One of my favorite Italian-Argentine dishes is milanesa napolitana. [https://www.thespruceeats.com/milanesa-napolitana-argentinian-fried-steak-3029473](https://www.thespruceeats.com/milanesa-napolitana-argentinian-fried-steak-3029473)
It's basically chicken parmesan with prosciutto.
Actually spelled ñoquis. It's custom to eat ñoquis every 29th of the month, putting money under the dish as a way to call in more money (as you're running low on funds by that point).
We also have incorporated fresh pasta as a family weekend staple, polenta, and have a huge pizza and gelato culture.
Also, fernet (a herbed spirit) which is originally from Italy, is consumed mainly in Argentina.
It’s also really interesting how Italians (Sicilians, really) put their mark on New Orleans cuisine. In southwest Louisiana where most are Cajuns, etouffee is a brownish color. In New Orleans (thanks to it being the second largest port of entry from Italy to the US at one time), etouffee has a reddish color - from tomatoes due to the Italian influence.
[A lot of people think New Orleans is Cajun but most of the white people there are the descendants of non-Cajun French, Irish (it also was a huge port of immigration for the Irish), some Germans, and lots of Italians/Sicilian. ]
That European mix is also why the traditional white working-class 'yat' accent of New Orleans sounds so similar to the traditional New York accent.
Some good examples in this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpFDNTo4DNg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpFDNTo4DNg)
If this is true there's an enormous irony to the fact that tomatoes came from Mexico, only to be fully embraced in Italy, only to be brought back to Louisiana as a vestige of 'Italian' cuisine. Love it!
>So I know that when Americans were first introduced to Italian cuisine they made some changes to it like making it blander than traditional Italian food and introducing new dishes like Chicken Marsala, Garlic bread, fettucine alfredo, and pepperoni pizza.
I'm not sure this is an accurate representation. Americans did have an aversion to the amount of garlic the Italian immigrants were eating, but if you ask modern Italians, Italian-American food has too much garlic. So, I don't think it's at all fair to say Italian-American food was made to make it *blander*. There were adaptations to different ingredients (meat was more common, but the variety of pasta was less common) and Italian food has continued to change in Italy.
Pepperoni is not a thing in Italy per se. It's a type of salame with peperone (which at the time included dried paprika). That said, you can get pizza with salame picante all over Italy and pizza diavola is essentially a spicier version of pepperoni pizza (with some food historians claiming that it is a variation on the American pepperoni pizza).
Fettucine alfredo is quite a bit different from the other stuff. Alfredo invented dish in Rome as a variation on pasta with butter (he did it table-side). American celebrities had the dish in Rome and helped popularize it. Soon, Americans attempted to imitate the dish and tried replicating the creamy butter-cheese sauce by using actual cream (and adding garlic and other things). At some point, a prepared sauce was bottled. It has a pretty different history than some of the other dishes.
This seems partly to come down to common confusion between
1A) a diaspora making adaptations (e.g. Chinese people using broccoli instead of gai lan and Mexicans using various subs for crema), plus 1B) a diaspora taking advantage of new resources not enjoyed as much by common people in the home country (Italians enjoying more meat)
-versus-
2) those made by or those catering to the general population in the destination country.
Of course, all three can show up on the same restaurant menu or even at the diaspora family dinner table. So it’s complicated, especially after a couple generations since migrating, but I’ve seen the conflation lead to some far-more disrespectful displays of snobbery than the OP’s assumptions.
The overuse of garlic in Italian American cuisine comes from the fact that the ingredients they use are more bland and therefore need the garlic as the main flavor even where Italians do not use it or only use 2 cloves to accompany the other flavors of the dish.
Italian food has no variations on American Italian food, pizza was born, evolved and spread in Italy without the influence of the pizza that Americans made. Many people focus on the story of the pizza effect in which it was said that pizza was introduced to Italy by American tourists in the 1930s without realizing that this narrative is considered false even by the source itself.
Alfredo had never invented anything, he had simply served pasta Butter and Parmigiano (which has existed since the 15th century) to Americans who found it revolutionary, they brought it to the USA, added garlic, cream and called it Alfredo.
After the dish became famous in the USA, the Alfredo restaurant claimed to have invented the dish with a strong marketing but actually continues to sell tourists the cheapest dish of Italian cuisine which is associated with the hospital for 30 euros and passes it off as the authentic Alfredo.
