This national love affair unfolded in two overlapping yet disconnected chapters. Chapter one began in the mid-nineteenth century, as immigrants from northern Italy settled in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Boston, and San Francisco. Italians who belonged to this first wave were largely people of culture—artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, and other professionals. Among the early immigrants were restaurant-keepers. In the 1850s and 1860s, as the Italian settlements gathered critical mass, they opened eating places to feed their transplanted countrymen. New York’s first Italian restaurants were clustered near Union Square, close to 14th Street, then the city’s main entertainment thoroughfare and home to the Academy of Music, the nation’s first official opera house. In 1857, an Italian named Stefano Moretti opened a pleasingly shabby second-floor restaurant directly across the street from the Academy, which became New York’s first important Bohemian dining spot. The favorite haunt of Italian opera stars, Moretti’s began to attract native-born musicians, artists, and writers. The avant-garde of their day, they were drawn to Moretti’s by the delightfully foreign atmosphere as well as the food, a five-course dinner for a dollar, a fair price for the time though well beyond the means of the working class. The dishes they encountered were typical of the northern kitchen. Risotto with kidney was a house specialty, along with wild duck and quail, both served with salad. But Signor Moretti was also known for his spaghetti, “tender as first love” and “sweet beyond comparison.” Though nineteenth-century Americans were generally familiar with macaroni, the pipe-stem-shaped pasta used today for mac ’n’ cheese, spaghetti was still utterly alien. American diners were simultaneously baffled, alarmed, and enchanted by these attenuated strands of dough that they discovered in Italian restaurants but still had no name for. If the food itself was bizarre, the complicated procedure of eating it left Americans awestruck. The following description of a New York Italian restaurant circa 1889 captures the air of adventure surrounding this novel food. The second course consisted
of a substance resembling macaroni that has been pulled out until each piece is at least two feet long, while the thickness has proportionally diminished. You are told that it is wholly bad form to cut this reptile-like food; you must eat as the Italians do. Thereupon you suddenly cease to feel hungry, and spend the time in observation. They, to the manner born, lift a mass of this slippery thing upon the fork, give the wrist several expert twists, and then, with lightning rapidity, place it in the mouth. If by misfortune a string escapes, it is gradually recovered in the most nonchalant manner imaginable. It is a fascinating operation, though by no means one to inspire a desire to emulate the operator.21
The only thing more diverting than this queer new food was the foreign crowd, a collection of singers, ballerinas, professors, journalists, and businessmen.
As the city’s theaters migrated from 14th Street to Broadway, the restaurants followed. For New Yorkers out on the town, tired of their native chop houses and oyster saloons, Italian food was a refreshing change of pace, and much cheaper than French, the foreign cuisine favored by elite society. Italian food, by contrast, along with German, was the foreign cuisine of the American middle class. The kind of food New Yorkers could expect to find at the new Broadway restaurants was more attuned to American tastes. For the less adventuresome eater, they offered both chops and oysters. The rest of the menu was still rooted in the more mildly flavored and buttery cuisine of northern Italy. An inventory of recommended dishes that ran in the New York Sun advised diners to stick with the cheaper items on the menu, like spaghetti in meat sauce, “a chopped-up soupy compound,” and to skip the more expensive meats in favor of veal, lamb, and giblets:
The leg of veal, usually used for a soup bone, is delicious when it comes on the table as osso buco. The leg is roasted, there is a suggestion of herbs and garlic and a sauce of brown butter over the risotto that accompanies it. Then there is the delicious marrow in the bone that has been opened in order that it may easily be eaten.
The veal cutlets, whether they are served à la Milanaise, with cêpes cut up over them and put into a sauce of butter and cheese, or with herbs, are superior to any that can be eaten at the best of Fifth avenue restaurants.
Arostino, which means a little roast, is a slice of the veal served with the kidney embedded into it and cooked with thyme and a thick brown sauce covering it and a bed of risotto. Such a cut of veal is unknown to American butchers.
The kidneys au sauce Medere are made in accordance with an Italian formula and are remarkable from the fact that only very small kidneys are used and they are served with champignons of about the same size.
It is in such dishes as these that the Italian restaurants excel, and to them they owe their present popularity, for they alone are able to serve them in such excellence in cooking and at such prices.22
The Broadway restaurants offered just enough novelty (and garlic) to stimulate the imagination while providing diners with the niceties of New York’s finest eating establishments, including an Italian menu printed in French.
