You won’t find recipes for Beefaroni or canned lasagna in Anna Boiardi’s new cookbook, Delicious Memories (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2011). Instead you’ll learn to make gourmet dishes like ravioli with ricotta and squash filling, cotechino with lentils, and baked fennel with butter and Parmesan.
Boiardi (BA ’94), whose great uncles and grandfather founded canned pasta king Chef Boyardee, knew she had a bit of a challenge on her hands when writing a book whose subtitle is Recipes and Stories From the Chef Boyardee Family.
“I wanted people to show the other side of Chef Boyardee, not just what they knew from the can,” Boiardi says. “I wanted them to understand this is the food that I grew up on. My grandfather passed away before I was born, but I knew my Uncle Hector very well and he actually was a very accomplished chef: a James Beard Award winner who ran the kitchen at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Everyone in my family cooks, so food was not just a family business, it was the way we shared our traditions, the thing that connected us.”
Check out Boiardi’s recipe blog at www.annasdish.com.