Inasmuch as the United States is a melting pot of cultures, few forms of cuisine have become as uniquely American as the dishes Italian immigrants brought with them to big cities like New York and Chicago in the early-20th Century. Indeed, pizza and spaghetti have become so popular in the US that one might be forgiven for mistaking them for traditional American meals!
But Italian cuisine does not stop at pizza, however popular the dish has become. A new generation of chefs has brought Italian food into the 21st Century, and many people have brought an updated look and feel to many traditional Italian ingredients such as lamb, pasta, and olive oil. With its simplicity and great taste, the pillars of Italian cuisine like tomato and meat sauces lend themselves to experimentation with new styles and recipes.
And yet, for many Americans of Italian descent, there still is nothing quite like a meal shared with family at home. We talked with Russo’s New York Pizzeria who added, “Just as the New England pilgrims created Thanksgiving as a communal feast to celebrate sharing and plenty, Italian cuisine in the United States grew out of the social bonds that large meals provided between friends and relatives.” Early immigrants to the United States could use mealtimes as a way to provide a sense of community in a new homeland, and from this spirit of giving the grand dishes of Italian-American cuisine really started to develop.
Once one of the wealthiest regions of Italy, southern areas such as Sicily and Abruzzo suffered dire conditions of poverty in the 19th and 20th Centuries, prompting a large expatriate community to move to the United States in order to better support their families. It is from these southern regions that most of Italian-American cuisine is therefore descended: Indeed, the style of pizza we might associate with areas like New York and Chicago is essentially a dish from the Italian city of Naples, while the delicious red sauces, meatballs and sausages spiced with oregano we might associate with a filling dish of spaghetti is still a major staple of families in the southern regions of the country.
Homemade Italian food in the US is particularly delicious because it was handed down year after year as families celebrated the company of loved ones, with recipes constantly evolving as each new generation provided their own twist on old classics. Accordingly, many of the greatest Italian dishes are cooked in large batches so as to serve guests and visitors. The rich tradition of using seafood in the coastal regions of Italy also came over with the large immigrant populations of the early 1900s, and ingredients such as crab cooked in tomato sauce are still to be found in many Italian-American households.
So why is it that Italian cuisine beat out so many other styles of cooking in the United States (and indeed the world) as a popular dish? The answer may lie in the fact that Italian food is often based on simplicity and healthiness. Unlike French cuisine, which often requires extensive training to get right, Italian cuisine is easily taught and has recipes flexible enough for chefs to improvise with. Moreover, few French immigrants appeared in the US during the same period as Italian immigrants did, unlike their Slavic and Jewish counterparts. As the staple of another major immigrant group, English food might have made a bigger splash in the states if it were not so notoriously bland! Somehow, fish and chips did not catch on quite like a slice of pizza in the realm of American comfort foods.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that Italian food has taken the world by storm, and because it offers delicious taste and simple recipes, it looks likely that homemade Italian meals will remain a favorite for generations to come.
