The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture

Often sentimentalized as nurturing through food, Italian American women have struggled against this stereotype to speak of the realities of their lives. In this unique collection, they speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively funny. Drawing on personal and cultural memory rooted in experiences of food, more than fifty writers dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir.

Though they begin with food, the writers in this collection quickly carry the reader into unexpected, sometimes shocking terrain as they bear witness to the historically unspeakable in the Italian American experience—mental illness, family violence, incest, drug addiction, AIDS, and environmental degradation. Tantalizing and appetizing, this collection is intellectually and politically provocative, for it revises any predictable notion of what it means to be an Italian American.