Brook was born in North Beach, San Francisco’s historic Little Italy. She earned a BA in Spanish and Linguistics in California before moving to Bergamo, in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy. She spent eighteen years there raising two children while working as a technical translator for an engineering firm and teaching English to doctors and engineers.

After returning to the United States, she taught Italian grammar and conversation at Santa Rosa Junior College and Sonoma State University. Using her demonstration kitchen as a living laboratory, she taught traditional Italian cooking in Italian, creating an immersive environment where language, food and culture converged in real time.