Beata Zatorska learned to make pierogi and other Polish recipes in her grandmother’s farmhouse kitchen, in the remote village in the foothills of Poland’s Karkonosze mountains where she grew up. When she returned years later, her beloved grandmother was gone, but she found her handwritten recipes for preparing traditional Polish dishes, and for preserving the precious fruit and vegetables grown in the family garden.
Those recipes make up a most charming new book, “Rose Petal Jam: Recipes and Stories from a Summer in Poland” (Tabula Books, $35), together with Zatorska’s memories of her childhood in Poland in the ‘60s and ‘70s, along with the story of her journey with her husband, Simon Target, to discover the Poland of today. The reminiscences, along with accompanying photographs, are reason alone for picking up this new cookbook. The recipes prove to be a bonus. Check out a recipe from the book: Polish Beef Goulash
For her latest public television series, Lidia Matticchio Bastianich takes viewers on a road trip into the heart of Italian-American cooking today, as only she can. Bastianich started with a question: How did Italian immigrants put beloved recipes from their homeland on the table for their families in the New World that was America? This one question began Bastianich’s coast-to-coast journey toward uncovering how and why Italian-American food has become what it is today.