New Cookbook Celebrates Traditional Italian-American Cuisine

Middletown, CT April 5, 2004--Few types of restaurants in America have been as enduring and popular as those in the neighborhoods we've come to know as Little Italies. In a word-association game, we might say "Italian restaurant," and expect the response to be "Spaghetti with Meatballs." Author Skip Lombardi, who spent nearly twenty years living in Boston's North End, and six years in New York's Little Italy, has published a cookbook of the recipes found on nearly all traditional neighborhood restaurant menus: Almost Italian.

With more than sixty recipes, Almost Italian amounts to a study of neighborhood Italian restaurants. Mr. Lombardi has searched the menus of restaurants from the North End in Boston, to North Beach in San Francisco, to recreate the dishes that helped to define a national cuisine: "Italian-American."

"When the immigrants began to arrive here in the early nineteen-hundreds," he said, "they had no unified national language, let alone a common cuisine. They had spoken in the dialects of their native provinces, and had cooked only what they could grow, hunt, or forage."

Once here, though, they discovered that even with their meager paychecks from jobs as laborers or longshoremen they could afford the semolina pasta that had been out of their financial reach in southern Italy. Soon, they began referring to their new diet as "Carrying on the old ways."

Early Italian-American restaurateurs—many operating out of the front parlors of their apartments—began a tradition in hospitality that led to a national cuisine with a clear heritage, but an identity of its own. While the original menus were, in effect, traditional Italian Sunday dinners, they evolved and expanded to embrace American ingredients available fresh and in season, yet prepared with southern Italian style.

Almost Italian is a cookbook for people craving Chicken Parmesan, but can't find the recipe in their "Italian" cookbooks. It's also a cookbook for those who remember the little neighborhood restaurants with the red-and-white checkered tablecloths, the straw-covered Chianti bottles, and Frank Sinatra's music. And in a sense, it's about nonna; presiding over the dining room saying, mangia, mangia!




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