Happy Birthday, Enrico!

Our Saturday afternoons during the opera season have long been punctuated by radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.

Giuseppe Verdi’s Ernani, broadcast today, February 25th, encourages us to mark the birthday of the celebrated tenor, Enrico Caruso, who sang the title role.

Deep in preparations of Almost Italian (the forthcoming book), we offer this reprise of our recipe for Pasta alla Caruso.

Auguri, maestro!

Enrico Caruso as Manrico in Il Trovatore

Enrico Caruso’s passion for food—and cooking—nearly equaled his passion for opera. During his tenure at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York (November 23, 1903 — December 24, 1920), he sponsored the citizenship of more than a dozen chefs from his home town, Naples, possibly to assuage his longing for Napoletano cuisine. Not only did he help them open restaurants and pizzerias in Little Italy, but on evenings when he wasn’t singing, the master himself enjoyed donning an apron to work in their kitchens.

But here’s where the libretto of Pasta alla Caruso gets complicated: Some food historians say Caruso invented the dish; others claim one of his Napoletano friends in New York originated it and named it in the tenor’s honor. Still others attribute the creation to various chefs in the scores of cities where the peripatetic Caruso performed.

The larger question for us, though, is why, if the dish was invented sometime between 1903 and 1920, did it not appear on the menus of neighborhood restaurants until the 1950′s. Chicken was not commonly eaten in Italy until after WW II. So, here’s what we think: when a tough Italian barnyard fowl did make it into the kettle, there would have been but one small liver. However choice a morsel an Italian might have found it, chicken liver was not a commodity ordinarily available and, thus, unlikely to have inspired a sauce. But here in America, with abundant poultry, Italian cooks found chicken livers to be a rich food that was actually cheap! Nonetheless, even with chicken livers at giveaway prices in the US, they were—and remain—one of those “variety meats” that diners tend to love—or assiduously avoid. And since the majority of the original Little Italy restaurant patrons were non-Italians, the percentage of avoiders was high. This seems to have been a sauce invented by Italians for Italians; in short, they kept it on the back of the stove—for themselves.

It took decades, probably till the Truman administration, before there was the critical mass of Italian-Americans dining out in places that had evolved to the white-linen level. Only then did Pasta alla Caruso become a fixture on menus celebrating the refinements of la cultura italiana by featuring a dish named for the great tenor, Enrico Caruso, an Italian name as widely known as Al Capone, but certainly one more favorably perceived.

In any event, the combination of chicken livers, mushrooms, and a rich tomato sauce makes for a soul-satisfying primo piatto, a first course. The chicken livers provide a creamy richness, the mushrooms, an earthiness, and the tomato sauce, a sweet acidity. Over a serving of spaghetti or perciatelli al dente, the dish has all of the harmony and exuberance of Il Trovatore’s Anvil Chorus.

Pasta alla Caruso
Pasta with Chicken Livers and Mushrooms in a Red Wine Tomato Sauce

Ingredients:

2 Tbs. Olive Oil
3/4 Cup Flour, seasoned with salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 Lb. Chicken Livers, separated into individual lobes, all visible fat removed
2 Tbs. Extra-virgin olive oil
2 Tbs. Unsalted butter
1 Lb. Assorted mushrooms, (Portobello, Crimini, White button) sliced thinly
1 Cup dry red wine
1 28 Oz. Can, crushed tomatoes (preferably San Marzano)
4 Tbs. Flat-leafed Italian parsley, finely chopped
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 Lb. Spaghetti or Perciatelli
Freshly grated Parmigiano

Preparation:

Flour the chicken livers, shaking off any excess and reserve on a plate.

Heat a sauté pan over high heat, then add the olive oil. Add the chicken livers and sauté until they are slightly browned and firm. Remove from the, pan and reserve.

Pour off the olive oil, then add the two tablespoons of butter. When the butter has foamed and the foam begins to subside, add the mushrooms, tossing to coat with the butter. Cook for four or five minutes, until the mushrooms begin to give off some of their juices.

Add the wine all at once, scraping the bottom of the pan to loosen any caramelized bits of liver and mushroom from the bottom. Continue, cooking over high heat until the wine has reduced by about half. Lower the heat and add the tomatoes to the mushrooms and wine. Adjust the heat so the mixture barely simmers.

