An Oakville woman has compiled her family’s traditional recipes into a cookbook and viral fundraiser that will help put food on the tables of people who need it. After her grandmother died in the midst of pandemic, Elena Iacono conceived of My Nonna Ma’s Kitchen: A Collection of Homemade Italian Recipes, as a gift for her mother.
Setting an initial fundraising goal of $5,000, she has since raised over $34,000 for Food Banks Canada in under a month. The intimate family album of recipes that has now been shared with more than 1,300 donors since the book launched September 28.
Elena’s maternal grandmother Maria Dicembre Canci, passed away April 23 in Ottawa, at the age of 86 from an aggressive form of dementia. The heartbreak of her passing was compounded by pandemic restrictions on visiting long-term care facilities, while gathering size limits prevented the family from hosting a proper funeral.
Instead of delivering a eulogy, the 38-year-old found herself in her kitchen, cooking. “I cooked all spring and summer,” she says. Reproducing the familiar aromas and flavours of favourite dishes her grandmother taught her over the years offered her some solace. As she writes in the introduction to a recipe for ravioli: “the first time I made this dish shortly after her passing, I was brought back to her loving company in just one bite.”
The idea to write the cookbook came about in July from a friend commenting on her Instagram food posts. On learning that Food Banks Canada was making a special pandemic appeal for $150 million, Elena knew she had found the right home for her project. “It’s just the perfect fit,” she says. As Nonna Ma wrote none of her recipes down, Elena had to transcribe recipes from her memories of time spent together in her grandmother’s kitchen.
Nonna Ma was born Maria Dicembre in 1934 in the countryside near the Italian coastal city of Vasto, the eldest girl of 10 siblings. She was of the generation who grew up scarred by the destruction and poverty of war, and was old enough to remember losing three infant sisters born during the famine years. She knew what it was to go without, which is perhaps why she loved feeding people so much, and why it would have given her joy to know her recipes were helping to feed people in the new homeland she had chosen for her children and grandchildren.
A courageous woman by all accounts, Maria decided she would join her two elder brothers in Canada, even though her then-fiancé, Elena’s grandfather Giovanni Canci had his paperwork all set to go to Australia. “She was like, ‘Look if you want to be with me, you’re going to come to Canada,” Elena laughs. Maria would have been just 21 when she boarded a boat by herself to Ellis Island, New York, and from there, a train to Ottawa in the middle of winter. It was 1956. Giovanni followed Maria later the same year, and the couple had Elena’s mother, Marisa, two years later, and then a boy, Elena’s uncle, Nick.
Everywhere the couple lived, they gardened, almost from the moment they landed in Canada. Evidence of their skill is apparent in the photos included in the cookbook of their last garden, in the backyard of the house where they lived for more than forty years. Family members pose under an arbour overgrown with grapes, and zucchinis hang down like pendant lamps over the kiddie pool where the grandkids played.
“I think there was something beautiful about the promise of this country,” Elena says. “I don’t think she knew what she was going to experience. She put her money on the dream and the rest is history. She knew there was a bright future ahead and there was. Her love of this country and her love of feeding people, that is her legacy.”
For Elena’s mother, Marisa Iacono, the book came as a wonderful surprise. “Sometimes as parents, you don’t know if your children are paying attention,” she says from her Ottawa home. “But when something like this happens, you realize they really were listening! She produced this beautiful book and I was not involved at all.”
Elena says she has been receiving notes on social media and emails from her readers who have been cooking their way through the book. These she passes along to Marisa, who says the messages are a source of comfort, lifting her heart as she grieves her mother.
“I’m not letting 2020 take us down," Elena says. "I’m going to spread a little bit of light and hope, and we’re doing it!”
Food Banks Canada is an umbrella agency that distributes funding and food to 750 food banks across the nation, which in turn share with another 2,500 community-based agencies like shelters and missions. Knowing that people may be experiencing financial difficulty due to the pandemic, Elena did not put a minimum contribution amount for people who wish to receive a digital copy of the book. Click to donate to Elena's fundraiser and get a copy of My Nonna Ma’s Kitchen: A Collection of Homemade Italian Recipes.