Rivalling Spaghetti with Meatballs, Chicken alla Cacciatora is certainly one of the defining dishes of Italian-American cuisine. Italians in the first waves of of emigration, many of whom were desperately poor, might only have heard of dishes prepared ‘hunter’s style.’

Photograph courtesy Jackie Messineo

And even if they had been fortunate enough to have actually tasted them, such dishes would more likely have featured pigeon or hare, small game ensnared or felled with a slingshot. Poverty in 19^th-century Italy, especially following the Risorgiamento, was so severe that few contadini would have been able to afford a gun, and most were without legal access to the game in forests and fields controlled by i galantuomini, the landed classes. ¹

In Italy, domestic fowl had never been widely consumed. Even in modern Italy, chicken has yet to gain favor as an everyday dish. ² So before we turn on the stove, it is worth considering the Italian origins of a dish that became a staple on the American red-sauce circuit.

We gleaned some hints as to the recipe’s evolution from food historian, Gillian Riley and her new book, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. She reminds us that Italian cuisine maintained many of the ancient medical divisions of foods into “hot” and “cold.” The divisions have nothing to do with temperature but are part of a system of classification similar to what persists in Chinese and other Asian cuisines to this day. That is, certain foods are considered “invigorating” and thus hot or warming (yang), while others are calming and cooling (yin).

Pigeon, because of its dark, rich-tasting flesh, was considered a “hot” food and thus a meat to be complemented by something cooling—which is to say, fresh and acidic. The medieval method for preparing pigeon often incorporated verjuice, the juice of unripe fruit, usually grapes. Among Italian recipes for game and other meats, it is this acidic inclusion that makes a dish ‘alla cacciatora.’

Following World War II, as Italian-American restaurants expanded their menus beyond foods remembered from “the old country,” many began to include chicken, whose firm texture and neutral flavor made it adaptable to myriad treatments. While European Italians may not have eaten much chicken, their American descendants took to it readily—for its economy and availability, and especially for its versatility. Because it could support many of the flavors previously used for veal dishes, chicken became a common stand-in for veal—a meat that, even in America, was considered a luxury.

Along with so-called variety meats, like tripe and liver, game had rarely been offered in the neighborhood restaurants. Meanwhile, the new medium of television had given Americans a furry personality as lovable as Beatrix Potter’s cotton-tails. It is no exaggeration to say that chicken made Italian restaurants safe for Bugs Bunny.

Back in the Old World, rabbit or hare alla cacciatora continued to be sautéed with garlic and fresh herbs before wine and vinegar (or citrus juice) were added to deglaze the pan and create a quick, uncomplicated sauce. Tomatoes were an American addition, yet another acidic element, and one that non-Italians immediately recognized as “Italian.” Then, too, this was the beginning of an increased use of color photography in cookbooks and print advertising, particularly in womens’ magazines. Delicious as these dishes may have been without them, tomatoes made for better photos. Not until America’s Little Italy recipes began to migrate back to Europe, did tomatoes appear in Italian alla cacciatora renditions.

Other Italian-American embellishments—mushrooms—remain absent from most Italian alla cacciatora recipes. Their inclusion may well be yet another example of the immigrants’ sense of humor. Hunters whose shots were less sure might still have salvaged their days in the woods if they were successful foragers. Even if they didn’t come home with a sack full of game, they might have found some mushrooms. (Boletus edulis, which Italians call porcini, grow wild in both Italy and North America.)

Continuing our deconstruction of alla cacciatora americana, we’ve no compelling answer as to how sweet peppers found their way into the American preparation. But we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that an enthusiastic Italian-American chef thought that green bell peppers, along with white chicken and red tomato sauce, were a fine way to pay homage to his grandparents’ homeland by evoking the colors of the Italian flag, the beloved tricolore.

Ingredients:

1 3 1/2 Lb. Chicken, cut into 8 – 10 pieces
1 Cup flour, seasoned with salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 – 4 Tbs. Olive oil
1 Lb. White mushrooms, quartered
2 Green bell peppers, cored, seeded, and sliced into 1 in. strips
1 Medium onion, finely chopped
4 Cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
1/2 Cup dry red wine
2 Cups marinara sauce
2 – 4 Tbs. Fresh oregano, finely chopped
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to be passed at the table

Preparation:

Pour the seasoned flour into a paper grocery bag. Add the chicken pieces, close the bag, and shake to coat completely.

Heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, then add 2 Tbs. of the olive oil. Remove the chicken pieces from the bag, shake off the excess flour, and add the chicken pieces to the pan. Sauté until brown, about 4 – 5 minutes per side. Transfer the chicken to a plate.

Return the pan to the heat. Add the mushrooms, peppers, onion, and garlic, and sauté until the onion becomes translucent, about 10 minutes.

Raise the heat to high, and add the wine. Cook for 1 – 2 minutes to evaporate the alcohol. Reduce the heat to a simmer and mix in the marinara sauce.

Return the chicken pieces to the sauté pan, spooning the sauce over them. Add the oregano. Simmer until the chicken is tender, about 20 minutes.

Transfer the chicken to a platter. Cook the sauce until slightly thickened, about 3 minutes. Ladle the sauce over the chicken. Garnish with the parsley and serve family-style, passing the Parmesan separately at the table. Traditionally, this would be served with a side of pasta.

Serves four.

^1. Additional information on post-Risorgiamento Italy can be found in an excellent book by Hasia Diner; Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration; Harvard University Press, 2001.

^2. For further discussion of Italian chicken consumption, see Part IV of our Introduction.

By now, you may have noticed—in our writing and from your own experience—that in most neighborhood old-school Italian-American restaurants, the concept of abbondanza meant lots of pasta, lots of sauce, and quite a bit of meat. In contrast, vegetable dishes, beyond token salads, were conspicuous by their absence from many menus.

When Italian immigrants opened their urban eateries, their clientele included significant numbers of German and Irish immigrants who had more interest in pasta with tomato sauce than in still-identifiable vegetables sautéed with garlic and olive oil. (One might dispute whether tomato sauce itself is a vegetable, but we’ll leave that to contemporary politicians wrangling over nutrition in school lunch programs.)

Even today, Rao’s Restaurant, arguably the most exclusive Italian-American restaurant in the Western Hemisphere, serves only four cooked vegetable “sides:” rapini (broccoli rabe), broccoli, Savoy cabbage, and escarole.

Yet, Italians loved vegetables and were skillful gardeners who introduced several Old World vegetables to Americans—notably, broccoli, fennel, zucchini, and escarole. And while the new immigrants were able to enjoy semolina pasta and meat far more often than they had in Italy, their cucina casalinga still centered on vegetables and pulses.

For evenings at home when neither pasta nor meat were on the menu, Italian-Americans often cooked some form of “beans and greens.” Back in Italy, the greens were likely to have been foraged—wild dandelions, borage, sorrel—whatever local goats and sheep had not yet nibbled. But here, southern Italian immigrants combined cannellini with spinach or escarole to make a dish that was neither contorno, vegetable dish, nor zuppa, soup.

As neighborhood restaurants gentrified, expanding their menus to include separate antipasto and soup courses, they began to offer variant forms of Minestrone, Pasta e Fagiole, as well a Scarola e Fagiole, a thick soup of escarole and beans.

By the 1980′s, as Americans became more conscious of the much-vaunted Mediterranean Food Pyramid, Escarole and Bean Soup, along with nothing more than a piece of good crusty bread, attained status as a trendy, complete, and virtuous meal.

Note: We use water rather than chicken stock, although you’re welcome to use either. Generally, the only time Nonna would have used chicken stock in a soup would have been when she had just boiled a stewing fowl. Like all good cooks, she would have found a use for the flavorful broth.

Escarole and Beans

Ingredients:

2-3 Tbsp. Olive oil
3 – 4 Cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1 Head escarole, approximately 1 Lb., washed and chopped into bite-sized pieces
2 14 oz. cans cannellini, drained and rinsed
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
Freshly grated Parmesan
Slices of rustic bread

Preparation:

Heat a soup pot over medium-high heat and add enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and sauté for a minute or two. Add the escarole and stir to coat with the oil. Sauté, stirring occasionally, until the escarole begins to wilt.

Stir in the beans. Lower the heat, add up to a cup of water (more if you prefer it soupier), season with salt and pepper, and simmer for five to ten minutes.

To Serve:

Divide equally among four soup bowls, drizzle a little more olive oil over each serving, and garnish with the Parmesan. Serve with a slice of good crusty bread. Or, garnish with homemade croutons.