Slice the chicken livers crosswise into half-inch rounds and add them, with any of their accumulated juices, to the tomato sauce. Taste for seasoning, add salt and pepper if necessary, then cook over low heat for about thirty minutes, or until any clear liquid has evaporated.

In the meantime, bring a large pot with about six quarts of water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente.

To Serve:

Drain the pasta, divide equally among four (or six) plates, top with the sauce, and garnish with the chopped parsley. Pass the Parmigiano separately at the table.

Oh, and try not to act surprised when one of your dinner guests suddenly discovers a long-hidden talent for Italian opera.

Serves four as an entrée, six as a first course.

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.

Photo courtesy of WP ClipArt dot Com

Not every dish on Italian-American restaurant menus can claim lineage back to the old country. Born here, without known Italian antecedents, Shrimp Cocktail has held a prominent place for decades—on antipasto menus of American banquet halls and neighborhood Italian restaurants.

While the early 20th century origins of the concoction are well documented in numerous culinary tracts, the connection to Italians is not, though it can be easily inferred.

During the late 1800′s, the Port of New Orleans was second only to Ellis Island as a point of arrival for Italian—and particularly Sicilian—immigrants. In 1910, more than three quarters of the population of the city’s French Quarter was actually Italian. During this period, the French Quarter acquired the nicknames “Little Sicily,” and “Little Palermo.”

The association of Gulf Coast shrimp and the gastronomically indulgent residents of New Orleans is common knowledge. Newly arrived Italians, many of whom worked on the docks, would have been aware of their city’s attention to food, shellfish in particular. And it’s highly likely that they would have been aware of New Orleanians enjoying a dish turn-of-the-century menus listed as Shrimps in Tomato Catsup.

As to why shrimp were ever served as a ‘cocktail,’ we need to consider Prohibition and the temporary end of alcoholic cocktails, as they had been known. It appears that some of the fancier restaurants sought to fill their equally fancy stemware with something other than martinis and champagne. Restaurateurs began presenting legal commodities—shellfish or macerated fruit—in martini glasses, and, with a bit of tongue in cheek, these offerings were called ‘cocktails.’

From elegant restaurants, the shrimp cocktails found their way to less exclusive venues and eventually to the neighborhood red-sauce restaurants. After WW II, when supper clubs offering dinner and a floor-show drew both Italians and non-Italians, the serving of a chilled, elevated glass of shrimp became a sophisticated prelude to the otherwise immutable pastas and main courses alla Parmigiana.

Even now, when Americans can choose from sushi, ceviche, and even the crudo of la nuova cucina Italiana, the refined minimalism of pink shrimp curling over the edge of a martini glass recalls an age of national self-assurance and optimism.

Shrimp Cocktail

Ingredients:

20 shell-on (21 to 25 count) shrimp in their shells (five shrimp per person)

For the brine:

1/4 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup sugar
1 cup water
2 cups ice

For the cocktail sauce:

1 Can(14 1/2-ounce) diced tomatoes, drained
1/2 Cup ketchup
4 Tablespoons prepared horseradish
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
Few grindings fresh black pepper
Grated rind of 1/2 lemon
Hot sauce to taste (Tabasco is the traditional hot sauce. I prefer Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce)
Lemon wedges

Preparation: (at least an hour before serving)

Prepare the brine: Dissolve the salt and sugar in the water and set aside.

Using a pair of scissors or a serrated knife, make an incision down the outer curve of each shrimp. Remove the black intestinal tract and discard. Rinse shrimp under cool water but leave their shells intact.

Place cleaned shrimp into a bowl with brine and refrigerate them for 20 to 25 minutes.

While the shrimp are brining, whisk together tomatoes, ketchup, horseradish, Worcestershire sauce, pepper, and lemon rind, in a non-reactive bowl. Add hot sauce to taste and refrigerate the sauce until ready to serve.

Remove shrimp from the brine. In a large saucepan with a lid, bring an inch of water to simmering. Place a steamer basket in the pan and arrange the shrimp in one layer on the basket. Place the lid on the pan. After 2 minutes, turn the shrimp over so they cook evenly.