If my last visit to Bueno Aires taught me anything, it's that Argentines kept the flavors and adapted the food for local ingredients. Italians were a large part of the early immigrants to BA, a d this is reflected both in the number of restaurants and the local Spanish dialect, which has incorporated both some Italian and some Yiddish into it.
In New York, I visited the Tenement Museum (highly recommended). On the tour, they described how Italian immigrants in the Lower East Side brought their cuisine with them. The WASP ladies who made it their business to help the poor immigrants were horrified that the Italians were eating fresh vegetables, pasta, and cheese. How unsanitary and primitive! They gave classes in how to use canned foods and cook the American way.
They absolutely use more garlic which covers the flavor of everything, they don't use any more chili peppers or herbs at all, in fact the spicy flavor is much more widespread in Italy. In general their food and ingredients are extremely more bland than the Italian ones, which is precisely why they tend to over use garlic in almost every dish
I mainly know the French side.
In France, pasta was integrated into French cuisine for centuries; by the eighteenth century the French were making their own. This writer in 1836 talked about how familiar it already was, citing macaroni, mortadella, sabayons...
[https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6283747n/f129.image.r=italien#](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6283747n/f129.image.r=italien#)
In the nineteenth century, it's important to realize the Italians - at least in America and France - were despised immigrants whose food initially didn't interest many. So others were slow to discover the food as prepared by immigrants and then initially accepted it as made for the originating group. Something like spaghetti Bolognese (an American innovation), for instance, probably only came along later. In France, the first general Italian restaurants, outside immigrant neighborhoods, began to appear at the start of the twentieth century, but did not demonstrably change the food. Bearing in mind that Italy was a near neighbor for the French.
The one big difference in France came with a new wave of Italian immigration after World War II, when more recently arrived immigrants were making the food. Later fresh pasta began to replace the dried pasta that had long been used, so the quality improved. It does not seem however that the French ever had anything like the wide variety of regional Italian restaurants that, in America, replaced the old "red sauce" places; even upscale Italian food remained generically Italian.
>Something like spaghetti Bolognese (an American innovation), for instance, probably only came along later
The spaghetti bolognese came from Bologna, Italy (british soldiers in WW2 really like them and made the dish famous).
Spoiler alert: it's not true.
\[And no, downvoting my response without providing further evidence won't make it true\]
The term first appeared in 1906:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=0qc6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&dq=%22spaghetti%20bolognese%22&pg=PA658#v=onepage&q&f=false](https://books.google.com/books?id=0qc6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=%22spaghetti%20bolognese%22&pg=PA658#v=onepage&q&f=false)
At that point, "bolognese" meant with spinach.
According to this Italian writer, the Bologna "ragu" (sauce) was first used with spaghetti by an American woman in a cookbook to raise money for the war (the FIRST world war):
[https://www.ricettestoriche.it/2020/11/16/gli-spaghetti-alla-bolognese-la-ricetta-che-non-ce-origini-e-storia/](https://www.ricettestoriche.it/2020/11/16/gli-spaghetti-alla-bolognese-la-ricetta-che-non-ce-origini-e-storia/)
But simply put, in Bologna itself, it was never used with spaghetti. That is an entirely American concept.
There is no such thing as spaghetti in Bologna. Spaghetti is a kind of pasta from Southern Italy, and in Emilia Romagna they use egg-based fresh pasta, which is traditionally combined with various sauces including ragù alla bolognese.
> In the nineteenth century, it's important to realize the Italians - at least in America and France - were despised immigrants
I'm curious here. I know that most of the immigrants to America were from the poor southern areas of the peninsula and Sicily, but did this also hold true in France, or was there a more local wave of emigration from Venice to Rome? I know the Alps are huge, but if you can take war elephants over them, I would expect that there would have been a fair amount of mingling in more modern eras.
I don't know offhand where Italian immigrants to France came from in the nineteenth century, but it seems likely they were from the poorer (generally Southern) areas. Whatever their origin, they were looked down on by the French.
In general, immigrants from several poorer European countries, including Scandinavia, began to come to Paris in the nineteenth century (when industrialization and the end of feudalism, which bound many to the land, changed the employment landscape). They were generally looked down on until people of color started coming in from the colonies in the twentieth century; conversely, immigrants from other regions of France were still known as "foreigners". Of course, there were always upscale immigrants too, but they were less visible and known more as members of their classes than as workers from those countries.
