The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken (2007)

You sometimes wish Judith Jones had delved deeper in her culinary memoir, The Tenth Muse; Laura Schenone goes to the opposite extreme in her lovely but rambling memoir, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken. (Gotta love that title.) ''I wanted something Enduring — a recipe of my own that did not come from a cookbook or a culinary expert on a television show,'' Schenone writes of her decision, in midlife, to track down her family's hallowed ravioli recipe. But when a relative sent her the ingredient list, she was appalled to see supermarket cream cheese. Her quest for a more ''authentic'' ravioli takes Schenone from suburban New Jersey to the Ligurian mountains with countless digressions — some scintillating, others less so — on chestnut flour, the deeper meaning of dumplings, and the vicissitudes of marriage. B