Serves four.

We began our presentation of this new edition of Almost Italian online in September 2007. Since then, most of our posts have discussed dishes that Italian-Americans served to a primarily non-Italian clientele in neighborhood restaurants.

Photo courtesy of Sugieeee

That clientele was primarily non-Italian because the actual residents of the Little Italy neighborhoods saw no reason to pay for food they would themselves cook at home. But as neighborhood restaurants flourished, an equally vibrant but somewhat different cuisine was simultaneously developing in the tenement apartments of the new immigrants.

Sundays were particularly important to Italian-Americans. No matter what Papa did for a living during the week, it was, in most cases, hard, physical labor. So Sunday was literally a day of rest.

Regardless of whether or not they went to church, Italian families nearly always gathered at home in reverential celebration of the abundance they had found in America. As NYU professor Hasia Diner emphasizes it was ironic that Italian “immigrants had to leave home to eat the food of home.”^1.

That a newly-arrived Italian could earn ten dollars a week as a brick-layer or dockworker was empowerment, opportunity beyond anything that had been available to him back in Sicily or Apulia. He could earn a living wage and not only house his family, but feed them well. And in the early 20^th century, that meant he could afford to feed them meat.

Oral and written histories are replete with recollections of the immigrants’ amazement at the availability and affordability of meat. That a family in America could afford once a week what might have been indulged in once or twice a year back in Italy (during a religious feast or wedding), was cause for jubilation.

Long after the hunger that propelled Italians to the New World had been appeased and first-generation Italian-Americans had moved off on their own, they continued to gather at “Mom’s house” for a Sunday afternoon meal any non-Italian would call a “feast.” This classic repast would include several types of meat braised in tomato sauce. For a first course, Mama would appropriate some of the sauce to serve over pasta. The meats would follow, accompanied by salad and bread.

Exhorting her family to Mangia, mangia, “Eat, eat!” it was always a woman, usually La Nonna, the matriarch, who came to symbolize the warmth and expansive generosity of Italian-American culture. Grandmothers, daughters, and daughters-in-law presided over kitchens and dining rooms in America. For many of these women, it was their transformation of ingredients here in the New World that gave them economic and social power. Italian women who had learned to cook—in Italy or America, from their stints as domestics in more affluent homes or from members of their own families—gained status as they created meals of abbondanza e nostalgia, evoking a homeland that had denied them the food they so proudly served here.

Following World War II, returning veterans, including many maturing first-generation Italian-Americans, joined the migration to the suburbs. Taking with them what had now become “old family recipes,” the new suburbanites assured that “Mom’s Sunday Gravy” became as much of a staple in North Jersey and on Long Island as it had been around the cramped apartment kitchen tables on Mulberry Street.

Just as food sustained strong family ties between generations of Italian-Americans, it has also maintained urban Little Italys. Like the stereotypical Nonna, with her pot of basil on the fire-escape, many a pasta or salume supplier has proved just as reluctant to leave the familiar, the core neighborhoods where immigrants first used food as the primary tool with which to form their identity as Italian-Americans.

^1. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration by Hasia R. Diner; Harvard University Press, 2003.

Sunday Gravy

Ingredients:

3 – 4 Tbs. extra virgin olive oil
6 Garlic cloves peeled
1 Lb. Piece of boneless beef such as eye of the round, or shoulder steak
1 Lb. Piece of boneless Pork shoulder
3 Tbs. Tomato paste
1/2 Cup dry red wine
3 28 oz. cans Italian plum tomatoes (preferably San Marzano)
1 Lb. Hot or sweet Italian sausages (or a combination)
1 Recipe for Italian Meatballs
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
4 Tbs. Fresh oregano, finely chopped
4 Tbs. Fresh basil, finely chopped
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped

Preparation:

Heat a large, heavy-bottomed casserole or Dutch oven over medium heat, then add the garlic. (Don’t allow the garlic to brown.) Add the meat, turning frequently to brown on both sides. As the meat is browned, remove it and reserve. If necessary, brown the meat in batches.

Combine the tomato paste and wine and add to the pot. Raise the heat to high. Stirring constantly, boil for a minute or two to evaporate the alcohol. Add the tomatoes and their juices, breaking up the tomatoes with the back of a fork as they go in. As the sauce begins to bubble, lower the heat so the tomatoes simmer gently. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper as necessary. Stir in the oregano, basil, and parsley.

