Italian American

On one of my visits to Roberto’s on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, I picked up this delightfully spicy chicken recipe. It pairs wonderfully with the tomato-and-bread salad on page 94.

I don’t encounter stuffed shells in Italy much; stuffed paccheri (big and floppy rigatoni-lookalikes) are much more common there. But I have sold a lot of stuffed shells throughout my restaurant days. This is comfort food—pasta stuffed with milky ricotta and topped with oozing melted cheese, and just about everybody loves it. It is a common dish, present in many Italian American restaurant menus and households. It is also very convenient, because the oven does the work, and you can feed a large number of guests.

Poached chicken served with salsa verde or another piquant sauce is common in Italy, and this is a perfect example of cultural blending between Italian and American styles. Today in America, Chef Fortunato Nicotra often makes this dish at our restaurant Felidia. It is light and yet very tasty, especially for lunch. I like it over an arugula salad, but he serves it on top of a light fresh-tomato sauce as well. It is delicious both ways.

When this dish was first made—in Emilia-Romagna, particularly in the city of Parma—it included veal and grana cheese, such as Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano. The bread crumbs, tomato, and mozzarella were all added later, and chicken has often been used as a more economical substitute for veal. This has got to be one of the most popular Italian American dishes. You can find it across America, in every Italian American restaurant, and it has now penetrated the fast-food chains, thanks to its popularity and reasonable costs. If done well with the best of products, it is a great dish.

Baked ziti is a real crowd pleaser. It is easy to assemble, one of those recipes that you can multiply and make double or triple the amount on those occasions when you have to feed your kids’ soccer team. It is also a versatile recipe as we become more attentive to our intake of nutritious proteins and vegetables; it is delicious with additional steamed or leftover vegetables or chicken. Legend has it that, as Attila approached Rome, Pope Leo I brought baked ziti with him to meet the invader. After the meal, Attila developed serious gas, considered a bad omen by the gods, and turned around and left Rome untouched. I don’t know many who could leave a steaming plate of baked ziti untouched. Sicilian in origin, this was a favorite of many Italian immigrants, who could take the ziti into the fields or mines with them and have a tasty lunch.

Macaroni and cheese has to be one of the quintessential American comfort foods. To most people it brings back fuzzy memories of a childhood family table. Even Thomas Jefferson had a thing or two to say about this dish. He ordered a macaroni-making machine and instructed the cook to use cheese liberally on the pasta and bake it like a casserole. It appears that this “macaroni” was more similar to the spaghetti of today. A lot of the versions of macaroni and cheese that you may have eaten would have had some form of cream sauce or roux, but here I’ll give you a recipe for this dish as an Italian in Italy would make it: a simply delicious rendition.

I would venture to say that, along with chicken parmigiana, chicken scarpariello is one of the most recognized chicken recipes in America. Chicken scarpariello is a composition of a few favorite ingredients: chicken, lots of garlic, and vinegar. In this recipe, I added some sausage, which is not unusual, especially if you have a big brood coming over. To multiply the recipe: proceed in batches; then, once you have brought the whole thing to a boil, transfer to a roasting pan and finish cooking in a 450-degree oven, stirring the chicken periodically so all the pieces get crispy.

This dish has roots back in the Renaissance, when people hunted for food and only the wealthy could enjoy chicken. This is good when made with a whole chicken, but I prefer it made only with drumsticks and thighs. It can be made well in advance, and will reheat and remain moist. It is great with polenta or pasta, but I love it with a chunk of crusty semolina bread.

The first mention of ravioli seems to have been at the fourteenth-century household of Francesco di Marco Datini, merchant of Prato, who describes pasta pockets stuffed with meat and (during Lent) with herbs and cheese. One of the first ravioli shops in America, Bruno Ravioli, was started by Bruno Cavalli in 1905 in Hackensack, New Jersey. Ravioli is less popular on Italian American menus today, but in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s it was all the rage. For Italians, ravioli is a Sunday meal, more common in the north of Italy, where fresh pasta is made, than in the south, where dry pasta is used more. Everybody loves the sense of accomplishment of making ravioli, stuffing the little pasta pockets with savory and delicious fillings. I think one of the major ingredients in filling ravioli is love. When the family gathers at the table and a steaming platter of ravioli arrives, there are always sounds of exaltation. This is an easy recipe, made with readily available sausage and ricotta, a delicious combination. Simple marinara or butter sauce will be the perfect dressing.

