Spinaci e Ceci

It was in the home of my mother-in-law, Julia Hazan, that, newly married, I became acquainted with an Italian cooking of which, until then, I had known nothing: the cooking of Italian Jews. While some of Julia’s dishes came from the same Bolognese tradition I had grown up close to, others took familiar ingredients, but phrased them with an accent new to me, that of the eastern Mediterranean. No one who was treated to Julia’s delicious cooking, or to the ten