https:\/\/youtu.be\/u4q-OzQh3Ms<\/p>\n
[. . .]\u00a0Meanwhile, the distinctive identity and taste of Italian American food seemed threatened to be dissolved in the process of mass production, as many of the companies that immigrants had started before World War II were being acquired, with their networks of suppliers, distributors, and consumers, by big corporations. After it made the crossing from Naples early in the century with the sizeable Neapolitan contingent of Italian immigrants, been baked in the basement of bakeries, and sold by the slice on the streets of Little Italies, pizza had remained unknown to other Americans until World War II. In the 1950s, as GIs returning from occupied Italy may also have helped popularizing it, a market for pizza was created almost overnight by inventive cooks and entrepreneurs who opened modernized pizza parlors first in the outer neighborhoods of New York, New Haven, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where second-generation Italian Americans had relocated, and then all over these cities. The deep frozen version of pizza, made\u00a0by the\u00a0millions\u00a0in\u00a0industrial plants in New Jersey and aimed at suburban supermarket shelves throughout the nation, followed suit. The quintessential Italian American dish,\u00a0spaghetti with meatballs,\u00a0was\u00a0such an innocuous symbol of identity\u00a0as\u00a0to be featured in the most popular scene of the Disney\u2019s cartoon,\u00a0The Lady and the Tramp<\/em>\u00a0(1955). A decade later (1969), an equally popular TV commercial for Prince Spaghetti introduced for the first time elements of nostalgia for the by-gone era of homogeneous Italian urban communities and traditional rich family life for the consumption of Italian and non-Italian Americans alike.<\/p>\n A new kind of tension emerged in fact in the 1970s and 1980s, as on the one hand, the ethnic revival movement endorsed food to be the most meaningful heritage of the immigrant culture third-generation Italian Americans strived to rediscover and celebrate, and on the other new middle-class discourses, closely reminiscing the critiques of Italian American food expressed by Italian travelers to America of the early twentieth century, were emerging, promoting the notion that Italian American food was an unfortunate bastardization of \u201creal\u201d Italian cuisine, which was only that of Italians in Italy. Italian American revivalists indulged in the production and consumption of community cookbooks celebrating the culinary legacies of Little Italies everywhere in the U.S. and Italian American food continued to be the most pleasurable part of the immigrant heritage to share and enjoy at ethnic street fairs and official gatherings of Italian American associations. At the very same time, a tiny group of middle-class northern Italian immigrants in New York City, many of whom had never cooked in Italy, reshaped Italian food in America by detaching it from its immigrant origins and relocating it within the \u201cauthentic\u201d traditions of Italian regional cooking. Cookbook writers and cooking instructors Marcella Hazan, Giuliano\u00a0Bugialli, Franco\u00a0Romagnoli, and Lidia Bastianich were welcomed by a culture industry eager to let them promote real Italian food among a growing cosmopolitan class of professional Americans who were avid consumers of foreign and ethnic cuisines. Recent immigrant, Italian-born and trained chefs\u00a0opened upscale restaurants serving Tuscan and other regional cuisines on the Upper East Side of New York or in the Chicago Loop. Sometimes called\u00a0\u201cnorthern Italian cuisine\u201d\u00a0to differentiate it from the down-market red-sauce clich\u00e9s of early twentieth-century immigrants, this new template for Italian eating\u00a0first\u00a0popularized dishes like creamy\u00a0risotto,\u00a0gnocchi,\u00a0pesto,\u00a0osso\u00a0buco, and\u00a0tiramis\u00f9,\u00a0and\u00a0then\u00a0formerly little-known foodstuff like sun-dried tomatoes, Treviso radicchio, and balsamic vinegar,\u00a0which became popular in Italy outside their local places of production at the same time they were being adopted by New York\u2019s and Los Angeles\u2019 \u201cfood scenes.\u201d So thorough was the transnational alignment of taste and culinary culture,\u00a0and wide the audience of this discourse,that by 1996\u00a0Hollywood was able to present the character played by Tony\u00a0Shalhoub\u00a0in the movie\u00a0Big Night<\/em>\u2014an\u00a0Abruzzese\u00a0immigrant cook to New Jersey in the 1950s who refuses to serve his ignorant American customers the inauthentic Italian\u00a0(\u201cred sauce\u201d immigrant)\u00a0food they like\u2014as the hero of the story. Third-generation Italian Americans willing to research and reconsider their identity starting from their larders and gas stoves were left with the intellectual and gastronomic task to reconcile two different transnational discourses rooted in different times and places, and articulating contrasting ideas about class and distinction.<\/p>\n As Italian American food culture entered the\u00a0twenty-first\u00a0century, and the new postindustrial consumer landscape, this reconciliation seemed to have, for the most part, happened.\u00a0In the current consumer culture promoted both in Italy and the United States by Slow Food and the many other actors in the American food revolution, authenticity,\u00a0artisanality, craft,\u00a0creativity,\u00a0time-blessed popular traditions\u2014of which Italian American food\u00a0culture\u00a0is rich\u2014are adding-value factors in the evaluation of food and cuisines.\u00a0Eataly, the Italian food megastore chain co-owned by the Italian businessman Oscar\u00a0Farinetti, Lidia and Joe Bastianich, and Mario Batali, which opened its first, very successful,\u00a0U.S. branch in\u00a0front of\u00a0Manhattan\u2019s Flatiron Building\u00a0in 2010, functions as an archive of the good-to-eat and good-to-think Italian food (the kind Slow Food supports, produced by small-scale independent farmers) for the convenience of upper- and middle-class consumers.\u00a0In this cultural climate, the \u201clow-brow\u201d diasporic Italian cuisine that turn-of-twentieth-century\u00a0immigrants to United States first envisioned\u00a0and\u00a0practicedstands on the same par of dignity of the \u201chigh-brow\u201d cuisine of famed chefs,\u00a0from Mario Batali\u00a0to Michael White,\u00a0who in fact\u00a0very\u00a0often declare to be inspired\u00a0by\u00a0it. The\u00a0Slow Food-promoted\u00a0concepts of preferring to shop for natural, unprocessed, fresh, and local food, thus supporting local and familiar vendors and producers,\u00a0had already been\u00a0explored in everyday practice by\u00a0humble Italian\u00a0American\u00a0immigrant women\u00a0in their overcrowded\u00a0neighborhoods more than one-hundred years ago. The legacy of Italian American foodways and its power to represent Italian American culture and life continue in the present.<\/p>\n \"Culture and Identity at the Table: Italian American Food as Social History\u201d\u00a0by prof. Simone Cinotto in\u00a0The Routledge History of Italian Americans <\/em>(New York: Routledge, forthcoming)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since the 1970\u2019s, Italian cuisine has become very popular in the United States, paving the way for the success of Italian wine and food exports and even political ideas developed by Slow Food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22331,"featured_media":78301,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","show_related_posts":true,"relatore_articolo_journal":"","autore_articolo_journal":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22331"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unisg.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}