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Italian-American Cookbooks From Oral to Print Culture donna gabaccia 1998 What makes a cookbook Italian-American? Not simply its place of origin or language of publication. Numerous books about Italian cooking are published in English in the United States and Canada, but few would agree that this makes them Italian-American; after all, they may be books about cooking in Italy. Perhaps it is the content of the recipes that makes a cookbook Italian-American. But a cookbook need not limit itself to the culinary realms of the immigrant kitchen to be considered Italian-American. Could the origins of the cookbook author, or her parents or grandparents, define a cookbook as Italian-American? If so, we will want to reserve our ItalianAmerican label for cookbooks produced by writers with demonstrable ties to the migration experience. Perhaps, then, preparation by Italian-American hands defines a dish—or the cookbook from which it comes—as ItalianAmerican . But even these last two definitions have limits, for Italian Americans sometimes choose to write about—and to prepare or eat—Japanese food, macrobiotic diets, or fast food. Obviously, there are many ways to bridge the culinary worlds of Italy and America. The history of migrations from one land to another is just one bridge among many—and it is a complex bridge—but it is the one that most Italian Americans would probably choose to define a cookbook as ItalianAmerican . In this essay I focus on the history of cookbooks written by, or for, immigrant cooks and their descendants, attending particularly to those cookbooks that offer information about the kitchens and cooking of Italianorigin foods in the kitchens of Italian immigrants and their descendants. I interpret these Italian-American cookbooks against the backdrop of a much larger body of American cookbooks that introduced Italian recipes to cooks with no immigrants in their kitchens. 133 134 Donna Gabaccia Most of the immigrant cooks who came to the United States, regardless of background, brought their recipes with them in their heads. Cookbooks were rare anywhere in the world before the nineteenth century. Literate, urban, and middle-class women in Europe and the United States were more likely to use cookbooks than those who were rural or poor. A rising sense of nationalism in the nineteenth century seems to have encouraged the codi fication of national cuisines from varied, local, and regional traditions in many countries around the world, including those with large rural, illiterate populations. Once in the United States, most immigrants produced and published cookbooks in their native languages as well as English. The Deutsch-Amerikanisches Illustriertes Kochbuch (New York, 1891) and Marie Rosicka’s Bohemian cookbook, Narodni Domaci kucharka cesko-americka (Omaha, 1904), reprinted parts of homeland cookbooks and adapted homeland favorites to new world food markets, often adding new recipes borrowed from American or other immigrant neighbors. Some, like the Suomalais-Amerikalainen Perhe-Keittokirja/Finnish-American Family Cookbook (Milwaukee, 1923) appeared in bilingual editions to facilitate use by daughters and granddaughters who were losing their Finnish-language skills, but not their taste for Finnish foods. The popular Jewish Cookery (Esther Levy’s collection of kosher recipes , published in Philadelphia in 1871) and Aunt Babette’s Cookbook (Chicago , 1889) simply assumed that English-speaking women would want to continue the cooking traditions of Jewish central Europe. By contrast the Ch’u shu ta ch’uan Chinese and English Cookbook (San Francisco, 1910) and Kokki-Kirja (Complete Directions for the Preparation of American Foods [Fitchburg, 1903]) aimed respectively at Chinese and Finnish immigrants who expected to take jobs as domestic servants in American homes. They offered recipes for American dishes (puddings, biscuits, and so on) in the native languages of the prospective servants. One finds very few examples of any of these types of cookbooks for Italian immigrant cooks. Maria Gentile’s The Italian Cookbook (New York, 1919) was published by the Italian Book Company, which also produced the cookbook La cucina casareccia napoletana,2 which Carol Helstosky discusses in this volume. Contemporaneously, Pellegrino Artusi’s Italian classic La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene had been adapted for use by immigrants as the simply titled Italian Cookbook (New York, 1940). Other immigrant cooks in America found printed recipes in works published in Italy and imported to the United States. Three thousand miles to the west of New York’s Italian Book Company, an Italian bookstore in San Francisco’s [18.118.226.105] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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