"The Italian American Table: Food Family, and Community in New York City," by Simone Cinotto

No, the pasta with tomato sauce and a side of sausage and/or meat in more gravy/sauce you eat on Sunday is not a time-honored recipe of your Old Country forebears.

In “The Italian American Table,” Simone Cinotto proposes that the food we know as “Italian” has roots in the Old Country, but actually flowered in New York City.

Cinotto's academic examination of New York City's Italian immigrant community peels back the layers of accumulated culture to be found in that construct we know so well as “Italian food.”

The book proposes that, “Italian food was the food that reflected the experiences of Italian New York, as it was reinterpreted, transformed, and perpetuated in different reincarnations of many different Italian cuisines.”

What that means is that Italian food is not born of traditional recipes persistently defended by immigrants against modernity, but a creative response to the challenges of life in the New World. 

A Creative Business Class

Much of the credit goes to dynamic Italian American entrepreneurs whom Cinotto has called, “less cultural conservatives and more creative innovators.”  

This business class, he says, provided the community with a self-sufficiency in terms of goods. The goods themselves nurtured the culture and created a powerful link between being Italian and shopping Italian.

“They created a culture and a material world that was important for them,” says Cinotto, a member of the Vito Marcantonio Forum. “This mostly symbolic cultural construction would not have survived if it were not very important in economical terms.”

Fortuitously coupled to the business acumen of these merchants was a very large market for goods from Italy or “Italian-made” product. The 1930 census revealed one-in-six New Yorkers were Italian.

Abundance Realized

As for the Italian American diet's progression, he informs that, for the immigrants, pasta, canned tomatoes, olive oil – items now sacrosanct – became part of their diet on this side of the Atlantic. 

“[The immigrants] predilection for fresh food,” Cinotto says, “which they never seemed tired of declaring, may well have been the result of not having much of it in Italy, where, contrary to popular notions, southern peasants rarely ate 'fresh' and 'in season' relying mostly on cereals (bread, soups, pastas or pulses), and poorly preserved cheese, fish and sausages.”

Meat in Italy was a sometime thing. Manufactured “dry” pasta was for the upper strata of society.

The immigrants did not consider themselves as coming from Italy, rather as migrants sprung from their piccolo paese, “little country,” or province.

Simone Cinotto. 

Michael Parenti recalls in "Waiting for Yesterday," his memoir of youth in East Harlem, that when he asked his father if So-and-so was a paesan, his father told him, 'No, he's Napolitan,' meaning he was not Barese, like the Parenti clan and not of the same paese.

The food they ate represented what their sending region could yield or trade for. They shopped in local stores trafficking in the imported foodstuffs from the same places. 

But their U.S. status was that of Italians and the second and third generation kids came to view themselves in that way. They went to DeWitt Clinton High School where there were Irish kids, African-American kids, Puerto Rican kids, Jewish kids and themselves... the Italian kids.

A Closed Circle of Consumption

The home was a different story. “Living frugally in ethnically bounded enclaves, they maintained highly distinctive foodways,” says Cinotto. “In their homes, Italian immigrant women, barely exposed to mass marketing and advertising, continued to prepare foods purchased in local, independent stores in the neighborhood.”

This, he calls, a “closed circle of consumption,” which endured in immigrant communities up until the Second World War. It meant that mass-produced foods and chain stores made few inroads into the eating habits of Little Italy.

“Even as the U.S. marketplace allowed migrants to enrich their daily fare with foods (such as white bread, pasta, meat, coffee, and sugar) that had long been out of reach in Italy, their isolation and poverty shielded them from most of the lure of mass culture, mass consumption, and mass advertising,” according to Cinotto.

Nonetheless, he observes, “their ethnic food production and distribution network allowed immigrants to have much wider access to more varied food than they had in rural Italy. The industry that brought 'Italian' foods to Italian enclaves was just one part of a complex, global trade system.”

American production techniques meant food was getting to the table cheaper than elsewhere in the world, and certainly cheaper than in Italy. “Hard-pressed immigrants saw some of the abundance promised by America in the availability of products beyond their reach back home,” says Cinotto. 

