Emigration and the Italian Table Abroad

The great movement of Italians overseas, chiefly from the poorer regions of the south and from the Veneto and Piedmont in the north, began after national unification and carried regional cooking to the Americas, Australia and northern Europe. The Cooking of Italy, in the Time-Life Foods of the World series, treats Italian cooking as a set of regional traditions rather than a single national cuisine, and that view is the proper starting point for understanding what the emigrants took with them.

Italian cooking was never one cooking, and the emigrants did not carry a national cuisine abroad. They carried the food of their own villages and provinces, shaped by scarcity, by what the local land and sea allowed, and by the habits of the household. The Time-Life volume insists on this regional character, and it explains why the table of the Italian abroad took so many forms: the food of a Neapolitan family differed from that of a family from Emilia or the Veneto, and each tried to reproduce its own. In the new country the cook met different conditions. Some ingredients of the old table were hard to find, while others, notably meat, were far cheaper and more abundant than they had been at home. Dishes once reserved for feast days could appear more often, and the emigrant cook adapted the repertory to the markets available. Pasta dressed with tomato, which in Italy belongs especially to the south, became the best-known emblem of Italian eating abroad, though it represents only one part of the country's cooking. The Italian grocer, the importer of olive oil, cheese, dried pasta and preserved tomatoes, and the small restaurant serving fellow countrymen formed the commercial framework of this table. Through them Italian dishes passed to people who had no connection with Italy, and in that passage some preparations were altered to suit new tastes and new supplies. The result was a body of cooking that is rightly called Italian in origin but is distinct from what was eaten in the regions the emigrants had left. The lasting importance of the emigration is that it made Italian food familiar well beyond Italy before the country's regional variety was widely understood. The cook who reads Time-Life alongside the regional authorities of this book will see the difference between the dish as it was made at home and the dish as it developed abroad, and will recognise both as part of the same history.

The Italian table abroad is marked by the tomato sauce, the dried pasta, the olive oil and the hard grating cheeses that emigrants valued and imported where they could. Its flavours are often fuller and more generous in meat and seasoning than the dishes of the regions of origin, which were frequently plainer and more restrained.