On the occasion of the 9th annual Week of Italian Cuisine in the World, the Department of French and Italian and the Center for European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago present an event linked to the 2024 theme Mediterranean Diet and Heritage Cuisine: Health and Tradition.
Public lecture (in English): Prof. Grazia Menechella (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Julia Lovejoy Cuniberti: The Midwesterner who Adapted Italian Culinary Traditions for American Kitchens”.
Welcoming Remarks: Dr. Elizabeth Covington, Executive Director of the Center for European Studies at UW-Madison.
Free and open to all.
Prof. Menechella will discuss Julia Lovejoy Cuniberti’s Practical Italian Recipes for American Kitchens (1917) as an important and significant cookbook that promotes Italian “cucina casalinga” (home cookery) as an ideal model for the Americans in 1917. It will be stressed how this Midwesterner from Janesville, Wisconsin was socially engaged and committed to helping needy families in Italy during World War I, while, at the same time, she raised awareness of the benefits of Italian “cucina casalinga” as a simple, flexible, economical, healthy model that was, and still is, easily adaptable in the US.
Grazia Menechella is a professor of Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on contemporary Italian literature, avant-garde writing, the history of Italian women, Italian diasporas, and food studies. For over twenty years she has taught a course on “Food Cultures of Italy”.
Prof. Menechella will offer also a lecture on the same topic at the Italian Cultural Institute in Chicago (November 20), at University of Illinois, Chicago (November 20), and at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (November 22).