After 1880, an entirely different kind of Italian eating place could be found in New York. These were the basement restaurants on Mulberry and Mott streets that catered to the new wave of Italian immigrants, peasant farmers from the southern half of the country who began to settle in New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood, moving into the ramshackle tenements once occupied by American blacks and poor Irish. The Italians also took over the low-paying jobs once held by the Irish to become the city’s new street cleaners and ditch diggers. Native-born New Yorkers drew a firm distinction between these new immigrants and the Italians they already knew, “honest,” “industrious,” and “orderly” people. An 1875 editorial that ran in the New York Times presented this thumbnail portrait of the new arrivals:
They are extremely ignorant, and have been reared in the belief that brigandage is a manly occupation, and that assassination is the natural sequence of the most trivial quarrel. They are miserably poor, and it is not strange that they resort to theft and robbery. It is, perhaps, hopeless to think of civilizing them.23
While the north vs. south distinction was rooted in historical fact (southerners were poor and uneducated), it became the foundation for pernicious stereotypes imposed on southern Italians, which Americans returned to again and again, using the immigrants’ birthplace to explain everything about them, from their violent nature to their deplorable eating habits. As a result, several years passed before Americans were able to gather up their courage and sample the fruits of the southerners’ kitchen.
The first restaurants in Little Italy reflected the immigrants’ meager earnings. A visitor to the Italian colony in 1884 counted four neighborhood restaurants where laborers could buy a two-cent plate of macaroni, three cents worth of coffee and bread, or splurge on coffee and mutton chops, the most expensive item on the menu, for a total of six cents. Basement restaurants also provided laborers with a place to gather, to smoke their pipes, play cards, and enjoy the talents of their musical peers. (The neighborhood’s busiest social spots, however, were the stale-beer dives, as they were known, where the house drink was made from the beer dregs collected from a better class of saloons.) The dining rooms attached to boardinghouses and cheap hotels were another eating option for the transplanted Italian. A typical menu consisted of coffee with anisette and hard bread for breakfast, and for supper, minestrone, spaghetti or macaroni, followed by a stew made with garlic and oil.
The early restaurants reflected the strong connections that immigrants felt for their native villages. As they settled in New York, Italians recreated the geography of home, with Neapolitans on Mulberry Street, Calabrians on Mott, Sicilians on Elizabeth, and so on. Within these regional encampments, Italians from a particular town or village tended to cluster on the same city block and sometimes in the same building. At their festa, villagers came together to honor their local saint, but also to celebrate their ties with each other. Italians have a word for the spe
cial connectedness felt among towns people. Campanilismo, from the Italian word for “bell,” describes the bonds of solidarity felt among people who live within hearing distance of the same church bell.
Restaurants preserved these regional loyalties. Some of the first restaurants were hidden within the Italian groceries that began to appear in New York in the 1880s, the provisions lined up on one half of the room, the other half set aside for tables. Like many immigrant restaurants, these were family-run businesses. The store/café occupied the front room of a ground-floor apartment, while the family slept in the back. This was also where the proprietor’s wife cooked for her customers. An 1889 article from Harper’s magazine describes the convivial scene inside one of these store/cafés, this one owned by a family of Sicilians:
Notwithstanding the poverty of the place, it is as busy as a beehive. At the long table, a number of men, who probably work at night on the scows of the Street-cleaning Department, are drinking the black coffee, which, despite its cheapness, is palatable enough to the drinkers. A handful of Italian women, whose dresses and shawls are bright with the gaudy colors so dear to them, are chaffering with the proprietor’s wife over a string of garlic or a pound of sausage. The chairs about the room are occupied by friends and customers of the house, who are smoking villainous short pipes and talking so loudly that one ignorant of the language would suspect them to be on the point of a riot.
The air is blue with tobacco smoke, and the place reeks with the conglomeration of stenches that no language can describe, yet all the people appear to enjoy the best of health, and even the children display a robustness and physical vigor that would do credit to those born with silver spoons. The food served in this, as in all places of a similar sort, does not lack nutrition, though the materials gathered would not recommend themselves to the fastidious. The stew, made up of scraps gathered here and there, is spiced until savory to a hungry man, and the macaroni, though manufactured from the cheapest and coarsest flour in some eastside shop, is usually wholesome.24
If Americans were charmed by the Italians’ earthiness, an establishment like the Sicilian café was best experienced in the pages of magazines.
Once confined to the Five Points, New York’s most notorious slum, by 1910 Little Italy stretched north toward Houston Street and west toward Greenwich Village. As the colony expanded, its physical character also changed. In 1895, the tenements surrounding Mulberry Bend, the heart of the Five Points, were torn down to make way for Columbus Park, Little Italy’s new “town square.” Two blocks west of the Bend, more tenements were razed to widen Elm Street, creating a broad thoroughfare known today as Lafayette Street. Now open to light and air, Little Italy was no longer the “foul core of New York slums” that Jacob Riis described in the 1890s. What’s more, Little Italy was no longer the bachelor community it once had been. By 1900, Italian immigrants were largely men and women who came to the United States to start a family and lay down roots.