After approximately five minutes or when all the shrimp have turned pink, remove from heat and shock them in bowl of ice to stop the cooking. Allow the shrimp to cool to room temperature. Peel the shrimp, leaving the tails intact. Refrigerate until serving time.

To Serve:

Arrange the chilled shrimp around the edge of chilled Martini or Margarita glasses, placing sauce in a pool in the center of each glass.

Serves four.

What do stone quarries, carnations, and stuffed mushrooms have in common? On the surface, nothing. But as I dig into the history of Italian-American food, I find some very surprising connections…

In the early 20^th century, J.B. Swayne was a commercial grower of carnations in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Seeking a greater return from his hothouses, he experimented with a new crop, the mushroom agaricus bisporus, beneath his raised carnation beds.

Acknowledged as the father of modern commercial mushroom cultivation, Mr. Swayne provided employment to numerous Italian immigrants, who then went on to start their own mushroom farms and ultimately take control of the industry. (Even now, three-quarters of commercial mushroom growers in Chester County, PA, are of Italian descent.)

Stone masonry and quarry work had brought many Italians to Chester County as they built lavish homes for clients like the DuPonts in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. Leaving behind the coal mines of western Pennsylvania, other Italians had been drawn to the arduous, but far safer, occupation of floriculture. Most of these Italians had come to America from rural areas and were inveterate foragers. When introduced to mushroom cultivation, they were immediately taken with the idea of growing a foodstuff that had previously been available only as a whim of nature.

Chester County—close to Philadelphia, Wilmington, and the rail-lines that led to other major American cities—became the center of this new agribusiness. But how did the mushrooms wind up, stuffed, on the menus of the neighborhood Italian restaurants in Boston, New York, and Chicago? I have some theories, but first here are two things I do know:

1) While southern Italians wouldn’t have known much about the noble porcini (boletus edulis) from the north of Italy, they had surely foraged some variety of fungus on their own turf.

2) Later in the 20^th century, as white linen began to replace checked tablecloths, Italian restaurateurs in New York were attentive to the French menus at places like Delmonico’s and Maxim’s, which listed a particular appetizer: champignons farcis.

Southern Italians certainly knew how to stuff vegetables like peppers and tomatoes. But one garden delight abundant in Italy was not so readily available to them in America: zucchini flowers. Even poor contadini and giornaliere back in Italy had been able to enjoy stuffed zucchini blooms. Since many Italian immigrants and the first generation lived in America’s cities, they had fewer places to grow their own produce.

Frugality often inspires gastronomic ingenuity. Presented with an ample supply of white button mushrooms, I think Italian-Americans simply exercised the license and imagination of good translators. Lacking zucchini blossoms, they put their time-honored stuffing—breadcrumbs, garlic, parsley, olive oil and Parmesan—into mushroom caps.

Sausage very likely found its way into the stuffing following World War II, when meat rationing was lifted. Many Italians made their own sausages anyway, and substituting sausage for the breadcrumbs was a statement of affluence.

By the 1950′s, antipasti were firmly entrenched on Italian-American menus, and creative chefs reveled in the ebullience of the post-War economy. They began stuffing mushrooms with ever-more expensive ingredients, such as crab meat. Large social gatherings like wedding receptions were made all the more festive by the presentation of a lavish antipasto buffet before a sit-down, multi-course dinner. Appetizer courses often included mushrooms with two or three different stuffings. Once again, in the spirit of Italian-American hospitality and celebration, excess was seen as a virtue.

Stuffed Mushrooms

Ingredients:

24 large (2 inch-diameter) white mushrooms, stems removed and finely chopped
1/2 Cup Italian-style dried bread crumbs (see Note)
1/2 Cup freshly grated Parmesan
2 Garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Extra-virgin olive oil

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 400° F.

Mix the chopped mushroom stems, bread crumbs, Parmesan, garlic, parsley, and 2 tablespoons olive oil in a medium bowl to blend.

Coat a sheet pan with approximately 1 Tbs. of olive oil. Spoon the filling into the mushroom cavities and arrange on the baking sheet, stem side up. (Recipe can be completed to this point earlier in the day. Refrigerate, loosely covered.)