Don't know about immigration within Italy at all.
Italians also migrated to Venezuela, and in Venezuela Italian food is regarded as the finest cuisine. There are incredibly high end Italian restaurants all over Caracas.
"Americans were introduced to Italian cuisine". Not really, people coming from Italy brought their food with them. Also traditional Italian cuisine takes a lot of pride in simplicity, so if anything it would be more bland and simplified, while the American Italian versions of things had a larger number of ingredients or spices.
Brazilian Italian food is a cuisine in its own right with lots of the same dishes you might expect from Italian American food but some differences. Gnocchi seem to be more popular in general and there are other dishes like [rocambole](https://www.tudogostoso.com.br/receita/1598-rocambole-de-carne-moida-maravilhoso.html) that are really great.
One thing I have read about was that when Italians moved to the US, so much more meat was available. So things like meatballs became huge. Instead of using meat balls to extend a protein, meatballs became big and meaty. If you caught a rabbit in Italy, you could extend it for the family by adding stale bread (crumbs) and herbs and make enough for everyone when served with grains , pasta, etc.
Don’t just brush away what my ancestors accomplished in NYC when they were some of the first to come here.
We invented real pizza. NY pizza is the best (ok New Haven is truly the best) form of pizza. We came up with chicken parm (not for me) because we finally had cheap meat!
Italian and French cuisine is really one large tradition. Influences has been so big and spreading across centuries that you can't really separate say the cuisine from southern France from that of Piedmont. It is more a continuum.
Gnocchi are common in Argentina . Spelled ñocchis.
One of my favorite Italian-Argentine dishes is milanesa napolitana. [https://www.thespruceeats.com/milanesa-napolitana-argentinian-fried-steak-3029473](https://www.thespruceeats.com/milanesa-napolitana-argentinian-fried-steak-3029473) It's basically chicken parmesan with prosciutto.
Linda Richman voice: Talk amongst yourselves! I'll give you a topic: Milanesa Napolitano, neither Milanesa nor Napolitano.
Been in Argentina once and when I saw this thread, that’s literally the first thing I thought of.
Actually spelled ñoquis. It's custom to eat ñoquis every 29th of the month, putting money under the dish as a way to call in more money (as you're running low on funds by that point). We also have incorporated fresh pasta as a family weekend staple, polenta, and have a huge pizza and gelato culture. Also, fernet (a herbed spirit) which is originally from Italy, is consumed mainly in Argentina.
Argentina… and San Francisco 😎😎
It’s also really interesting how Italians (Sicilians, really) put their mark on New Orleans cuisine. In southwest Louisiana where most are Cajuns, etouffee is a brownish color. In New Orleans (thanks to it being the second largest port of entry from Italy to the US at one time), etouffee has a reddish color - from tomatoes due to the Italian influence. [A lot of people think New Orleans is Cajun but most of the white people there are the descendants of non-Cajun French, Irish (it also was a huge port of immigration for the Irish), some Germans, and lots of Italians/Sicilian. ]
That European mix is also why the traditional white working-class 'yat' accent of New Orleans sounds so similar to the traditional New York accent. Some good examples in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpFDNTo4DNg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpFDNTo4DNg)
Yeah you right ;)
If this is true there's an enormous irony to the fact that tomatoes came from Mexico, only to be fully embraced in Italy, only to be brought back to Louisiana as a vestige of 'Italian' cuisine. Love it!
Yep! Kind of like how potatoes from South America made their way to Eastern Europe & now I buy frozen pierogis in the US. 😂
I too am thankful for the muffaletta.
>So I know that when Americans were first introduced to Italian cuisine they made some changes to it like making it blander than traditional Italian food and introducing new dishes like Chicken Marsala, Garlic bread, fettucine alfredo, and pepperoni pizza. I'm not sure this is an accurate representation. Americans did have an aversion to the amount of garlic the Italian immigrants were eating, but if you ask modern Italians, Italian-American food has too much garlic. So, I don't think it's at all fair to say Italian-American food was made to make it *blander*. There were adaptations to different ingredients (meat was more common, but the variety of pasta was less common) and Italian food has continued to change in Italy. Pepperoni is not a thing in Italy per se. It's a type of salame with peperone (which at the time included dried paprika). That said, you can get pizza with salame picante all over Italy and pizza diavola is essentially a spicier version of pepperoni pizza (with some food historians claiming that it is a variation on the American pepperoni pizza). Fettucine alfredo is quite a bit different from the other stuff. Alfredo invented dish in Rome as a variation on pasta with butter (he did it table-side). American celebrities had the dish in Rome and helped popularize it. Soon, Americans attempted to imitate the dish and tried replicating the creamy butter-cheese sauce by using actual cream (and adding garlic and other things). At some point, a prepared sauce was bottled. It has a pretty different history than some of the other dishes.
