Julia Lovejoy Cuniberti: The Midwesterner who Adapted Italian Culinary Traditions for American Kitchens

Lecture

On the occasion of the Week of Italian Cuisine in the World, the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago presents  an event dedicated to the tradition of the Mediterranean diet, inspired by the theme Mediterranean Diet and Heritage Cuisine: Health and Tradition.

Prof. Grazia Menechella (University of Wisconsin-Madison) will discuss Julia Lovejoy Cuniberti’s Practical Italian Recipes for American Kitchens (1917) as an important and significant cookbook that promotes Italian “cucina casalinga” (home cookery) as an ideal model for the Americans in 1917. It will be stressed how this Midwesterner from Janesville, Wisconsin was socially engaged and committed to helping needy families in Italy during World War I, while, at the same time, she raised awareness of the benefits of Italian “cucina casalinga” as a simple, flexible, economical, healthy model that was, and still is, easily adaptable in the US.

Julia Lovejoy Cuniberti (1888-1987), daughter of Allen Perry Lovejoy and Julia Lovejoy, grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin, attended Vassar College, and moved to Chicago after graduation (1911) where she was a resident at the Hull House as a social worker. She met her future husband, Fernando Cuniberti, an Italian lawyer from Pavullo nel Frigano (Modena), at the Hull House in Chicago. The couple got married in 1914 and took residence in Chicago. In 1917, Julia Lovejoy Cuniberti published her cookbook Practical Italian Recipes for American Kitchens. The cookbook is based on Lovejoy Cuniberti’s experience in Italy, where she was strongly influenced by Pellegrino Artusi’s 1891 cookbook Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Living Well.

Free with registration. Doors open at 5:30pm CT.