Edda Servi Machlin, who emigrated to the United States from Italy after WWII and wrote a definitive cookbook on Italian Jewish food, died August 16 at her home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She was 93.

Her book, The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, did more than offer recipes; it recounted her memories of growing up in Pitigliano, a town in Tuscany that was known as little Jerusalem because it had a vibrant Jewish community and culture, one that had been there for centuries. She told of an underground communal oven that, when she was young, was used only for baking matzo at Passover.

In 1943, her parents and youngest brother were sent to a concentration camp in northern Italy, from which they were later liberated. She, two brothers and a sister fled into the hills of Tuscany and hid out with the partisans. She moved to New York in 1958, where she met Eugene Machlin and began her cookbook writing career.