Return the beef and pork to the pot. Partially cover the pot and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for two hours, or until the meat begins to fall apart. Add the sausages and meatballs, and simmer gently for another hour.

Remove the meat from the sauce, and place in a large bowl, or on a platter. Cover loosely with aluminum foil.

To Serve:

Serve the sauce over pasta—typically penne, ziti, or rigatoni. Allow 1/4 Lb. dry pasta per person. Serve the meat as a separate course with salad and bread.

Serves 10 – 12

Photograph courtesy Sublicious

Does anyone under 35 (or 45, or even under 55) remember Lent? Our generations of gratification probably don’t think of a pre-packaged Jenny Craig meal the same way our parents and grandparents viewed meatless meals in the six weeks prior to Easter. These days, abstinence from the food we enjoy probably means we’re trying to look good in a bathing suit. Lent, on the other hand, was supposed to be contemplative and its dietary limitations soul-strengthening. The cottage cheese and fruit plate or the tuna casserole made with canned cream of mushroom soup—a Lenten lunch was usually a little frumpy.

Nonetheless, there were some meatless, guilt-free pleasures to be had before sushi and sashimi came ashore.

Italian-Americans have long enjoyed pepper and egg sandwiches on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. One suspects their appeal may have much to do with their simplicity—welcome comfort food after the excesses of Carnevale or Martedi Grasso. In Chicago’s Italian-American community, pepper and egg sandwiches enliven meatless Fridays throughout the entire Lenten period.

Not quite a fritatta, a pepper and egg sandwich is the combination of garlic, bell peppers, and onion, sautéed in olive oil until the peppers are wilted. Beaten eggs are added, and the whole mixture cooked until the eggs are done. The peppers and eggs are served inside a hearty loaf. Possible embellishments include either provolone or mozzarella and pale green peperoncini, which add an acidic bite that contrasts with the sweetness of the fried bell peppers.

Since the 1950′s, and possibly earlier, the “pepp ‘n egg” sandwich has been a popular lunch or snack. When I was a child, my Sicilian Methodist family spent summers on Long Island Sound in Connecticut, where we and other Italian-American families would pack picnic baskets full of pepper and egg sandwiches for an afternoon at the beach. As an adult, I encountered the sandwiches again in Rockport, Massachusetts, where I lived briefly among descendants of Calabrese, who favored them as picnic food. The photo above is a roadside diner near the New Jersey shore. No matter where they’ve turned up, no one has ever considered these meatless sandwiches the food of abstinence, especially not when they might be washed down with a cold beer or two.

Ingredients:

1 or 2 Tbs. olive oil
1 Clove garlic, finely minced
1/2 tsp Crushed red pepper flakes
1 Medium onion, thinly sliced
1/2 Red bell pepper, thinly sliced
1/2 Green bell pepper, thinly sliced
3 eggs, beaten
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 Loaf Italian bread (such as a bastone or a ciabatta)

Preparation:

Heat a sauté pan over medium heat then add enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Add the garlic and the crushed red pepper and sauté for a minute or two. Add the onion and peppers, regulating the heat so the onions don’t burn. Sauté until the peppers have softened.

Raise the heat to medium-high and add the beaten eggs. Stir to combine with the onions and peppers and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the eggs are set.

Slice the bread lengthwise without cutting all the way through. When the eggs are done, gently slide them onto the bread to make a sandwich and cut the loaf into four portions.

Serves 2 – 4

New Year’s Day—even beyond the implementation of all manner of resolutions—is a time to do something, or more specifically, to eat something that will bring luck for the coming year. For Italians, that means lentils with sausages.

The lentils are said to symbolize coins which the diner can hope to amass in the coming year. And for poor Italian peasants and laborers, the sausage once represented opulence.

Most southern Italians eat cotechino sausage on New Year’s Day. Lavishly spiced with coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg, mace, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon, this is a fresh pork sausage that includes those proverbial everything-but-the-squeal portions of a pig. Cotechino may very well have been the inspiration for Winston Churchill’s remark that anyone interested in laws and sausages should never watch them being made.

Italians north of Rome eat a sausage similar to cotechino, but butchers stuff the meat into a pig’s foot and call it Zampone.

