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

Introduction

Introduction Even a perfunctory look at the representations of Italian Americans in film and on TV reveals the centrality of food in Italian American culture. In The Sopranos David Chase (born De Cesare) created at once one of the most sophisticated historical narratives about America at the turn of the millennium and a hyperreal description “from the inside” of Italian American life. Throughout the series, Tony Soprano makes nightly visits to the fridge for ethnic comfort food like capocollo and eggplant parmigiana, usually to deal with his depression—a consequence of the unresolved emotional relationship with his mother. Tony regularly reaffirms his family leadership by asserting his power over food rituals like the careful grilling of sausages and the preparation of braciole. Tony’s wife, Carmela, plays the same food game, drawing her dysfunctional family around the table with dishes of baked ziti. Substituting food for an impossible love, Carmela treats the young parish priest with her special rigatoni, only to find out that Father Intintola has been “cheating” on her by accepting as a gift the pasta made by one of Carmela’s closest women friends. In Arthur Bucco’s Vesuvio restaurant, the other Soprano family feasts on high-end Italian food and wine in a display of conspicuous consumption and ethnic conviviality, pleasure, and pride. In an early episode, two of Tony’s middle-aged wiseguys, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri and Salvatore “Pussy” Bonpensiero, find themselves in a fancy coffee shop where everyone orders lattes, caramel macchiatos, and decaf cappuccinos. Perplexed by the scene around him, Paulie, a memory keeper of old-school Italian America, begins a tirade against “the rape of the culture” by Anglo-Americans. He rants that these Americans ate “pootsie” before Italians gave them the gift of their cuisine and now reap the benefits of the immense popularity of Italian food— 2 . introduction “pizza, calzone, buffalo moozarell, olive oil.” “But this, this espresso shit, this is the worst,” Paulie concludes, defiantly stealing an Italian coffeemaker on the way out as his protest against cultural colonialism.1 A generation earlier, The Godfather used food as a force that kept the Americanizing Corleone family anchored to Italianità. The Italian-born mobster Peter Clemenza, who orders his associate to “leave the gun, take the cannoli” after killing a suspected traitor, also teaches the young Godfather-to-be Michael Corleone how to make real Italian Sunday gravy, so that he will one day be able to feed his own (personal and crime) family. Food is everywhere in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, where family dinners, barbecues, and impromptu midnight meals make up much of the everyday life of the criminal community. Fatso, written and directed by Anne Bancroft (born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano in the Bronx), wryly explores the ways food, more than anything else, defines the most “Italian ” of human relationships—the mother-son bond. Finally, in Big Night, Stanley Tucci’s film two recent immigrants who own a struggling restaurant on the New Jersey shore in the 1950s, food is the fullest expression of the craving for security and social redemption that drove immigrants to America and of their longing for what was lost in the process. Not only has food been the most eloquent symbol of collective identity for Italian Americans throughout memoirs, literature, poetry, and the visual arts, but generations of social workers, sociologists, anthropologists, and other observers have also described the way eating becomes an act of self-identification and pride for Italians and an occasion for asserting cultural and political claims. It has become a truism that distinctive “Italian” food habits persist long after language and other cultural features have vanished.2 Why has this happened? Why has the food of immigrants and their children continued to serve as an extraordinarily powerful means of identification across different generations of Italian Americans, both within the community and in the eyes of outsiders? Why, and how, have Italian food and foodways come to define Italian America? What accounts for the immense and nearly universal popularity of Italian food—in many varieties, forms, and declensions—in American society, and, indeed, around the world? What does the persistence of Italian foodways tell us about the character and meaning of the Italian experience in America and, more broadly, about the function of consumption in the racial and ethnic formation of minority groups in the United States? Novelist Mario Puzo was born in 1920 in the Italian Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. In 1970, asked to explain what was...