The conversations happened at the counter, over and over, for years. A customer at Altomonte’s Italian Market would describe a dish their mother used to make. Then they would say the recipe was gone, buried with her, never written down. Maria Teresa Grispino Nappi heard some version of that story hundreds of times before it turned on her.
“One day it struck me. That could easily be my own family someday if I didn’t document my mother’s recipes,” Nappi said in an alumni profile published by La Salle University. Her mother, Franca Grispino, known to three generations of Bucks County shoppers as Nonna Franca, had almost nothing written down.
