Perhaps best known for her James Beard award-winning book, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove (W.W. Norton & Co.), Schenone traveled to Genoa in search of her grandmother's - and ultimately her own - culinary roots and writes about the journey in her memoir, The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken (W.W. Norton).

Now Schenone, 45, and painter/writer/pastry chef Nancy Gail Ring, 51, are launching Jellypress.com, a Web site devoted to lost recipes - with a special feature called the Not-to-Be-Forgotten recipe club.

The site explores the ancestral pantries all women share, looking for precise recipes as well as broader life lessons.

"We explore the past because it is a foreign culture we can learn from," Schenone says. "But it is likely the recipes we find will have to be tailored for today's tastes."

And frankly, some of their findings fall into a Better-to-Be-Forgotten category. Schenone has come across recipes for Feet and Ears (of pigs, that is) and Cod's Head, for example. She does not recommend either.

She and Ring met and became pals when Ring, then a food columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, reviewed Schenone's first book. In addition to both being food historians and home cooks, they discovered they lived in neighboring towns (Montclair and East Orange).

They also share an abiding appreciation for the power of food in family life - past and present. In Schenone's kitchen recently, the women spoke about food and how it roots us, as they casually sliced and sauteed their way through three recipes.

On one hand, when you get right down to it, we're mothers and we do have to decide what to make for dinner most, if not every, night, Schenone says. "And in every generation, that has meant learning anew the roots of our sustenance and our role in providing sustenance.

"This has given us, as women, a privileged relationship with food over the centuries."

They made hand-rolled ravioli stuffed with ricotta and goat cheese, dabbed (not drowned) in a tomato sauce. They made cacciucco, a fish stew circa 1891, which is featured on Jellypress.com; and Grandma Roe's Rugelach (her spelling), a Ring family specialty. (See accompanying recipes.)

Like Schenone, Ring turned her search for her grandmother's lost recipe into a mouthwatering memoir, Walking on Walnuts (Bantam Books).

A watercolorist who learned to bake early and often, Ring wanted to re-create her grandmother's rugelach (a pastry stuffed with raisins and walnuts). Her journey of self-discovery through the ancestral cupboard also recounts Ring's experiences in the pastry kitchens of well-known Manhattan restaurants. It was fun, she says, until she suffered a herniated disk carrying a 50-pound sack of flour.

And how's this for an obscure connection: The two women found that the recipes they were looking for each called for cream cheese. Philadelphia brand cream cheese.

The product was listed in the ingredients for Schenone's family ravioli, so she figured a recipe that old had to have used a different cheese initially. Sure enough, in her travels, Schenone found a European Neufchatel with a high fat content and a similar taste and concluded that Philadelphia cream cheese was substituted when the fresh Neufchatel was no longer available.

Ring learned that Philadelphia cream cheese was the secret ingredient in the dough for her grandmother's rugelach.

"When we met we were amazed at how much we had in common," says Ring.

Rugelach (sometimes called a "little twist") and ravioli ("little package") also have more in common than is immediately apparent, Schenone says.

Both use dough that is rolled and stuffed. And neither is a quick and easy dish, Schenone says. So they were likely made on holidays, and that would have enhanced their cultural significance.

Both women collect vintage kitchen gadgets, and they especially prize family hand-me-downs. Schenone still uses her grandmother's cone-shaped sieve, wooden pestle, and a set of fabulous fish platters and plates.

Schenone says many home cooks tend to see the past as a paradise where kerchiefed women held culinary magic in their stalwart hands.

"There's a sense that they had something essential that we've lost," she says, "And to an extent that's true." Certainly, Schenone wanted to learn what ravioli dough should feel like.

But lost can be a good thing. Some recipes, ingredients and techniques are best left in the past, Schenone says.

"Nostalgia can lead us to think the good old days were always happy ones, that Mother Nature is always benevolent, and that technology has ruined our food. I don't believe all that is true."

She would rather not return to a time when women had to snare a hare and clean it themselves before making stew.

But Schenone would encourage people to eat dandelion greens more often. She'd bring back Rosewater and Orange Blossom Water, and encourage home cooks to know more about saucing dishes and making pie dough.

That's part of the tactile memory she's trying to recover.

Lemon verbena and lavender are already being brought back by creative chefs. Quince, beets - these are all good things, Ring adds.

But for a variety of reasons ranging from taste to time and trouble, Schenone says, she would not put entrails, beef cheeks or lamprey (an eel-shaped fish with extremely fatty flesh) back on the family dinner table.

Neither is she likely to make terrapin, fricasseed pigeon, or anything involving duck's blood.