Introduction

We both have childhood memories of the way women in our lives would arrange the cuisine so that it served as both food and medicine. Pieroni recalls chestnut-meal polenta boiled in the new red wine: that was one of the most common cough remedies used by grandmothers in Pieroni’s home region in the mountains of northern Tuscany during the cold winter months. Price recalls her childhood in the United States and the chicken soup served to ease the discomfort of and speed recovery from a common cold, as well as the inevitable prune juice to relieve childhood constipation.