Drizzle remaining oil over the filling in each mushroom. Bake in the center of the oven until the mushrooms are tender and the filling is heated through and golden on top, about 25 minutes. Serve immediately.

Serves 6.

Mushrooms Stuffed with Sausage

Ingredients:

24 large (2 inch-diameter) white mushrooms, stems removed and finely chopped
1 Lb. sweet Italian sausage, removed from casing
1/2 Cup Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
2 Cloves garlic, peeled and minced
3/4 Cup freshly grated Parmesan
1/2 tsp. Crushed red pepper flakes (peperoncino)
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 Cup unseasoned bread crumbs (see Note)

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 400° F.

Mix the chopped mushroom stems, sausage, parsley, garlic, 1/2 cup of the Parmesan, and the peperoncino together in a mixing bowl. Use your hands to break up the sausage, and to combine the ingredients. Add approximately 2 Tbs. of Olive oil and mix one last time to combine.

Put the bread crumbs in another bowl, drizzle with a bit of olive oil and add 1/4 cup of the Parmesan.

Oil the bottom of a sheet pan, or a shallow baking dish large enough to hold all the mushrooms in a single layer. Arrange the mushrooms in the pan, with the stem side facing upward. Season the insides with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil.

Stuff each mushroom with a rounded spoonful of the sausage stuffing and sprinkle the bread crumbs on top. (Recipe can be completed to this point earlier in the day. Refrigerate, loosely covered.)

Bake in the center of the oven for 20 minutes until the stuffing is browned and the mushrooms are soft. Serve immediately.

Serves 6.

Mushrooms Stuffed With Crab Meat

Ingredients:

18 large (2 inch-diameter) white mushrooms, stems removed and finely chopped
7 Oz. crab meat
2 – 4 Scallions, including green tops, finely chopped
2 Tbs. Fresh oregano, chopped
1 Tbs. Anisette liqueur (optional)
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
1/4 Cup freshly grated Parmesan
1/3 Cup high-quality mayonnaise
3 Tbs. additional Parmesan

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 350° F.

In a medium bowl, combine chopped mushroom stems, crab meat, scallions, oregano, and optional anisette. Taste for seasoning, and add salt and pepper as necessary. Fold in the Parmesan, and mayonnaise until well combined. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, or until ready to use.

Fill the mushroom caps with rounded teaspoonfuls of filling, and place them in a shallow baking dish or a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Sprinkle tops with the remaining Parmesan, then bake in the center of the oven for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and serve immediately

Serves six.

This was a favorite among the supper club crowd during the 1950′s, when tableside preparations were the rage from coast-to-coast. Head waiters in tuxedos relished the opportunity to make this salad as theatrical as anything the French had ever flambéed.

Lettuce Vendor

Technically, Caesar Salad would never have gotten a Green Card, let alone qualification as Italian-American, had its creator not been a bona fide Italian. Emigrating from Baveno, in the lake district of northern Italy, Cesare Cardini arrived in America in 1913. Within a few years, he had opened a restaurant just south of the California border in Tijuana, Mexico. It was there that he invented the salad that bears the revised spelling of his name, not that of the Roman emperor who dallied with Cleopatra.

Initially, the Hollywood patrons of Caesar’s Palace, Cardini’s first restaurant in Tijuana, came to take a break from Prohibition; but they were soon coming back for Caesar Salad. And it wasn’t too long before Caesar Salad began to appear on the menus of neighborhood Italian restaurants all over North America.

While Mr. Cardini’s salad contained several ingredients unusual for the period, like Worcestershire sauce and Parmesan cheese, the most unusual were the toasted croutons. One tale of the salad’s origin suggests that on the Fourth of July, 1924, Caesar’s kitchen was running low on vegetables. Mr. Cardini is said to have gathered armloads of whatever was available, putting everything on a cart which he wheeled into the dining room. There, he began making this salad in full view of diners. Among his hastily gathered ingredients, were garlic-flavored croutons that had probably been destined to garnish soup.

The original salad didn’t include anchovies, but we have a clue as to how they eventually found their way into the standard Caesar Salad: Worcestershire sauce may contain many exotic flavor enhancers, like tamarind, asafoetida, cloves, and—guess what—anchovies. I happen to love anchovies, so I have included them in my recipe.

