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    Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression
    Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression
    Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression
    Ebook231 pages1 hour

    Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression

    By Clara Cannucciari and Christopher Cannucciari

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    YouTube® sensation Clara Cannucciari shares her treasured recipes and commonsense wisdom in a heartwarming remembrance of the Great Depression.

    Clara Cannucciari became an internet sensation late in life, making cooking videos until her 96th birthday. Her YouTube® Great Depression Cooking channel garnered an army of devoted followers. Now, in Clara's Kitchen, she gives readers words of wisdom to buck up America's spirits, recipes to keep the wolf from the door, and tells her story of growing up during the Great Depression with a tight-knit family and a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" philosophy of living.

    In between recipes for pasta with peas, eggplant parmesan, chocolate covered biscotti, and other treats Clara gives readers practical advice on cooking nourishing meals for less. Using lessons learned during the Great Depression, she writes, for instance, about how to conserve electricity when cooking and how you can stretch a pot of pasta with a handful of lentils. She reminisces about her youth and writes with love about her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

    Clara's Kitchen takes readers back to a simpler, if not more difficult time, and gives everyone what they need right now: hope for the future and a nice dish of warm pasta from everyone's favorite grandmother, Clara Cannuciari, a woman who knows what's really important in life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 27, 2009
    ISBN9781429963718
    Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression
    Author

    Clara Cannucciari

    CLARA CANNUCCIARI (1915 - 2013) was the author of Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression and hosted the web series Great Depression Cooking with Clara.

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    4.5/5

    16 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wonderful insights into what people did to survive during the Great Depression. Clara was a character!
    • 5/5
      Clara, well known as the grandmother on YouTube, was 94 years old when her book was published. Her videos on the Internet made her famous for their common sense, simplicity and wisdom. This book captures the essence of Clara.Born and raised in a Chicago, IL. Suburb, Clara and her family survived the "Great Depression". Her stories are mostly of that time; they are filled with family, friends, and food.Clara tells a story from her life, and then adds a recipe associated with the story. There are many photographs illustrating the stories. The photos feature Clara, friends and family, and food.Clara adds tidbits of her cooking wisdom throughout the book. The tips are useful and practical, such as differences between olive oil and vegetable oil. The index makes it easy to follow and find items and recipes.The illustrations are also listed, putting Clara's life into perspective. Her book is a wonderful volume of history, memoir, cookbook, and advice. It is no wonder that she is known as YouTube's "favorite grandmother"!

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Clara's Kitchen - Clara Cannucciari

    Preface

    Cooking with Clara

    An afternoon with our grandparents was always a magical experience, as warm golden light streamed through their kitchen windows and the aroma of something sweet wafted from the oven. They would tell timeworn stories of people and places long forgotten. They’d teach us their favorite card games and tell us how much better behaved we were than our father or mother. Their wisdom was ours for the taking, but sadly, we may have been too young to appreciate the fullness of this gift.

    I had lost all but one of my grandparents before I grasped the meaning of their often repeated tales and instruction. I remember the day that I sat in the kitchen with my Nana, Clara, as she retold one of her favorite stories while I relished a magnificent plate of pasta. The recipe was as old as the story, and it dawned on me that my Nana was the last open window to my family’s past. Without her we would have only a few written stories and recipes to show our children and our children’s children. I immediately set to work to capture the tales she so freely spins.

    Clara has so many stories that she loves to retell, but as it is for most of us, it’s her childhood she loves to recollect. Clara’s childhood had very little resemblance to my own. She has seen more trials and tribulations than I can imagine. Listening to her share these stories, I hear not only the hardships, but also a message of hope that has given me the confidence to share her with the rest of the world. She is indeed an optimist, raised in a time of great pessimism. I think this message touches many people in these tough times. It is a nice reaffirmation for us to hear that frugality and family are truly the keys to a good life.

    The pages before you are more than a cookbook. Here is a book of experience and wisdom from a genuine survivor of America’s most challenging era: the Great Depression. Clara’s tales, from a time ravaged by poverty and sadness, reveal special recipes and stories to help fill the stomach and soul, and bring us back to a strong sense of family, heritage, and legacy.

    I hope you will enjoy Clara’s wit and wisdom as much as I do.

    —CHRISTOPHER CANNUCCIARI

    Introduction

    MY NAME is actually Calogera Bonfani Cannucciari, and I was born August 18, 1915. When people find out how old I am and that I lived through the Great Depression, they ask a lot of questions, especially these days. How did you live on so little—and how did you stretch out what you had? How did you eat? I tell them that it wasn’t easy, but we managed. We just relied on what we did have—the ability to sacrifice and put our needs in perspective. To be resourceful about what we got. And by preparing and eating simple, filling foods.

    These are the basic truths I’ve always lived by, even now into my mid-nineties. I’ve experienced two world wars and many other wars. I was a teenager during the Great Depression, and I survived all the recessions that followed. I have seen the world and people’s attitudes change. And I’ve lived to become something I would never have imagined: a celebrity chef.

    e9781429963718_i0002.jpg

    I’m not a trained chef. I learned to cook from my mother, who learned to cook from hers, back when she was a girl in the Old Country. My family is originally from Sicily (I am first in my family to have been born in America), and my parents brought up my younger brother, Sam, and me Sicilian, just as they had been brought up. This means they worked hard and they expected the same from us. Even in the toughest years, we got by.

    When I was growing up, we lived in an Italian section of Melrose Park, a suburb of Chicago. It was so Italian, in fact, that whenever we rode the street car and the conductor came close to our stop, he’d say, Next stop, Spaghetti Town! We had family there, both on my mother’s and father’s side, but everyone in the neighborhood was like a big extended family. We knew everyone, and all of us Italians pretty much stuck together.

    My father, Joseph Giuseppe Bonfani, was a carpenter and brick layer. He worked with Irish, Polish, and German Americans and learned to speak their languages. He was used to learning languages. He was born in Sicily in 1883, but when he was six, his family moved to Tunis, Africa, a French colony, where he learned to speak and read French and Arabic.

    When he was twenty-three, his father died, and his mother, sisters, and their husbands all headed to America. He and his mother settled in Pennsylvania, where he became a coal miner, while his sisters and their families traveled on to Chicago. But several years later, after a mining accident that nearly left him blind, he and his mother moved to Chicago to join the rest of their family in Melrose Park. And that’s where he met my mother in 1914.

    e9781429963718_i0003.jpge9781429963718_i0004.jpg

    My father learned English quickly. He liked learning. He always had a book in his hand. When he was working, he was working, but when he was home he was reading. He always told us that we should learn as much as

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