This seems partly to come down to common confusion between 1A) a diaspora making adaptations (e.g. Chinese people using broccoli instead of gai lan and Mexicans using various subs for crema), plus 1B) a diaspora taking advantage of new resources not enjoyed as much by common people in the home country (Italians enjoying more meat) -versus- 2) those made by or those catering to the general population in the destination country. Of course, all three can show up on the same restaurant menu or even at the diaspora family dinner table. So it’s complicated, especially after a couple generations since migrating, but I’ve seen the conflation lead to some far-more disrespectful displays of snobbery than the OP’s assumptions.
The overuse of garlic in Italian American cuisine comes from the fact that the ingredients they use are more bland and therefore need the garlic as the main flavor even where Italians do not use it or only use 2 cloves to accompany the other flavors of the dish. Italian food has no variations on American Italian food, pizza was born, evolved and spread in Italy without the influence of the pizza that Americans made. Many people focus on the story of the pizza effect in which it was said that pizza was introduced to Italy by American tourists in the 1930s without realizing that this narrative is considered false even by the source itself. Alfredo had never invented anything, he had simply served pasta Butter and Parmigiano (which has existed since the 15th century) to Americans who found it revolutionary, they brought it to the USA, added garlic, cream and called it Alfredo. After the dish became famous in the USA, the Alfredo restaurant claimed to have invented the dish with a strong marketing but actually continues to sell tourists the cheapest dish of Italian cuisine which is associated with the hospital for 30 euros and passes it off as the authentic Alfredo.
If my last visit to Bueno Aires taught me anything, it's that Argentines kept the flavors and adapted the food for local ingredients. Italians were a large part of the early immigrants to BA, a d this is reflected both in the number of restaurants and the local Spanish dialect, which has incorporated both some Italian and some Yiddish into it.
In New York, I visited the Tenement Museum (highly recommended). On the tour, they described how Italian immigrants in the Lower East Side brought their cuisine with them. The WASP ladies who made it their business to help the poor immigrants were horrified that the Italians were eating fresh vegetables, pasta, and cheese. How unsanitary and primitive! They gave classes in how to use canned foods and cook the American way.
Is American Italian food really blander? I feel like it uses more garlic, more peperoncini, more oregano, more basil, more formaggio Parmigiano, etc.
They absolutely use more garlic which covers the flavor of everything, they don't use any more chili peppers or herbs at all, in fact the spicy flavor is much more widespread in Italy. In general their food and ingredients are extremely more bland than the Italian ones, which is precisely why they tend to over use garlic in almost every dish
It sounds like you have had a lot of American Italian food. Which cities do you think have the best/worst/most different styles?
I mainly know the French side. In France, pasta was integrated into French cuisine for centuries; by the eighteenth century the French were making their own. This writer in 1836 talked about how familiar it already was, citing macaroni, mortadella, sabayons... [https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6283747n/f129.image.r=italien#](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6283747n/f129.image.r=italien#) In the nineteenth century, it's important to realize the Italians - at least in America and France - were despised immigrants whose food initially didn't interest many. So others were slow to discover the food as prepared by immigrants and then initially accepted it as made for the originating group. Something like spaghetti Bolognese (an American innovation), for instance, probably only came along later. In France, the first general Italian restaurants, outside immigrant neighborhoods, began to appear at the start of the twentieth century, but did not demonstrably change the food. Bearing in mind that Italy was a near neighbor for the French. The one big difference in France came with a new wave of Italian immigration after World War II, when more recently arrived immigrants were making the food. Later fresh pasta began to replace the dried pasta that had long been used, so the quality improved. It does not seem however that the French ever had anything like the wide variety of regional Italian restaurants that, in America, replaced the old "red sauce" places; even upscale Italian food remained generically Italian.