The Importance of Food

Italian American families of that time, Cinotto's research revealed, spent significantly more on the family food budget than other ethnic groups in the U.S.

Food was important, part of southern Italian hospitality. So was tradition, but the immigrants found that keeping their American-born children in line as to the old ways was a losing battle.

Parenti writes, “The immigrant men drank wine made in their own cellars and smoked stogies. We nasty youngsters called the stogies 'guinea stinkers' in reference to the old Italians who smoked them.”

The “nasty youngsters'” immigrant parents turned to food as the glue that would preserve the family from the corrosive effects of modern American culture.

Cinotto notes that, “Immigrants began to employ food and food rituals in the construction of the Italian American famiglia with its emphasis on solidarity, strong gender roles, a commitment to work, suspicion toward abstract ideas, and an appreciation of the effective limits of happiness."

He observes that,"The ideology of La Famiglia met the needs of working class culture -- itself under development -- that prepared individuals to the life of labor most of them were destined to live." 

For Italian Harlem's immigrants, Cinotto says, a woman's ability to prepare the beloved foods was a sign of successfully transmitted tradition across generations.

"In practice,' he adds, "it meant that the new bride was ready to serve her new husband the food his mother used to cook." 

Marc cared about spaghetti.

Sunday dinner was very important. The foods served were not to be found in the American culinary universe the children encountered at school and in the homes of American friends. It therefore served as a strong symbolic link to the family and to that family's identity as Italian. 

To Be, or Not to Be (Italian)

As Parenti remembered, his grandfather, in the end, expanded his language comprehension of the standard Italian, used in local papers like Il Progresso, until he became less a Barese and something of the Italian he had never been in Italy.

It is Cinotto's proposition that much the same progression affected the Italian American diet.

After World War I, the community's wealth, much of which used to be sent to family in Italy, stayed in New York, and provided Italian American businesses with access to new capital.

A new generation of medium- to large-sized Italian American commercial entities then, “helped reshape the Italian American market by adding their ethnic social and cultural capital to modernized methods of production and marketing; they managed to create an aura of Italianitá around their products by asserting the Italian identity of their products or inventing one where it did not exist, while at the same time meeting the standards required by modern consumer culture – low price, quality, purity, and ease of preparation.”

Even when the canned tomatoes came from a California company, or the salami from northern New Jersey, branding industrially produced mass products as Italian worked, and these became every day items in the Italian American kitchen, in Cinotto's words, “earning the same trust accorded to 'natural' and 'traditional' non-processed foods." 

Marc frequented Rao's.

You'll never grab a can of whole tomatoes again without reading the label after Cinotto takes you through his survey of U.S.-sourced “Italian” kitchen staples. Just because there's a folkloric drawing of a peasant woman holding a basket in the Italian countryside, doesn't mean the contents comes from the Italian countryside.

A Comprehensive Study

There's much more. The role Italian restaurants served in helping Americans get more comfortable with the people who owned them and vice versa. Mussolini's encouragement of importation to the Italian immigrant community and the move toward Italian American companies when the trade bonanza ended.

There is a look at the codification of an “Italian cuisine” -- designed more for Americans than Italians -- featuring Neapolitan tomato-based offerings and dishes devised on Mulberry Street or 116^th Street, home of Rep. Vito Marcantonio; a dedicated marinara man in his own right. 

The progression, or the dialectic, is ongoing.

Mario Batali rooted his haute cuisine in the Old Country proper and would not hire kitchen hands who had not done time in an Italian – as in Italy – restaurant. There was a response, with cookbooks like “We Called It Macaroni” reasserting the virtues of home-cooked New York-style Italian cuisine.

All of which serves to highlight the dramatic levels of out-migration from Italy to the Americas. Cinotto often employs the term “diaspora” to describe the displacement of southern Italians around the world.

The condition was one of uprootedness and the establishment of foodways that drew upon old habits and made concessions to the offerings of a new environment resulted in something newer still: a strong marker of Italian American identity. 

Cinotto teaches history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. He is the recipient of accolades for his studies of food and the Italian American experience. 

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