Where more grandiose novelists might place epigraphs from Tolstoy or Flaubert at the beginning of each chapter, Anna Paletta Zurzolo has inserted recipes. And to deflate fiction’s pomposities even more, her instructions are written just as you might hear them from the mouths of the wise women who inhabit her moving tale of girlhood in post-war Italy.

“For once leave the hen alone,” begins the recipe for the healing soup known as brodo, “and put a nice rooster in a big pot of boiling water.” This is clearly not a quick-’n’-easy cookbook for time-challenged lifestyles, but it is something much more valuable: a novel that describes the real lives of a vanished world with brilliant and down-to-earth sincerity.

“Only connect,” said E.M. Forster in one of his more memorable epigraphs, and Zurzolo has connected: with the impoverished and almost feudal society in an ancient mountainous village, with the patient women left to bring up the headstrong children while their parents start a new life in Canada (known as “poor” America), and with the unnamed (but seemingly autobiographical) young girl who is the keen-eyed narrator of Bread, Wine & Angels.

Zurzolo, a Winnipeg businesswoman, has not bothered herself much with plot or dialogue, but that should not be taken as a sign of a first-time novelist’s jitters. Her writing is completely self-assured, and the descriptions of mushroom-hunting, vinegar-making, pig-slaughtering, sausage-stealing are vivid and engaging. Yes, much of this lively book is about the getting and keeping of food, because that is what survival depends on in a village on the edge of modernity, where even stale bread is a treasured ingredient. But in Zurzolo’s hands, just as in the world she so evocatively recreates, food is much more than a menial distraction or a dinner-party pretension: It is the basis for a wonderfully complex and ordered way of life.

Order brings rules and boundaries that challenge Zurzolo’s chatty, unbounded narrator but never quite repress her. She is a delight to listen to as she watches life’s mysteries gradually unfold, and when she leaves for poor America at the end of the book, it’s hard not to feel a loss: not just of this gabby girl but of the hidden world that she has singlehandedly brought to light.