Unable to buy a cotechino locally, in time for our New Year’s dinner, we hardly felt deprived. The sausages we did serve may have come from a Tampa Bay area supermarket chain, Sweet Bay, but we consider them the equal of the very best sausages we’ve ever had—in Italy and from artisan butchers in New England. In fact, we’ve written before about our fantasy of a kindly old Italian fellow dressed in a threadbare grey cardigan sweater going to Sweet Bay’s corporate kitchens once or twice a week to supervise the making of the sausage.

Our lentils, cooked separately with bay leaves, garlic, and orange peel, finished in the pan with the sausages, were delicious. But with or without sausages, lentils carry the main message. So we hope all our readers have a happy, healthy year. May you and your loved ones share the abbondanza we wish for you in 2008.

Cafe Baci, Sarasota, FL.

Tonight, many of you will be celebrating La Cena della Vigilia di Natale—the Feast of the Seven Fishes. And even if not, we hope you’ll all be together with loved ones.

My family didn’t observe the tradition, probably because they were rare birds in our community of Sicilian-Americans—Methodists. When it came to religious observance, minimalism was the guiding principle. This is not to say we didn’t feast, and I hasten to add that my grandparents never lost sleep over the separation of Church and Kitchen. As a child, I could look forward to Christmas Eve treats like Schiacciatta, Baccalà, and Casatta alla Siciliana. But we were under no obligation to abstain from meat, or to attend mass of any kind, let alone at midnight.

So research on the folkloric, and possibly non-Christian, origins of the Feast has been fascinating for a non-Catholic like me. What’s remarkable is how little anyone actually knows about it. One thing is clear: the number seven has held mystical significance for millennia—even before the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Some say the fish represent the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. Others say it’s the seven Christian virtues, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Sorrows of Mary. Others cite the Seven Hills of Rome (although most would concur that few modern Romans observe la vigilia). I’ve even seen reference to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in Asia Minor…

There are those, like my editor, who detect more than a whiff of Saturnalia, the Pagan celebration of the winter solstice, and note similarities to folkloric traditions persistent among Muslims. (Remember that under Arab rule, Sicily’s cuisine gained ingredients and techniques that make even its contemporary food more reminiscent of North African Muslim kitchens than those of Calabria.)

Other numerals—9, 11, 13—carry additional meanings for Christians and those of other faiths. Indeed, depending on the individual family and the means and skills of its cooks, the vigilia table often includes seafood and fish dishes in those numbers, too.

Given the abbondanza Italians were able to enjoy here in America, it’s no surprise that they would demonstrate their gratitude and generosity and continue, through the decades, to add contemporary dishes to their family menus. Certainly baccalà, calamare, and eel are unshakable mainstays for traditionalists, but clams casino, shrimp cocktail, and sushi have taken their places on Italian-American Christmas Eve tables, too.

Whatever you do to celebrate this wonderful time of year, we wish you Auguri!.

Skip & Holly

P.S. We’d love to hear what’s on your Christmas Eve menu. Please leave a comment if you’d like.

Photograph courtesy PTRoss

Many an Italian-American will claim that this recipe is the authentic Pasta alla Napoletana or Pasta alla Calabrese or even Pasta Pugliese. Such claims will be “substantiated” by printed restaurant menus dating back to the 1950′s or by an oil-stained recipe index card in Aunt Rosa’s hand… But authenticity, particularly in culinary research, is an elusive commodity.

“Trust, but verify,” said Ronald Reagan, which runs contrary to our tale-spinning mantra: Se non è vero…

This much is certain: southern Italians who emigrated to North America, whether they’d sailed from Naples or Palermo, all knew the pleasures of a tomato-based sauce with which they enriched whatever else they had. Garlic, olive oil… maybe some garden basil or wild herbs, salt, and peperoncino made the basic sauce for whatever they could cook, catch, or buy; and many of them could not afford much. Certainly, for most of Italians in the first waves of immigration, meat had not been a staple.

But here in America, with its vast grasslands and organized feed-lots, meat production was on a scale that would have been unimaginable to the peasant who ate a full meal of meat only a few times each year, perhaps at a village wedding or baptism.

