Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

10. Table: Cine Cucina

chapter 10 Table Cine Cucina Music and cooking are so much alike . . . Taste, like rhythm, may be described, but it does not exist until it is experienced. —Marcella Hazan, 1978 At the turn of the century, even the progressivists closed their eyes and held their noses when approaching the food shops in Little Italy, and my grandmother, born in 1901, used to recall endless childhood taunting, where antipathies of one order or another would invariably turn into food insults: “Go eat worms!” they told her, meaning spaghetti. Into the early 1980s my favorite provisions store in New Haven, Connecticut (barrels of dried beans, oodles of different kinds of small pasta for soup, and extra-dry ginger ale) was so embedded in the old Oak Street neighborhood it went without a sign! But now, a century after my grandmother’s birth and a couple of decades after that provisions store’s demise, Italian food has become the cuisine most beloved by Americans—which would seem, at first glance, to be a mixed blessing, given its adulteration in the frozen food section of the supermarket or in the latest big-box restaurant at the mall. My grandmother would have made an immediate about-face at the smell of half cooked garlic wafting from the Olive Garden door, chuckling in pleasure—the prejudice is over!—but shrugging her shoulders in sadness at the gross popularity of such bad food. But my grandmother, who was simply and truly a fabulous cook, has passed away. So does all this authenticity talk still matter? In Milan, and then again in Rome, I have warned members of my 181 family not to ask for grated parmesan with the seafood dishes (vongole, calamari, fra diavolo) they love. I have seen them bite their tongues in deference to family peace only to give into temptation, reaching for parmesan on the table for other dishes; and I have seen, each time, a waiter, a professional man of the table in waiting, justly suspicious, swoop down to prevent the disgrazia. In Italy, the customer is not always right; the guest/host relation of hospitality is not exactly what transpires when a stranger comes to dine; and there are things too precious to be left to an advantageous exchange rate, international goodwill, or nouvelle caprice. What is to happen, then, to Italian food culture in the capricious, imperious United States—where even Italian Americans sometimes prefer not to get it? Who remembers how, who is going to do all the work, and will anyone care?1 Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s restaurant flick Big Night (1996) invites us to consider what is at stake, socially and spiritually, literally but also figuratively, in the Italian cultura of food—la buona cucina— when it operates, as it often has and now must, in the face of capitalist forces, the imperative of cross-cultural toleration, and the cult of anything-goes hybridity. Big Night is set vaguely on the Jersey Shore in the late 1950s—the transitional moment of an in-between people on the verge of realizing a momentous transatlantic relocation, literally and figuratively: the Greater New York area Big Night evokes was then the demographic center of Italian America and remains still the habitus of the Italian American imaginary—its place, so to pun, in the national imagination. I was first drawn to Big Night because the paternal side of my family hails from Bergen and Hudson counties, because Italian food is the discipline of tough love in both my ancestral houses (the cheese issue notwithstanding!), and because we, too, would be loath to let either Isabella Rossellini or Minnie Driver slip away. I want now to bring the sensorium—as knowledge, delight, and obligation—to the table of cultural inquiry and to demonstrate, as explicitly as possible, what a difference a metaphysics of viscerality makes to our construction of the contact zone and our feeling for Italianness in America. Big Night is the story, apparently, of the defeat of Italian gastronomy under the boom conditions of the American postwar marketplace: the brilliant cook Primo holds sacred the production and consumption of great food, to which he sacrifices body and home, yet he can’t make a go table 182 of his authentically Italian trattoria in 1950s New Jersey. The foreseeable future belongs to rival entrepreneur Pascal, another Italian émigré, whose wildly successful spaghetti-and-meatball joint (which Primo...