Home Cooking

In the early 2000s, as cooking-show host and cookbook author Rachael Ray’s star was rising, she sat for a moment in her Lake Luzerne cabin, an unassuming woodsy getaway decorated with roadside bargains and paintings by one of her aunts. She tapped the glass of a framed photograph of her grandfather Emmanuel. He was “my best friend,” she said. He’d lived with Ray and her family when she was a child growing up in Lake George. “His friends would come over and I’d sit up with these old men as they smoked their pipes and played cards all night. My grandfather knew everything about everything.”

After emigrating from Sicily, Emmanuel Scuderi and his brothers “worked their way up the Hudson and came upon Lake George and they loved it,” said Ray. They settled