Here, the basic marinara sauce embellished any meat a cook chose—meatballs, pork ribs, tripe, or the distinctively seasoned sausages made throughout the southern Italian peninsula. Since the earliest Italian-American restaurants were serving a largely non-Italian clientele, customers needed names for these concoctions. So someone with roots in Campania would tell an Irish or German-American that his sausage and peppers served over tubular pasta was Pasta alla Napoletana, while a cook from Catanzaro might call the same combination Pasta Calabrese.

Having the basic ingredients in common, southern Italian immigrants to America were the first Italians anywhere to create a cuisine that really could be called “Italian.” Yet, funnily enough, they chose to distinguish themselves and their dishes with labels denoting regional origins.

Pasta with Sausage and Peppers

Ingredients:

2 Tbs. olive oil
2 – 3 cloves garlic, minced
1 Medium onion, chopped
1/2 Cup dry red wine
1 28 Oz. Can plum tomatoes (preferably San Marzano)
1 Cup roasted sweet peppers, roughly chopped (see note)
4 Links sweet Italian sausage, sliced into 1in. rounds
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
4 Tbs. Fresh basil, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 Lb. Penne or Rigatoni
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Freshly grated Parmesan or Romano cheese

Preparation:

Heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, then add the olive oil. Add the garlic and sauté for about 1 minute. Lower the heat to medium and add the chopped onions. Sauté until they become translucent, about 5 minutes.

Add the wine and boil for 2 – 3 minutes to allow the alcohol to boil off. Add the tomatoes, peppers, sausages, parsley, and basil. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper as necessary. Lower the heat and adjust so that the sauce will barely simmer. Simmer for approximately 20 minutes.

In the meantime, bring a large pot of salted water (at least 6 Quarts) to the boil. Approximately ten minutes before serving, add the pasta and cook until al dente. Drain in a colander, then pour onto a platter or divide equally among four plates. Ladle the sauce over the pasta and garnish with the remaining parsley. Pass the Parmesan or Romano separately at the table.

Serves four.

Making “Sunday Gravy” in Chicago
Photograph courtesy of Francesca Folinazzo

This dish, perhaps more than any other, has defined Italian-American cuisine. In fact, the concept of Spaghetti with Meatballs inspired the first edition of Almost Italian.

Italians eat spaghetti. Italians eat meatballs. But they don’t eat spaghetti with meatballs. Writing in 1897, Pellegrino Artusi, author of La Scienza in Cucina e L’Arte di Mangiar Bene, The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well, includes three recipes for meatballs, none of which involve pasta. But the Italian immigrants who first opened restaurants in the Little Italy communities were not cooking so much for their fellow paesani as for a non-Italian clientele.

Ingredients that had been scarce or costly back in Italy were at hand in America, where the new entrepreneurs found that they were able to prepare and offer their version of “Sunday dinner” every night of the week. For the immigrants, the most lavish meal would have been meatballs, sausages, and perhaps pork shoulder, braised in tomato sauce. This would have followed a course of pasta lightly dressed with some of the braising sauce—the red sauce that evolved to become “Mom’s Sunday Gravy.”

Customers lacking intimate knowledge of Italians’ foodways seem not to have understood that something farinaceous could be savored as a course on its own. Among northern Europeans, there is no equivalent to a separate course of rice or pasta, as served in Italy. And so, among the American immigrant populations, the difference persisted. Those of non-Italian descent, having become accustomed to having meat and starch together on the same plate, liked to place two or three meatballs on their pasta. It wasn’t too long before the Italian restaurants abandoned the practice of serving the meat separately and began to serve individual plates of pasta with meatballs in tomato sauce.

During the past few years—in Rome, for example—spaghetti with meatballs has infiltrated the menu turistica, ‘tourist menu,’ at many of the neighborhood trattorie. This gives a new twist to the adage, “When in Rome…”

But here, I’m really more concerned about “when in New Haven or Hoboken.” So, I’m happy to share my Sicilian grandmother’s recipe for meatballs, along with her recipe for the marinara sauce in which to braise them.

My Grandmother’s Meatballs

Ingredients:

1/2 Lb. Ground beef
1/2 Lb. Ground pork
2 Large eggs
1/2 Cup bread crumbs (see Note)
2 Cloves garlic, peeled, and finely chopped
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
1/2 Cup freshly grated Parmigiano
Salt & freshly-ground black pepper
Olive oil

1 Recipe for Marinara Sauce—recipe follows

1 Lb. Spaghetti
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Additional freshly grated Parmigiano

Preparation:

Using your hands, mix together, the beef, pork, and egg, then mix in the bread crumbs, garlic, parsley, and Parmigiano. Season with salt & pepper. Form the ground beef and pork mixture into balls slightly larger than the size of golf balls. I usually wind up with fifteen to twenty, depending on how large I make the first few.

