Most 30-year-olds spend their days working in front of computers. Giancarlo Arcieri, 35, spends his plying wood with knife in his Midtown Manhattan violin shop. His father Carlos Arcieri, also a violin maker, taught him the trade, and Giancarlo made his first violin when he was just 19 years old. The key to good violin making? A love of knives.

Longtime New Yorkers recall cooking and food shopping in NYC's bygone era of milk and ice delivery men, ice boxes, horse-drawn fruit and vegetable carts, and much more.

This piece, featured on Narratively (www.narrative.ly/hidden-history/f…ods-of-new-york/), incorporates interviews with Hilda Baumol, 90, of Battery Park City; Paul J. Hintersteiner of Washington Heights; and Debra Klaber, 60, also of Washington Heights.

Margot Karp, 86, moved with her family to Washington Heights, Manhattan, in 1939 to escape Nazi Germany.

Karp fondly recalls her mother's strudel-making in her childhood home in southern Germany.

"It got rolled out in sheets and then you put it down and you pulled the dough and stretched it as far as you could," she says. "They were good at it. That was a favorite dish."

But when Karp arrived in New York City as a refugee at age 14, she embraced American food and culture.

"My drive was to be as American as could possibly be as quickly as possible," she says. "I think my parents accused me of wanting to be too much like everybody else...[but], for me, being told by my parents that I was too American was just what I wanted to be."

My Indian mother-in-law and I didn't have an exact recipe to follow as we forged our relationship. At times it seemed like we might never understand each other, but we kept cooking together.

Hear more "uncommon stories about mothering" on MOTHER: A PODCAST: https://soundcloud.com/mother-the-podcast