Italian American cuisine is a testament of the American Dream and reflects the experience of Italian immigrants in the United States.   Culinary historian and nutritionist Cynthia Bertelsen discusses the origins of Italian-American cooking, and presents an eye-opening account of a poverty-stricken Italy and a culinary tradition that was enriched by American opportunity, becoming a celebrated and beloved cuisine world-wide. 

What was Italian cooking like for the average family prior to the first emigration wave of the late 1800s?

To begin, it’s actually a misnomer to use the term “Italian cooking,” because cooking in Italy has always been, and still is, extremely regional in nature. But for convenience’s sake, we’ll call it Italian.

The reality for peasants was chestnuts and corn meal in northern Italy, corn meal and little else in southern Italy. Polenta, gruels, and not much else except for bitter greens. Only the upper classes ate the meals that became somewhat associated with traditional “Italian food” in America, because meat and dairy products appeared more than the diets of the poor, most of whom fled Italy because of the serfdom enforced by these upper-class families, particularly in southern Italy. And even then nothing like the antipasti that we enjoy today ever appeared on anyone’s table until the twentieth century either.

What are the roots of Italian-American cooking as we know it today?

Since people only ate pasta around Naples and the area south of that bustling, and sometimes dangerous, city until the early twentieth century, pasta – highly identified as a symbol of Italian food – began to appear in Italian-American cuisine in the New World because it was available and cheap. None other than Thomas Jefferson figured in the introduction of pasta (“maccaroni”) to Americans around the dawning of the nineteenth century.

The meat-rich Sunday gravies of Italian-American households stemmed from the Sunday ragù, enriched only with a small piece of pork if the family was lucky. In the New World, meat was very plentiful and much more affordable. And since people wanted more than anything to forget the terrible hunger of their homeland, meat became the foundation of Italian-American cooking, along with cheeses. At the same time, vegetables played an important role in the Italian-American diet, as they had back in Sicily, Naples, or Calabria. Many Italians grew their own vegetables and when possible, made their own wine, sausages, and other products. In addition to tomatoes, basil, and chili peppers, these highly skilled farmers also brought new vegetables like arugula, zucchini, fennel, broccoli, and escarole, many of which are only now being accepted by the American culinary mainstream.

Ironically, home economists and social workers worked hard to discourage Italian-Americans from eating too many vegetables, the prevailing belief being that they were bad for a person and that meat was a better dietary choice. (Recall the history of Salisbury Steak and Dr. James H. Salisbury!) An influence on Italian-American cuisine came from women from different areas of Italy, primarily the southern part, marrying men from other regions of Italy. These women learned to cook the foods of their husbands’ families, taught by the mothers, aunts, and sisters of the husbands.

Which popular Italian-American dishes are representative of true Italian cooking?

Pasta e fagioli (beans and pasta) is one dish that has stood the test of time, and migration, as have many feast-day foods such as zeppole or sfinge. Feast-day foods like cheesecake, veal, and lasagna – later eaten quite often on days other than feast days – symbolized the abundance for which the contadini (peasants) longed. Spaghetti AND meatballs, eaten in separate courses in Italy, turned up as Spaghetti WITH meatballs in America.

How popular is Italian cooking outside of Italy and the United States? What accounts for the popularity of Italian cooking?

In nearly all the places I’ve lived or visited, a person can almost always find pizza. Even in La Ceiba, Honduras, when the sea air hangs heavy with salt and humidity, you find pizza. The problem for many restaurants, of course, is the cheese, but in central America and Mexico, for example, a cheese similar to mozzarella called quesillo substitutes quite well for mozzarella. Likewise, in Ethiopia, where the Italians spent some years occupying the country, wood-fired pizza and other Italian dishes appear, primarily on hotel menus. In Morocco, some larger grocery stores sell a type of thick ricotta that makes a delicious lasagna filling when the cook stirs in a bit of heavy cream.

I have spent some time thinking about why Italian-style cooking seems to be so popular everywhere outside of Italy, except perhaps for Asia, and I think the answer lies in the relative ease of preparation, the basic ingredients, and the interchangeability of those ingredients. Because of the need for improvisation, cooks in Italy (mostly women) created a vast, vast repertoire of recipes or, better said, methods of combining the ingredients they did have. The cuisine doesn’t demand lots of hours spent fussing over a stock or chopping vegetables into just-right shapes. In other words, while there’s tradition, it’s not the rock-bound type you find in the French kitchen. Or even in the Chinese or Japanese kitchen.

There is another reason for the popularity of Italian food and that lies within a somewhat intangible quality – love and family and community. The earliest immigrants formed strong benevolent connections to others from the same regions of Italy, settling close to each other when they came to the United States. That sense of community carried over into the families and neighborhoods as the immigrants began to branch out through marriage and mobility.

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