“Some families inherit a cookbook. I inherited memories.”
Unlike my Grandma Busser, who carefully recorded her recipes in a handwritten cookbook, my Italian grandmother never wrote a single recipe down.
Everything she knew lived in her head.
Bread. Pasta. Sauce. Cookies. Meatballs. Pastina. Pizza.
If you wanted to learn to cook like Pasqua Contino, you had one choice—you stood beside her in the kitchen and watched.
By the time I realized what a treasure she was, much of that knowledge had disappeared with her. This page is my attempt to preserve the woman behind those memories and, one recipe at a time, bring her kitchen back to life.
Pasqua Di Maggio was born on March 27, 1902, in the beautiful fishing town of Vieste, in the province of Foggia, Italy—the “heel of the boot.”
Her childhood was not an easy one.
Family history says her father abandoned the family, leaving her mother to raise three daughters alone. Unable to support them all, difficult decisions had to be made.
Her older sister Teresa married Francesco Cirillo. Her younger sister Maria entered a Catholic convent. In 1921, nineteen-year-old Pasqua boarded a ship with Teresa and Francesco, leaving Italy behind in search of a new future.
She arrived at Ellis Island on October 4, 1921.
Just six months later, on April 24, 1922, she married my grandfather, Rosario Contino, in York, Pennsylvania.
Grandma always insisted she had little say in the matter.
According to her, she had been “traded” as a bride in exchange for employment for her brother-in-law. Whether that story was completely true or had grown with time, I’ll probably never know.
What I do know is that my grandparents remained happily married for more than seventy years.
My father had the perfect description of his mother.
"She was one hundred pounds of dynamite on a one-inch fuse."
She barely stood five feet tall, but she could command an entire room.
She was stubborn.
Opinionated.
Competitive.
Funny.
She could switch from giving life advice to telling my grandfather to "Shut up, old man!" in the space of a few seconds.
Grandma considered herself something of a philosopher, and she had a saying for almost every occasion.
"Macaroni comes in pairs."
She applied this to marriages, arguments, friendships, or almost any situation involving two people.
"Nella bocca aperta vivono le mosche."
"In the open mouth live the flies."
Translation: people who talk too much should probably talk less.
"La testa che non apre la bocca è una testa di cuccuza."
Grandma translated this as, "The head that never opens its mouth is a head full of squash."
Her advice?
Speak up for yourself.
My favorite saying was always this one.
"Always take the road you know, because you know what you leave—not where you go."
Every single time she said it, my grandfather would yell from another room:
"Columbus took a chance!"
Without missing a beat she'd answer:
"Shut up, old man!"
That exchange never stopped being funny.
Looking back now, I realize our family lived through traditions that seemed completely ordinary at the time.
Every Monday Grandma made pastina.
Every Thursday she made homemade spaghetti.
Every Saturday she baked bread.
Not one loaf.
Enough bread for the entire extended family.
Saturday morning meant people stopped by her house to pick up their weekly loaf of fresh Italian bread.
As a child I thought everyone’s grandmother baked bread every Saturday.
Only years later did I realize how extraordinary that tradition really was.
Grandma never measured anything.
She didn’t own recipe cards.
She didn’t keep notebooks.
She simply knew.
If someone asked for a recipe, she’d happily tell them…
…while quietly changing or leaving out one important ingredient.
She wanted your food to be good.
Just never quite as good as hers.
That competitive streak never disappeared.
Ironically, it wasn’t her Italian cooking that bothered her.
It was my mother’s Pennsylvania Dutch baking.
At every family gathering people raved about Mom’s cakes, cookies, and pies.
Grandma couldn’t stand it.
She’d decide to make “American food.”
The results were…less than successful.
Her Italian cooking was unforgettable.
American cooking?
Let’s just say she should have stayed with pasta.
Unlike Grandma Busser, Pasqua left no cookbook.
Every recipe on this website has had to be rediscovered through memory, family stories, and a great deal of detective work.
