If you tasted the cheese filling in Sharon Sander’s homemade ravioli, or the porcini mushroom cream sauce atop her tortellini, you’d swear she was preparing treasured family recipes passed down from her Italian ancestors. It would surprise you to learn that Sanders, in fact, grew up on a farm in a rural Appalachian town in Pennsylvania, raised on a diet of hearty country cooking.
To understand how Sanders acquired a taste for Italian cuisine, you’d have to go back to when she was a young college graduate, managing a small bookstore in Huntingdon, PA, when she decided to take her first trip abroad—a university alumni tour of Italy.
On that trip, Sanders’ tour group visited a leather goods shop attached to the famous Church of Santa Croce in Florence. Their tour guide was an American graduate student named Walter, who immediately caught Sanders’ eye. While Sanders refused Walter’s invitation to lunch, she eventually returned later that day and decided they should go to dinner.
He took her to his favorite restaurant, Trattoria Benvenuto, and the meal she shared with the man who would eventually become her husband was memorable, she says. “I thought it [Cacciucco] was the most exotic thing I’d ever eaten. It’s a little bit messy but, oh, so satisfying—much like amore.”
Kitchen Essentials - Extra virgin olive oil - Real Parmesan cheese - Quality vanilla extract - Whipping cream (“No Cool Whip!”)
She returned to central Pennsylvania and the couple exchanged letters before deciding that Sanders should return to Florence for good. Walter helped her to get a job at a jewelry store and they met many other young Americans who were also living abroad. “I felt exhilarated,” Sanders says of the time they spent there.
They married in the Church of Santa Croce where they first met and returned to America to settle in Walter’s hometown of Chicago. There, Sanders combined her two loves—writing and food—in a food reporting position at the Chicago Sun Times, interviewing the city’s most well-known chefs and going on press trips around the world.
Fifteen years and two daughters later, Sanders decided she wanted to write in a smaller market and give her daughters a better quality of life in a small town. She researched publishers in small markets and came across Rodale in Emmaus, where they had an opening for a cookbook editor. Sanders landed the job and spent years researching and developing concepts for cookbooks, contributing articles to many of Rodale’s health and food magazines as well.
The experience laid the foundation for Sanders to write her own cookbook, Cooking Up an Italian Life, which is part recipe collection, part autobiographical account of her love affair with Italy. Sanders performed cooking demonstrations to promote the book and this led to her current endeavor, a home-based learn-and-dine business called SimpleItaly. “Having the events here in my home is really special. We talk about wine, food, the Italian lifestyle,” says Sanders, who has been conducting these demos for the last three years.
Her approach to cooking mirrors that of a native Italian’s, emphasizing quality, in-season and local ingredients, prepared in a simple, unfussy manner and made with love.
Ever the romantic, Sanders prepared for us an intimate Valentine’s Day dinner for two sure to make your mate and your mouth happy. Amore!
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Make Your Own Fresh Ravioli! More Recipes from Sharon Sanders