked the Cream of Peas that night or something like that. The recipes I would call non-traditional Jewish Italian. Some of them, Pork Chops with Oranges are really good and very simple to make. The stories have become classics in Italy. They are quite dependent on the culture of the time to make a lot of sense. There is some attempt on the part of the translators to add information on her culture, but being an American male, it's difficult to understand the viewpoint of an Italian female of thirty years ago.