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Food, Recipes, Cookbooks, and Italian-American Life An Introduction donna gabaccia 1998 Scholars have finally begun to take eating and cooking seriously. Many now accept as a starting point the observation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who in 1825 intoned, ‘‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.’’ The linkages among food, culture, and identity have long occupied small numbers of folklorists and anthropologists. But until recently most writing about food was done by popular writers—who offered guides to tourists and other adventurous consumers—and by gourmets reflecting on the haute cuisines of the lands they knew best. In the past ten years, however , historians, literary scholars, and sociologists have brought the study of eating closer to the scholarly mainstream by focusing instead on ordinary people and everyday eating. All have discovered cookbooks as an exciting new source of information on human history and identity. Among Italian Americans, food and cooking are powerful expressions of our ties to the past and our current identities. They also say much about how America has responded to us and our foods. On the one hand, it seems that everyone from African Americans to WASPs now cook and eat spaghetti , claim to love Italian food, and buy Italian cookbooks—but they do not imagine that they ‘‘become Italian American’’ by doing so. Indeed, many new immigrants to the United States think that pizza is an American invention; they may even have eaten pizza mass-produced by Pizza Hut before they left their homelands. At the same time, Italian Americans sometimes feel insulted by advertisements—‘‘that’s a spicy meatball!’’—and by popular culture images of overweight ‘‘Mammas’’ tied to their saucepans that depict Italian Americans as obsessed with eating. Many seem to believe that we are much, much more than what we eat, and that too many negative stereotypes link Italians and food. In this section of the anthology, four 121 122 Donna Gabaccia contributors explore cookbooks as one important expression of ItalianAmerican culture and identity. The first selection provides historical context for defining and understanding Italian-American cookbooks. What makes a cookbook regional, Italian, American, or Italian-American? How have Italian immigrant kitchens differed from those of other Americans, other immigrants, and other Italians? Carol Helstosky first analyzes a particular cookbook, La cucina casareccia napoletana, sold in New York’s Little Italy in the late 1930s. Donna Gabaccia, who acted as a guest editor for this special feature in Italian Americana when it was first published in 1998, then provides a general overview of the wider variety of cookbooks that have focused on immigrant kitchens over time. In her essay, she draws particular attention to ‘‘community cookbooks ’’ (including a partial bibliography of cookbooks of this type) and to other cookbooks written by Italian Americans themselves. The second half of this sequence follows up on Helstosky’s and Gabaccia ’s observations with two personal reflections on writing and publishing cookbooks by Catherine Tripalin Murray (A Taste of Memories from the Old ‘‘Bush’’) and Cassandra Vivian (Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian). Although each author wrote a different type of cookbook, their personal reflections reveal a common motivation—to connect family, memory, and recipes. Cookbooks are by no means the only resource available to historians of food, culture, and society. And, as Carol Helstosky notes, they are complex sources, inherently difficult to interpret. Still, cookbooks remain some of the most fascinating and ubiquitous texts that describe our eating habits. We invite cooks, collectors, and scholars among Italian Americana readers to take cooking and eating seriously. We hope they will look with new respect at their own cookbook collections, for they are both personal statements and scholarly archives-in-the making. ...

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