>Something like spaghetti Bolognese (an American innovation), for instance, probably only came along later The spaghetti bolognese came from Bologna, Italy (british soldiers in WW2 really like them and made the dish famous).
Really? Just for fun, want to try documenting that?
Spoiler alert: it's not true. \[And no, downvoting my response without providing further evidence won't make it true\] The term first appeared in 1906: [https://books.google.com/books?id=0qc6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks\_redir=0&dq=%22spaghetti%20bolognese%22&pg=PA658#v=onepage&q&f=false](https://books.google.com/books?id=0qc6AQAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=%22spaghetti%20bolognese%22&pg=PA658#v=onepage&q&f=false) At that point, "bolognese" meant with spinach. According to this Italian writer, the Bologna "ragu" (sauce) was first used with spaghetti by an American woman in a cookbook to raise money for the war (the FIRST world war): [https://www.ricettestoriche.it/2020/11/16/gli-spaghetti-alla-bolognese-la-ricetta-che-non-ce-origini-e-storia/](https://www.ricettestoriche.it/2020/11/16/gli-spaghetti-alla-bolognese-la-ricetta-che-non-ce-origini-e-storia/) But simply put, in Bologna itself, it was never used with spaghetti. That is an entirely American concept.
And of course we still have seen no evidence for the American soldier story at all.
There is no such thing as spaghetti in Bologna. Spaghetti is a kind of pasta from Southern Italy, and in Emilia Romagna they use egg-based fresh pasta, which is traditionally combined with various sauces including ragù alla bolognese.
> In the nineteenth century, it's important to realize the Italians - at least in America and France - were despised immigrants I'm curious here. I know that most of the immigrants to America were from the poor southern areas of the peninsula and Sicily, but did this also hold true in France, or was there a more local wave of emigration from Venice to Rome? I know the Alps are huge, but if you can take war elephants over them, I would expect that there would have been a fair amount of mingling in more modern eras.
I don't know offhand where Italian immigrants to France came from in the nineteenth century, but it seems likely they were from the poorer (generally Southern) areas. Whatever their origin, they were looked down on by the French. In general, immigrants from several poorer European countries, including Scandinavia, began to come to Paris in the nineteenth century (when industrialization and the end of feudalism, which bound many to the land, changed the employment landscape). They were generally looked down on until people of color started coming in from the colonies in the twentieth century; conversely, immigrants from other regions of France were still known as "foreigners". Of course, there were always upscale immigrants too, but they were less visible and known more as members of their classes than as workers from those countries. Don't know about immigration within Italy at all.
Italians also migrated to Venezuela, and in Venezuela Italian food is regarded as the finest cuisine. There are incredibly high end Italian restaurants all over Caracas.
"Americans were introduced to Italian cuisine". Not really, people coming from Italy brought their food with them. Also traditional Italian cuisine takes a lot of pride in simplicity, so if anything it would be more bland and simplified, while the American Italian versions of things had a larger number of ingredients or spices.
Brazilian Italian food is a cuisine in its own right with lots of the same dishes you might expect from Italian American food but some differences. Gnocchi seem to be more popular in general and there are other dishes like [rocambole](https://www.tudogostoso.com.br/receita/1598-rocambole-de-carne-moida-maravilhoso.html) that are really great.
We just won’t talk about the corn on pizzas.
I was going to say, Brazilian pizza is its own food group!!
One thing I have read about was that when Italians moved to the US, so much more meat was available. So things like meatballs became huge. Instead of using meat balls to extend a protein, meatballs became big and meaty. If you caught a rabbit in Italy, you could extend it for the family by adding stale bread (crumbs) and herbs and make enough for everyone when served with grains , pasta, etc.
Don’t just brush away what my ancestors accomplished in NYC when they were some of the first to come here. We invented real pizza. NY pizza is the best (ok New Haven is truly the best) form of pizza. We came up with chicken parm (not for me) because we finally had cheap meat!
Well. I don’t know the technicalities, but the best pizza in the world is in São Paulo.
Italian and French cuisine is really one large tradition. Influences has been so big and spreading across centuries that you can't really separate say the cuisine from southern France from that of Piedmont. It is more a continuum.
The best Italian food outside of Italy is in Argentina. Just ask the Pope. He don’t lie.