Anchovies turned out to be among the more subtle subversions of Caesar Salad. Over the course of the 1980′s and 90′s, Italian-American chefs have pushed, prodded, and shoved additional ingredients into and around the salad. Blackened Chicken Caesar Salad, Grilled Tuna Caesar, Shrimp Caesar, Tofu-topped Caesar, Caesar Burgers, and even Caesar burritos no longer raise eyebrows when they appear on upscale and fast-food menus.

During the 1990s, the California Department of Health banned the sale of Caesar Salad made with eggs. That regulation was suspended in 1998 when food scientists presented convincing evidence that coddling eggs, or dipping them into boiling water for 40 – 45 seconds, killed any lurking bacteria. If you do use eggs when making the dressing, please don’t omit this step.

Caesar Salad

For the Croutons:

2 Cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ Cup Extra-virgin olive oil
2 cups French baguette slices cut into 1-inch cubes.

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Combine the garlic, a few grindings from the pepper mill, and bread cubes in a bowl. Mix until seasonings cling evenly to cubes. Drizzle the olive oil over the cubes, stirring gently with a spatula. Spread the seasoned bread cubes on a sheet pan and bake until the croutons are golden, approximately10 minutes.

For the Salad:

1 Clove garlic, peeled and cut in half horizontally
4 oil-packed anchovies, minced
1 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
Juice of ½ Lemon
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
1 Large egg, coddled (submerged in boiling water for 45 seconds)
4 – 5 Tbs. Extra-virgin olive oil
2 Heads of Romaine lettuce (outer leaves removed and reserved for another use)
1/2 Cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Preparation:

Rub the inside of a wooden salad bowl* with the garlic halves, covering the bowl as evenly as possible. Discard the remaining garlic. Add the optional anchovies, and mash them with the back of a fork, while stirring to coat inside of the bowl as well.

Add the Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and mustard. Stir well. Crack the coddled egg into the bowl and beat vigorously with the back of a fork until all ingredients are well mixed.

Slowly add the oil in a steady stream, stirring constantly, until the mixture is smooth and the dressing begins to emulsify.

To serve:

Tear the Romaine lettuce into 2-inch pieces. Add them to the salad bowl and toss to coat them with the dressing. Add the Parmesan and croutons and toss the salad again. Serve immediately on chilled plates.

Serves six.

* For an erudite and extremely funny treatise on the mystique of wooden salad bowls, visit the Los Angeles Times online archives to read:
COOL FOOD When Salad Bowls Stalked the Earth by Charles Perry

During the halcyon days of supper clubs, clams on the half-shell were dressed up as Clams Casino and Clams Oreganata, appetizers that became popular with the dinner-show crowd. Dishes like Pasta with Clam Sauce and Clams Possilipo had already become fixtures on the menus of nearly all neighborhood restaurants, but the supper clubs served their clams as starters rather than as entrees.

Dining Out in the Fifties

Over time, neighborhood Italian-American restaurateurs took a lesson from their uptown brethren and began offering separate antipasti courses on their menus. While this generated larger dinner checks for patrons and, thus, greater revenue for restaurants, it really was a natural extension of Italian home dining. Families often ate “just a little something” while the pasta water was coming to a boil.

The more upscale Italian-American restaurants went a step further, dividing their menus into separate pasta courses and entrees, but neighborhood places continued to serve their main dishes on a bed of pasta or with pasta as a side dish.

By the 1970′s, cookbook authors like Marcella Hazan, Giuliano Bugialli, and Ada Boni were making us aware of the tenacious regionality of Italian food and cooking. American chefs riding the Northern Italian wave began serving dishes cooked with butter! Suddenly, everything North of Rome was “in.” Sine qua non ingredients like balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes defined a new class of Italian restaurants. Gnocchi, polenta and risotto supplanted pasta on many new menus. Restaurateurs from Tuscany and other northern provinces, notably Sirio Maccioni and Pino Luongo, presented Americans with a more refined version of Italian food.

