When I opened the door to my Chicago apartment one April evening, I found my neighbor, Francesca, standing there, cradling a dish the size of a truck tire. I recognized it immediately. It was her pasta bowl: white porcelain decorated with tiny painted roses and crazed inside with spidery lines the color of strong tea.

Once, the bowl had been her mother’s, and before that her grandmother’s. I had seen it in action several times, when I joined her for weekend dinners along with her two young children, husband and, more recently, her father-in-law, Tom.