4 ideas
Anna Del Conte grew up in a comfortable Milanese family and spent part of the war in hiding in rural Emilia. From that starting point she spent decades teaching the English to cook Italian food, beginning with her book Portrait of Pasta (1976).
There is no single 'Italian food', only the cooking of particular regions and towns, shaped by local ingredients, climate and history. Explaining Italian food abroad means undoing the flattened, generic version foreigners have built, and replacing it with the specific dish from the specific place and the reasons it is made that way.
Foods improvised from hunger, such as risotto made with foraged nettles in wartime, carry the memory of hardship. Once the scarcity has passed they are kept and valued as heritage. Looking at a cuisine this way shows how many 'traditional' dishes are fossilized survival strategies and not deliberate refinements.
Someone who has fully lived in two countries sees each through the other's eyes. What natives treat as normal, such as English culinary timidity or Italian family and class rigidities, becomes visible and open to criticism. Belonging to both places, and to neither completely, is what gives the émigré's view its sharpness about both.