The Irish nana is a repository of family history, memory and lore. Sometimes, like the Italian nonna, she is also a 'walking cookbook', carrying the old knowledge of how things were best done. Alice's own grandmothers, Nana Taylor and Nana Ballyduane, were the first generation after the Great Famine, born in the 1860s.

These women taught their families the Irish traditions and habits of homemaking that survived for centuries, and are now almost gone. Now Alice herself is a nana too, and this book takes us through three generations and almost a century and a half. She explores the old and the new, the 'then' and 'now', the nana of yesteryear and of today, with her characteristic empathy and love.