Heat a sauté pan over medium-high heat, then add enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan to a depth of about 1/4 inch. Add the meatballs and brown all over, regulating the heat if necessary to avoid excessive spattering. The meatballs are done when they’re brown all over, and have a slight crust. (see Note below)

Simmer gently for about an hour and a half in four cups (one quart) of my grandmother’s tomato sauce. Recipe follows.

Approximately 15 minutes before serving, bring a large pot of water (at least six quarts) to a full, rolling boil and add the pasta. Cook until just al dente. Drain in a colander, and pour the pasta out onto a serving platter.

Spoon the meatballs over the pasta, then pour the sauce over all. Garnish with the parsley, and serve family-style at the table. Pass the additional Parmigiano separately.

Serves four.

Here is my grandmother’s basic tomato sauce. This is the one she always seemed to have on hand, to go over pasta, or “just to color” some sautéed zucchini, or to mix in with some beans.

During the growing season, she and my grandfather would put up gallons of the stuff, but when the larder ran out, she wasn’t at all averse to using canned tomatoes. However, when she used canned tomatoes, she claimed that adding a grated carrot sweetened the sauce and took away the “canned” taste.

Ingredients:

Olive Oil
4 Cloves garlic, peeled, and thinly sliced
2 28 Oz. Cans peeled tomatoes (preferably San Marzano)
1 Small carrot, grated
1/2 tsp. Red pepper flakes
2 Tbs. fresh oregano, finely chopped
2 Tbs. fresh basil, finely chopped
1/4 Cup flat leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Salt & freshly ground black pepper

Preparation:

Heat a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, then add enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Add the garlic. With a wooden spoon, stir for about one minute, until the garlic begins to give up its aroma.

Remove the pan from the heat and slowly add the tomatoes. Return the pan to the heat and begin to break up the tomatoes with either the back of a fork, or a wooden spoon. Simmer the tomatoes to evaporate some of the liquid, then add the carrot, the red pepper flakes, oregano and basil.

Simmer gently for about 20 minutes, or until the sauce has thickened and the clear liquid from the tomatoes has evaporated. Add the parsley and season with salt and pepper.

Photograph courtesy of Francesca Folinazzo

A lot of you will be traveling this week. As you sit in airline terminals and wait in bumper-to-bumper traffic, whatever you do to get to Nonna’s house, please jot down a few questions for your family. I’m asking you to do this in the hope that I can fill in some gaps in my own family’s culinary history.

My Sicilian grandfather was only fourteen years old, his brothers and sister not yet teenagers, when they arrived at Ellis Island in 1904. They all became fluent English speakers while continuing to speak, read, and write in Sicilian dialect, even though they were mere children when they left the society in which Sicilian had been their only language.

One question I have is how their acquisition of Sicilian continued to the sophisticated level required for their professional careers.

My maternal great-grandparents had had little formal schooling, but their boys were lucky enough to go to good schools and continue their educations—but only in English. One graduated from West Point, another became a physician, another had his own insurance agency.

How they kept and polished their Sicilian is a mystery to me. And they did indeed keep their Sicilian. Well into their careers, they served a largely immigrant population in Middletown, Connecticut. It’s a particular mystery to me how my great uncle explained—in polished Sicilian diaect—appendicitis or gall bladder disease to semi-literate Sicilian patients during the Depression, let alone discuss their treatment options.

And it’s just as much a puzzle as to how my grandfather, the son of a cobbler, came to learn his repertoire of Sicilian recipes. Cultural codes back in Sicily certainly would have kept a young boy out of the kitchen in 1904, and once in America, he went away to a church-run boarding school. Yet somewhere, somehow, he did learn to cook the traditional dishes, to the extent that he taught them to his own wife, my grandmother. I just don’t know when he learned them or from whom. But surely, my family’s case is not unique.

I’d love to hear stories and speculation on this from other Italian-Americans. Alas, I’ve no one left in my own family to interview.

