Mother Sauce

Home cook and author Lucinda Scala Quinn shares 100 iconic and beloved Italian-American recipes from the last 100 years.

In America today, nonna’s cooking is everyone’s favorite food with spaghetti, lasagna, and pizza some of the most popular dishes. Yet this is a cuisine that is only a century old. When Italian families first arrived in the U.S. in the first part of the twentieth century, mammas brought with them the skills and ingredient know-how to fashion a whole new foodway in spite of living in poverty and their ostracization from their newly adopted country. These remarkable women gave birth to a cuisine that their fathers, husbands, and sons then monetized outside the home. Red sauce joints thrive around the  U.S., but rarely are these women actually credited as the true founders of the Italian-American cuisine. In her latest book, home cook and author Lucinda Scala Quinn cooks 100 iconic Italian-American recipes. Along the way, she shares the origins of the recipes and gives credit to the incredible women who developed our cherished Italian dishes. Home cooks and food lovers alike will delight in this masterful collection of America’s favorite comfort foods, from Baked Ziti and Sausage and Pepper Hoagies to Chicken Marsala and Cannolis. With gorgeous recipe shots, archival photos, ingredient sidebars, and cultural essays, Mother Sauce brings nonna’s cooking to kitchens everywhere.