Every year around Passover I try to offer an Italian Jewish dinner as part of our regional menu series. When my son returned from a trip to Venice, he brought me a few new cookbooks to add to my collection. In them I found chapters on la cucina ebrea, or traditional Jewish cooking, in Venice and Padova. Many of the recipes dated from the fifteenth century. Foods that I had come to think of as Eastern European turned out to have Italian roots. For example, they served smoked sturgeon,