Serafino was envied for his freshly made pizza or panino among his fellow workers; their women let them pick up bread from Annicharico and cheese or salami somewhere else along the way to work. Soon they were asking Serafino to bring them the same lunch as he had—they’d pay. Before long the news of Umbertina’s baking reached others, too, and through Serafino, the laborers who stopped in at Scalise’s bar for beer on their lunch break started giving orders for Umbertina.

How often, as she got up in the cold dark of a winter’s day to start the fire in the wood-burning stove or went out to shop, did she thank God for her health and energy and think with contempt of the laziness of the other wives, who preferred to sleep rather than fix their men’s food.

Umbertina kept the men’s orders in her mind; she had great powers of concentration and a memory that took the place of reading and writing. She charged everyone the same flat rate of 75¢ per week for their lunches to simplify pricing. To get the mill workers’ lunches ready for Serafino to take with him, she’d get up at five in the morning to start the baking and get to the market. She never got an order wrong.

For Umbertina it was an article of faith to eat well, and now that she could afford it she always had in her kitchen the most virgin of olive oils, the most aged and mellow of cheeses, the best salami and freshly baked bread, crusty and not doughy inside the way the bakers left it to increase its weight.

This was a northern climate, she said. And they needed to eat more, including meat, to keep up their strength.

If there was one flaw in her paradise—and she seldom mentioned it, feeling it wrong to complain—it was the vagaries of the upstate New York climate; the weather was erratic, and its crazy quirks would make her restless and edgy. There would be chill, gray days in August or such balminess in February that the trees and bushes would go berserk and produce buds at the wrong time, only to have them die in the frost. April was warm one day, cold the next.

“It is because it is a new world, a new country,” Umbertina would half grumble to Serafino. “It has not yet found its clima,” that steady, predictable flow of the seasons she remembered from her years in Castagna. And she thought that the weather might have something to do with the jerky movements, restlessness, and rigidness she noted in the few americani she ever saw. Or maybe they didn’t eat well—she had seen their bread, a characterless, soft, spongy, dead-white concoction that she wouldn’t have fed her pigs in Castagna and that she considered a desecration of God’s good grain.

She never stinted on food for her family. They had everything fresh or homemade. On special occasions, like Thanksgiving, which she called Chicken Day, she made ravioli filled with ricotta and other cheeses, never mixing it with spinach as the abruzzesi did, for she didn’t believe in mixing her greens—dandelions, good strong chicory, spinach, and broccoli—with anything. Fresh greens were a miracle of the earth and had to be separate to be relished properly and have their best effect on bodies after a long winter without. But into the minestra went everything: beans, greens, vegetables, and pieces of meat, along with the soup bones to enrich it. She made cacciatore dishes with her tomatoes and peppers, or if there was rabbit, with fragrant stems of rosemary and white wine. The rosemary in her garden was not the sprig from Nelda’s garden in Castagna, which had not survived the journeys and moves, but a new American growth. It would never be the glorious blue flower-laden bush of the warm Italian countryside, but it still had the aroma she remembered and was still the totem of her strength. “In the house where the rosemary grows, the women of the house are its strength,” Nelda had told her, and that’s what she now believed.