Patti Isaacs Rescigno

At age four Patti would stand on a stool in the kitchen “helping” her mother to bake cookies and prepare mid century standards like Rice A Roni and tuna noodle hot dish. But even in the Midwest of the 1960s, she knew there were other ways to eat. Through her father, raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, she learned to make potato latkes, blintzes, and hamentashen. Her enthusiasm for international cuisine blossomed in 1980 when she married Federico “Gauss” Rescigno of Milan, Italy. Although based in Minnesota, Patti and Gauss visited his home country often, learning to cook and eat the Italian way with relatives. Patti lived in China on two occasions and cooks a variety of Asian specialties as well.

Patti works as a cartographer (mapmaker) and is in the final stages of publishing The Second Long March, a memoir that describes daily life in Communist China and how it was transformed as the country developed economically.