By Tom Nealon

We take Italian food for granted. Surrounded as we are by cookbooks, cooking shows, and restaurants, both fancy and humble, featuring the cuisine of everyone's favorite footwear-shaped country, we often fail to wonder how this wonderful food was passed down to us.

So much of French, English, and American food was preserved in cookbooks from an early date — France and England both have unbroken runs of recipe books starting in the 17th century, but Italy was a little different.

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Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/