But through all these changes, the neighborhood restaurants continued to serve their chicken Parmesan, shrimp scampi, and pasta with red sauce, as though unaware of the phenomenon taking place around them. Gradually, more of them replaced their red-and-white tablecloths with white linens. Rough wines in raffia-clad bottles were pushed aside by more carefully crafted Italian imports as more Americans began to appreciate and order wine. Antipasti had boosted profits, but vintage Barolos and Chiantis made even greater contributions to the bottom line. Yet even with these refinements, the spirit in which Italian food was prepared remained the same.

Despite encroachment from adjacent neighborhoods, dwindling Italian populations, and rising real estate prices, the urban neighborhood restaurants continue to thrive. Their culinary legacy is now more than a century in the making. Most tellingly, their clientele remains largely unchanged—students, artists, tourists, businesspeople, lovers, potential lovers creating a first-date memory, neighborhood regulars… and ever fewer who remember Nonna presiding over the dining room saying, Mangia, mangia!

Next: The recipes…

But American chickens—even decades before Frank Perdue—were physically superior to their Italian cousins. So even though they had only limited experience cooking poultry back in Italy, the first Italian-American home cooks were quick to adapt their recipes to such an affordable and abundant protein.

Meanwhile, Italian-American chefs in the Little Italys began paying tribute to their homeland with new creations such as Chicken Sorrentino, Chicken Sorrento-style; Chicken Margherita, Chicken dedicated to Queen Margherita; and Chicken Siciliano, Chicken Sicilian-style.

By the early 1950′s, Eggplant Parmesan, a classic Italian dish born in poverty, had inspired the upscale Chicken Parmesan.

Despite their creativity with chicken, most chefs were content to continue cooking the traditional pasta recipes from home. However, the most popular pasta dish ever—Spaghetti with Meatballs—was invented here. Prior to its invention, Italians who could afford meat, certainly ate their share of spaghetti and meatballs, but they did so in separate courses.

The tradition was—and remains—for Nonna to make a batch of meatballs and to braise them (often with sausages from the neighborhood butcher) in her signature tomato sauce. While the meat and sauce were bubbling on the stove, she would appropriate a few ladlefuls of sauce to serve over a dish of spaghetti as a first course. Then she would bring the meatballs to the table, as a secondo, to be served with bread and salad.

Until the early 1950′s, neighborhood Italian restaurant menus were in English only and featured classics like Pasta in Tomato Sauce and Pasta with Tomato Sauce and Cured Pork. Restaurants that had changed their checked table covers for starched white linen began to offer diners sophistication on the menu as well as in the appointments of the dining room. Dishes were listed in Italian first, followed by English translations, so one began to see Pasta alla Carbonara, Pasta with Eggs and Pancetta. But the complex subtleties of Pasta al Ragù eluded the translators, and it consistently appeared as nothing more than Pasta with Italian Meat Sauce.

By the 1970′s, Italian restaurants were firmly anchored in America. Chefs felt secure enough to tinker with pasta dishes, if for no other reason than to differentiate their menus from those of other Italian restaurants. Two of the most famous creations from the 70′s remain popular today. Pasta alla Vodka, Pasta with Tomato-Cream Sauce infused with Vodka, was part of a marketing campaign by Smirnoff Vodka. Pasta Primavera, Pasta with Spring Vegetables, was an impromptu creation of Tuscan-born Sirio Maccione, owner of Le Cirque, once among the most fashionable French restaurants in Manhattan.

Another dish, one that was authentically Italian, gained huge popularity here. In 1917, Roman chef Alfredo di Lelio had wanted only to prepare a soothing meal for his uncomfortably pregnant wife. He could never have imagined that the creamy pasta dish he created would sire a veritable menagerie—Chicken Alfredo, Turkey-Vegetable Alfredo, Shrimp Alfredo, and even Crayfish Alfredo. Even more noteworthy is that the Italian-American versions are now sometimes served as main-dish casseroles with pasta as an optional “side dish.”

Lobster Fra Diavolo is perhaps the most luxurious seafood adaptation and stands among the classic dishes of the Italian-American repertoire. Meaty North Atlantic lobsters were plentiful and readily available—expensive, but as affordable as the prime cuts of beef for which there was a steady demand. Italian-American restaurateurs, who had known success with Lobster Fra Diavolo, attempted to emulate steakhouse Surf-n-Turf platters. Lobster or shrimp in tandem with a steak became Mare e Monti.

