Cooking Through Grief

In this autoethnography, the author explores the connections between food memories, family relationships, and grief as she recalls how food became a marker of significant moments during her grandmother’s illness and death. For many Italian Americans, like the author and her family, food memories are tied to familial traditions and what Luce Giard calls the doing-cooking: cooking practices that reveal women’s work of teaching, nurturing, and caretaking. The author investigates the function of food memory, how acts of doing-cooking shape familial relationships, and how memories associated with these practices impact and are altered by the grieving process.