Some mysteries have already been solved.
As a child I didn’t know these cookies were called Tetù.
Our family knew them by another name.
Strunz di Cane.
Translated politely…
“Dog poop.”
That wasn’t meant as an insult.
It described the rough little chocolate spice cookies rolled in powdered sugar that just appeared.
For decades I searched for “Italian Spice Cookies.” You cannot scour the internet for “dog poop cookies.”
Google was completely unhelpful.
Then, nearly a century after my grandmother learned the recipe in Italy, I discovered Tetù.
The first batch came out of the oven.
One bite.
I was eight years old again.
Grandma called these biscotti.
Not the crunchy almond cookies Americans know today.
Her biscotti were soft, lightly sweet cookies flavored with anise for the adults and citrus for the children.
They were perfect with coffee.
Perfect with milk.
And perfect for dunking.
Finding these recipes turned out to be much easier than finding Tetù.
Every Monday meant soup.
For years everyone assumed the secret was chicken broth.
It wasn’t.
The missing ingredient—the one Grandma never admitted using—was beef broth.
Her broth was roughly two parts chicken to one part beef, along with plenty of garlic and a generous shower of grated Parmesan added only after serving.
One forgotten ingredient changed everything.
One memory returned to me only while writing this page.
Grandma never used dry breadcrumbs.
She took a slice of yesterday’s homemade Italian bread, held it under the kitchen faucet, squeezed nearly all the water back out, and broke it into a bowl.
An egg went into the soaked bread first, creating a soft paste before any meat was added.
Then came roughly two parts ground beef, one part pork, veal if she had it, Parmesan and Romano cheese, garlic, parsley, and absolutely no oregano.
She insisted real Italians didn’t use oregano.
History may disagree.
Arguing with Grandma never did.
The meatballs simmered gently in her sauce all day.
If time was short she’d brown them first, but the slow simmer always made the better meatball.
Grandma’s pizza looked nothing like today’s pizzeria pizza.
It began with the same dough she used for her Saturday bread, allowed only a single rise before being pressed into a thick pan nearly an inch deep.
The topping wasn’t pepperoni.
It was her rich homemade meat sauce made with beef, pork, and sometimes veal.
Then came grated Parmesan cheese.
Mozzarella?
Not according to Grandma.
She insisted Parmesan belonged on pizza and mozzarella was “an American thing.”
Whether history agrees isn’t really the point.
That’s how Pasqua made pizza.
And in her kitchen, her rules were the only ones that mattered.
Perhaps the most surprising memory involves springtime.
Grandma would send my grandfather driving around York looking for wild greens she called cicoria.
Sometimes it was dandelion.
Sometimes wild mustard.
To them, these weren’t weeds.
They were ingredients.
Those greens eventually found their way into a simple frittata with eggs, garlic, and cheese—a reminder that immigrant families often recreated the flavors of home using whatever Pennsylvania fields could provide.
(Please don’t forage based on my childhood memories. This is family history, not culinary advice!)
When I think about my grandmother today, I don’t first remember recipes.
I remember the smell of fresh bread drifting through her kitchen on Saturday mornings.
I remember pots of sauce simmering for hours.
I remember my grandfather answering her philosophical advice with a joke.
I remember a woman barely five feet tall who somehow filled every room she entered.
Grandma Busser left me a cookbook.
Grandma Contino left me memories.
This Family Cookbook Project exists because both kinds of inheritance deserve to be preserved.
Every loaf of bread I bake…
Every bowl of pastina…
Every batch of Tetù…
Every recipe rediscovered…
…is one more way of bringing Pasqua Contino back into the kitchen where she belongs.
🏠 Welcome
📖 Grandma Busser's Original Cookbook
🇮🇹 Grandma Contino: The Unwritten Cookbook
🕵️ Recipe Detective
🍞 Modern Tested Versions
❤️ Share Your Own Family Recipe
🏠 Return to Bytes, Bread & Barbecue