Having all but vanished from contemporary menus, Mare e Monti seems to have gone too far beyond what was expected. The clientele of Italian-American restaurants had a threshold for experimentation…or perhaps price? But Lobster Fra Diavolo lives on and has been joined by Shrimp Fra Diavolo, Chicken Fra Diavolo, and yes—Tofu Fra Diavolo!

to be continued…

Italian-American Restaurant

Exhorting happy patrons to Mangia, mangia, Eat, eat! there was La Nonna, the matriarch. She presided over the kitchen and the dining room, which may have been the family’s front parlor by day. The famous Mama Leone set the standard for Italian-American hospitality in 1906 when she opened a restaurant in her New York City apartment to feed twenty diners each night.

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

Salume

In the small satellite towns within shopping distance of urban Little Italy communities, pizza parlors and mom-and-pop Italian restaurants sprang up. The proprietors of these suburban businesses relied upon the large urban suppliers, so it was shopping that ensured the vibrancy of the Little Italys, even as Italian-Americans moved out of cities. In the late 1940′s and 50′s, the evolving cuisine still depended upon traditional ingredients, many of which were imports not readily available elsewhere. Parmesan cheese, olive oil, dried porcini mushrooms, salt cod, and cured meats were key components of Italian-American kitchens everywhere. Suppliers, however, remained in the cities.

This was also the period during which new Italian-American chefs—particularly those who had seen action in Italy or France during the War—began to push out the boundaries of what had already become a traditional repertoire of Italian-American dishes. Perhaps their most radical departure was their introduction (or invention) of dishes without tomato sauce.

For non-Italians, it became trendy to go to Little Italy to eat pasta simply tossed with garlic, olive oil, and crushed red pepper flakes—aglio, olio, e pepperoncino (a preparation that really was Italian). The restaurant owners marveled that the dish that had seen them through years of poverty had become fashionable.

Chicken—rarely eaten in Italy until the development of modern poultry production—found its way onto the menus of neighborhood Italian restaurants. Appearing in dozens of guises, chicken proved extremely profitable for restaurateurs because it allowed them to expand their menus and made a wider variety of “Italian” food available to their clientele. Suddenly, the full panoply of Italian recipes previously cooked with veal became chicken dishes too.

Back in Naples or Palermo, most people couldn’t afford chicken. And even those who could afford it didn’t eat it often because at the time, Italian chickens were scrawny, sinewy, unappetizing birds better suited to egg production and soup.

In fact, according to a 1956 report from the Italian National Union of Aviculture (more than fifty years after my own forebears came to Connecticut) the average Italian ate fewer than five pounds of poultry (including turkey and duck) per year. Clearly, that wasn’t a lot of Chicken Cacciatora per capita.

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This development of a neighborhood restaurant culture marked a significant shift in thinking about what constituted “Italian” food. Among non-Italians, spaghetti with meatballs, a dish that seemed to symbolize Italy (but wasn’t Italian at all), became wildly popular. Eventually one truly authentic Italian offering eclipsed even spaghetti as the gastronomic icon of Italy—pizza.

Ciro’s Italian Village, Washington, D.C. (1930)
Photo courtesy of Bill Walsh, copy editor at The Washington Post.

As more restaurants opened and menus expanded, it was la cucina casalinga, home-cooking, that made them so popular with non-Italians. Paradoxically, this was the very reason that Italians didn’t patronize these first restaurants, even though they had opened within their own neighborhoods. The first generations of Italian-Americans stayed home or ate at the homes of family members.

Despite this lack of community support, Italian restaurants became successful enterprises because they were located in quaint neighborhoods; they offered novelty to their non-Italian diners; and the food was delicious, inexpensive, and abundant.

It was that abundance, abbondanza, that finally assured neighborhood Italian restaurants their central place in mainstream American dining. At the height of America’s engagement in World War II, nationwide food shortages often made it more practical for people to eat at an Italian restaurant than to cook at home. Going out had more appeal than using precious household ration allotments for groceries of dubious quality. The War certainly gave the commercial pasta industry a boost, as housewives of all ethnic heritages discovered the economy and versatility of semolina pasta, a commodity not subject to rationing.

