The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City

Epilogue

epilogue Third-generation Italian American writer Helen Barolini recently looked back at the values and ideals that in the 1950s guided the suburban life of her parents, the first in their families to join the professional middle class. Barolini recalled, “In adopting American ways and the modernity of the twenties, both my parents lost the old-world family cohesiveness and unity of their parents. They had discovered a whole world outside family—family was no longer the fortress one stayed immured in; there were other attractions like business and social success, a country club and Corinthian club, material possessions.” As clearly as Barolini mourned that loss, she still acknowledged that the “whole world outside the family ” did not always extend to her Italian American table. “We girls learned to sew and cook in home-economics class,” Barolini wrote. I remember learning to make Welsh rarebit, tuna fish casserole, prune whip, tomato aspic, chipped beef on toast—all things we’d never eat at home, but which I told my mother about. It turned out that she herself, once, had attempted to go Wasp in her early days of marriage by serving my father creamed chicken on waffles. Once and never more; he had certain rules: Sunday was for spaghetti with meatballs (the word pasta was not used and no other form of it ever appeared) and he could get testy about the tomato sauce if it was too bitter, too thin, too thick, too cooked; a chunk of iceberg lettuce to munch on was all he wanted—no mixed salad; white fish or kidney beans were served in a broth of oil and garlic; strawberries were never to be crushed as a topping for ice cream and fruit in general was not to be promiscuously mingled in a “fruit cocktail”; and only Italian bread was ever to be placed on his table. American bread, which pop disparaged as cotton batting, was reserved for our school sandwiches. “Take out the soft part,” he’d command us children about Italian bread, “eat the crust, the soft part’s no good.”1 212 . epilogue The dark, crackling crust spoke candidly to Barolini’s memory of the workingclass origins of her Italian American cooking. That sound and those smells symbolized the resilience, even in a suburban world of supermarkets and single-family houses, of the food culture that immigrants and their children had shaped, out of feelings of shame and inferiority, through conflicts and compromises, in places like East Harlem, the South Village, and Mulberry Street’s Little Italy. Just like it had been in the 1920s and 1930s, though, the distinctiveness of Italian American food in postwar America would be the result of continuous transformations and adaptations to a changing Italian America and American culture. In the 1950s, many Italians began leaving their neighborhoods and, while still overrepresented among the ranks of the working class, quickly moved upward economically in the following decades, as college graduates and homeowners. From 1950 to 1970, the population of first- and second-generation Italians in New York City dropped by 36 percent, or more than 357,000. Language loyalty was disappearing as quickly as the immigrant generation itself. And the new immigrant families who arrived after the loosening of immigration restriction in 1965 came from a different Italy. Despite all this, Italian immigrant food culture sustained itself, but it was also transformed, as a cultural sphere that once again proved resilient to loss—but open to change. Its persistence in the life of Italian America and larger society can be grounded in different related dynamics. During these decades of social, cultural, economic, and political change within the Italian American community, Italian immigrant food became big business, both for local, independent, Italian American firms catering to an ethnic clientele and for aggressively growing national corporations. The once “dangerous” trattorias of Little Italy were transformed into comfortably middle-class attractions, and dining on spaghetti and meatballs at a restaurant run by a black-mustached cook became so common, and desirable, an experience that the consumption of difference through food would reach unprecedented popularity. Italian food became a culture that could be packaged for a mass consumer market, like the cans of spaghetti in tomato sauce that started appearing in the 1930s. Pizza is a vivid example of this continuing influence of an Italian working-class lifestyle and food culture in American life during the 1950s and 1960s. Before World War II, most non-Italians were completely unfamiliar with pizza...