It’s easy enough to ascertain how certain traditional Italian recipes morphed into Italian-American dishes; that’s what the Almost Italian project is about. But how did the original recipes arrive intact? We need to ask how they made the trip from Italy to America in the first place, especially since we already know that many of the immigrants were so poor in Italy they couldn’t have afforded to cook them back home.

So start making YOUR lists. The questions you pose could prove to be lifesavers during those awkward Thanksgiving moments when talk turns to Hillary Clinton, ethanol, or immigration reform. When your aunt starts asking about your little nose-ring or latest tattoo, or someone has just spilled an especially dark Zinfandel on the lace tablecloth, you’ll be glad you can divert everyone’s attention with:

So, do you think Zio Beppo’s sausages, the ones he cured in the trunk of his ’68 Impala, were more Calabrese or Abruzzese?

Is it true that cousin Tony sold his sister’s collection of Mass cards on Ebay?

When it comes to family history, there are many truths…share some of yours, right here, on Almost Italian.

My editor Holly, and I wish you a very happy Giorno di Ringraziamento, Happy Thanksgiving.

Shrimp Scampi is a relative newcomer to the menus at neighborhood Italian restaurants—probably because it represents the first significant departure from recipes based on tomato sauce. According to the culinary research published on the Food Timeline, “The earliest reference to shrimp scampi in The New York Times is a restaurant advertisement published May 9, 1956 for The Tenakill Restaurant in Englewood NJ.”

Until I began looking into the origins of the dish, it hadn’t occurred to me that scampi, in the Italo-American lexicon, refers as much to the method of preparation as it does to the main ingredient. The word scampi didn’t appear in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary until 1925. At the time, it was defined as the plural form of the Italian word, scampo, “a large shrimp or prawn” and “a dish of shrimp or prawns grilled or sautéed in oil or butter and garlic.”

Away from the Gulf Coast, significant numbers of shrimp dishes didn’t show up on menus until Prohibition, and then, mostly in dainty shrimp salads and the Shrimp Cocktails of our previous post. After WWII, Shrimp Scampi began to appear on the menus of metropolitan, “Continental” restaurants. This was also the period when American French restaurants began to add “Italian” specialties to their offerings. Dishes like Chicken Tetrazzini and Spaghetti Bolognaise (note the French spelling) would appear cheek-by-jowl with Duck a l’Orange and Sole Meunière.

For generations, Italians have enjoyed the simple classic, gamberi alla casalinga, home-style shrimp. The dish is a simple combination of shrimp, sautéed in olive oil with garlic, red pepper flakes, and lemon juice. Shrimp Scampi includes butter and white wine.

I have a theory about how these last two defining ingredients got into the dish we call Shrimp Scampi: I believe a restaurant chef in America became aware of Gamberi alla Casalinga, and in the process of trying to Frenchify it for an upscale clientele, added the wine and butter. From that elevation, Shrimp Scampi crept back to the Little Italy communities, where it has established a comfortable and permanent residence—more often than not on a bed of linguine.

As we like to say whenever we cannot offer irrefutable proof, Se non e vero, e ben trovato. If it isn’t true, it makes a good story.

Shrimp Scampi

Ingredients:

1 1/2 Lbs. shrimp (16- 20 count), shelled and deveined
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
4 Tbs. Unsalted butter
2 Cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
½ Cup dry white wine
Juice of 1/2 lemon
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
1 Tbs. Grated lemon zest
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped

Preparation:

Season the shrimp on both sides with salt and pepper.

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat, then add the butter. When the bubbles have begun to subside, add the shrimp. Cook, without moving them, for 1 minute. Add the garlic and cook for about 1 minute longer. Turn the shrimp over and cook for 2 minutes more, or until they begin to turn pink. Transfer the shrimp to a bowl.

Return the skillet to the heat and pour in the wine and lemon juice. Boil the liquid to evaporate the alcohol and to reduce the sauce, about 2 – 3 minutes. Scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Stir the lemon zest and the first 4 Tbs. of parsley into the sauce. Taste for seasoning, and add salt and pepper as necessary. Pour the sauce over the shrimp, and toss to combine.

To Serve:

Divide the shrimp among 4 plates or arrange on a platter and serve, garnished with the remaining parsley.

Neighborhood Italian restaurants would very likely serve this over a pound of linguine. I prefer to serve it as-is, with a salad and plenty of crusty bread as a vehicle for the sauce.

Serves four