Efficient railway transportation enabled Italian restaurants to offer diners fresh vegetables like broccoli, fennel, and zucchini long after the relatively short Northeast growing season ended. Only thirty-six hours after leaving the produce farms of northern California, the legendary Great American Lettuce Train would be at Pennsylvania Station in New York City.

Customers learned that Italian restaurants offered far more than a filling meal of pasta with tomato sauce. There was always the crusty bread, candles in Chianti bottles, maybe a nip of Papà’s homemade grappa, and more often than not, a Victrola playing Rossini or Verdi.

Then then there was La Nonna, the matriarch…

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Sharing Pasta in Naples.

In 1912, three Sicilian immigrants—Michele Cantella, Gaetano LaMarca, and Giuseppe Seminara—recognized the growing demand for semolina pasta and founded the Prince Macaroni Company, naming it not for deposed Sicilian nobility, but for their location on Prince Street, in the very heart of Boston’s North End. Three years later, Emanuele Ronzoni started the Ronzoni Macaroni Company in New York.

Another Sicilian, Vincente Taormina, who had begun importing foods to New Orleans in 1905, moved to New York in 1927 to join forces with his cousin and fellow importer, Giuseppe Uddo. They called their new enterprise Progresso Foods. After the company had relocated to Vineland, N.J., the cousins changed their focus from importing Italian ingredients to producing the foods that Italian-Americans had grown accustomed to eating.

Meanwhile, other Italian entrepreneurs were filling niche markets in nearly all food-related areas of the new Italian-American culture. Commercial prosciutto-curing operations, as well as sausage and cheese-making companies, flourished in New York and New Jersey. Small Italian businesses grew into large-scale importers, bringing Parmesan, olive oil, and wine in straw-covered bottles from Italy to eager buyers in the numerous Little Italy communities.

Before long, there was an alimentaria, Italian grocery store, on nearly every block of every street in every Little Italy. For example, in the small industrial city of Middletown, Connecticut, my great-grandparents, Antonio and Sebastiana Amenta from Melilli, Sicily, opened a grocery store in their house. Patronized by fellow Melillese from all parts of town, the shop thrived and served Middletown and surrounding areas for decades.

Despite having come to America from impoverished agricultural areas, where most had not even been able to own the land they had cultivated, the new immigrants were skilled farmers. They were quick to plant a variety of vegetables and herbs in every arable space—from window boxes to back yards, community plots, and even on tenement rooftops. Along with their beloved tomatoes, basil, and chili peppers, they introduced new vegetables like arugula, zucchini, fennel, broccoli, and escarole.

Pioneers of the American wine industry, Italians had found their way to northern California’s Napa and Sonoma valleys by the 1880′s. Genoa-born Andrea Sbarbaro started the Italian Swiss Colony in 1881, and in 1894, Anton Nichelini from Ticino founded what has become the oldest family-owned winery in the United States. In the Sonoma Valley, Samuele Sebastiani began his winery in 1904.

Ironically, the passage of the Volstead Act and the establishment of Prohibition in 1919 actually fostered the production of wine. It is testimony to the strength of wine-drinking immigrant communities that the Volstead Act allowed a head of household to produce up to 200 gallons of wine for home consumption annually.

Having secured a source of California grapes, Cesare Mondavi began shipping the fruit back to his Italian community in Minnesota in 1919. Finding northern California reminiscent of his old home in Italy’s province of Le Marche, he moved his family from Minnesota to Lodi, California, in 1923.

Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Ernesto and Julio Gallo started their commercial operations. A decade later, Cesare Mondavi bought the Charles Krug winery for his children.¹

The demise of Prohibition encouraged Italians to open restaurants in their neighborhoods, although the majority of patrons were non-Italians. Much of the appeal of those first eateries was that Italian restaurateurs treated diners like members of their extended families, serving them the same food ordinarily prepared for a Sunday meal at home. Meanwhile, Italians who lived in the neighborhood saw no reason whatsoever to leave their own homes to pay for food they could prepare for themselves.

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¹ The Mondavi family’s rise from grape shippers and produce wholesalers to their position as the driving force for American wine-making is as gripping a drama as any Italian opera. We recommend The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler; Gotham Books, 2007.