Chapter two of the American romance with Italian food began at the turn of the century, as native New Yorkers wandered into the now-expanded Italian colony. One stop on their itinerary was the Italian grocery, which exposed the visitor to enticements they had never known existed. The heart of their education, however, took place in the Italian restaurants that served as culinary classrooms. For Americans who believed that Italians subsisted on bread and macaroni, the edible delights available in the downtown restaurants came as a revelation. Published accounts of these gastronomic forays were quick to warn readers of certain possible pitfalls. To quote one newspaper reporter: “The Italian taste in cookery is not always such as pleases the native American palate.”25 Properly advised, however, American diners could find an array of delectable dishes: minestrone that was “thick and tasteful” kidneys, liver, and veal, prepared southern-style with peppers and onions; simmered polpette, or meatballs; fried calamari; and a host of tantalizing vegetable dishes based on eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. But the dish that most enchanted American diners was spaghetti.
Discovered by an earlier generation of adventuresome eaters, in the early 1900s spaghetti reentered the American culinary consciousness and quickly moved from restaurant kitchens to the family dinner table. Recipes for spaghetti began to appear in American cookbooks, including The Boston Cooking School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer published in 1896. In her 1902 cookbook, Sarah Tyson Rorer, a leading voice of the domestic science movement, explains precisely how this still-novel food should be cooked:
Spaghetti is always served in the long form in which it is purchased. Grasp the given quantity in your hand; put the ends down into boiling water; as they soften, press gently until the whole length is in the water; boil rapidly for twenty minutes. Drain, and blanch in cold water.26
Around the same time, recipes for spaghetti began to appear on the women’s pages of American newspapers. Many sent in by readers, newspaper recipes leave a vivid record of the creative, often zany applications that American home cooks found for spaghetti. There was “Mexican Spaghetti” with tomatoes, paprika, peppers, and bacon served in a chafing dish; “Chicken and Spaghetti Croquettes” made with cooked spaghetti, finely chopped; and the popular “Tomatoes Stuffed with Spaghetti.” In 1908, the women’s page of the Chicago Tribune featured a reader’s recipe for “Spaghetti and Meat Balls,” one of the earliest references to this future staple of the Italian-American kitchen:
SPAGHETTI AND MEAT BALLS
Take one pound of round steak, run through meat grinder two or three times; one egg, three rolled crackers or grated stale bread, one small onion grated, four sprigs parsley chopped fine, and pepper and salt to suit taste. Mix and form into small balls, a teaspoonful and a half each.
Prepare sauce as follows: One can tomatoes, one green or red pepper, one onion, two bay leaves, and a quart water. Boil one hour, then strain through colander. Add small piece of butter, and pepper and salt to suit taste. Return to fire and place meatballs in it and boil slowly for forty minutes.
Spaghetti: take one pound of spaghetti, boil it in two quarts of saltwater for twenty minutes, drain, pour over sauce and all, and serve hot.27
The Baldizzis’ financial prospects improved considerably when America entered the war in 1941. By this time, the family was living in Brooklyn. Adolfo found work in the wartime naval yards, while Rosaria returned to her job in the garment district. With both parents employed full-time, the pall cast over the Baldizzi household began to lift. On Orchard Street, the family had owned a radio, which Rosaria kept tuned to the opera stations. In Brooklyn, she bought a record player and kept it running whenever she was home, filling the house with music. On holidays, the Baldizzis hosted family parties complete with music and dancing. The new prosperity brought very welcome changes to the family dinner table. At last, Rosaria could afford to buy the meat that was so conspicuously absent from the Orchard Street kitchen. The most festive meal of the year, however, was entirely meatless. Christmas dinner traditionally began at ten o’clock, to coordinate with the midnight mass. The first course was octopus salad, followed by a pan of lasagna, rich with ricotta, eggs, and mozzarella, but the climax of the meal was a stew made with baccala—salt cod. Here is the Baldizzi family recipe for the holiday staple:
Josephine and John Baldizzi on the roof of 97 Orchard Street, 1935.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
CHRISTMAS BACCALA
1 stalk celery, diced
½ cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon salted capers (or more to taste)
2 small cans tomato sauce
2 ½ to 3 pounds baccala
Two days before Christmas, soak the baccala in cold water, changing the water at least two times a day. Cut baccala into pieces.
Sauté celery for five minutes. Add onion, garlic, and capers and cook a few minutes, until soft. Add tomato sauce. Cook over a low flame fifteen minutes. Add baccala and cook until fish comes apart with a fork.28
On New
Year’s Eve, the Baldizzis celebrated with sfinge, a kind of hole-less doughnut. Rosaria started the batter in the afternoon, mixing the flour, yeast, and water in a large pot, then covering it with a blanket and leaving it to rise. Just before midnight, she put a pot of oil on the stove, testing the temperature with a drop of water. When it splattered, the oil was sufficiently hot. The second the clock struck twelve, she dropped the first spoonful of batter, which caused the oil to bubble wildly, producing a loud zhoosh-ing sound. It took roughly a minute for the sfinge to cook up, puffy and golden. After scooping them from the pot, she dipped them in sugar. Then she fed them to the kids, still hot, so their first taste of the New Year would be sweet.
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