Pollo alla sorrentina is always topped with eggplant and melted mozzarella. But what does that have to do with Sorrento? Naples and Sorrento are in the region of Campania, where the best mozzarella comes from, so it would make sense that it would be used for cooking there. In Italy, rarely do you find the name of a locale in the title of the dish. On the other hand, the names of many Italian American dishes seem to include cities in Italy. The choice seems to be driven by nostalgia, remembering and honoring one’s place of birth in the recollection of how things tasted there.

Everybody loves meatballs. I think meatballs are an example of Americana and they belong on the American table. This is a great and simple recipe. It calls for three types of meat, but a combination of any two—or even a single meat—will work as well. The recipe makes four dozen meatballs, but you can cut it in half and it will work just as well. The sauce and meatballs freeze well, but are best frozen in smaller quantities (1/2 pint, or six to eight meatballs and sauce) so that they reconstitute quickly.

I had this dish at Roberto’s on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. The smokiness of the provola is the defining element that graces the dish.

This chicken dish is a signature Italian dish from Chicago. Just about every Italian restaurant in Chicago has some rendition of it. Traditionally made on Sundays, it is a whole chicken cut up in pieces with potatoes, peppers, peas, and lots of garlic and oregano. We have a similar chicken dish in our family, Grandma’s “chicken and potatoes.” At our house, it is everybody’s favorite, and we do make it on most Sundays.

There was a time when calamari was not much consumed in America and it was considered a cheap fish. But Italians love calamari, and it became the fish of choice of the Italian immigrants. You can find calamari today as a delicacy in contemporary restaurants of every ethnicity. Spicy calamari with linguine is a trademark of Italian American restaurants all over America.

Broccoli rabe grew wild in Italy, especially in southern Italy; in places like Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata, and Sicily it was abundant and free for the picking, and thus used especially to dress pasta dishes. Orecchiette, a pasta that has an indentation from being dragged with the finger on a board, was the pasta of choice. All of these regions are on the sea, and mussels were cheap and abundant as well. So it would seem natural that the three ingredients come together to make this wonderful dish. Now broccoli rabe is abundant in the United States, thanks to Andy Boy vegetable growers in California. This recipe is a delightful combination.

Ralph’s claims to be the oldest Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and it is still run by the original family. It was opened in 1900 by Francesco and Catherine Dispigno, emigrants from Naples, who named the restaurant after their son Ralph. A host of celebrities have eaten at Ralph’s, and while we were eating there, a nearby couple told us they travel an hour each way once a month to come and eat there. The original mosaic-tile floor is beautiful, and eating in the upstairs room transports you back to the 1920s. Now Jimmy and Eddie Rubino, still part of the family, run the restaurant, and this chicken dish has been on the menu as long as they can remember.

I first encountered this dish in Chicago. While the sauce for the pasta has all the makings of a primavera, the fried shrimp on top is very much Sicilian.

This was one of the recipes that I took away from my great lunch with Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi of Torrisi Italian Specialties in New York’s Little Italy. Turkey is, of course, an all-American product that was brought back to Europe after the discovery of the New World, and it is still not big on tables in Italy. But in this recipe, traditional technique and New World bird combine to make a delicious hybrid. “Sous-vide,” French for “without air,” is a technique of cooking food sealed in a plastic bag. Such foods usually cook for a long time at a low temperature, about 140 degrees F. The integrity of the product is preserved, and, when vacuum-sealed, the food will last longer. To perform this technique properly, one needs a lot of expensive and cumbersome equipment. Some contemporary restaurant chefs use it, and with good results, but I certainly do not recommend it for home use.

This dish is especially good when made with live blue-claw crabs, but sometimes they are difficult to find. The snow crab—or its more expensive cousin, the Alaskan king crab—will yield a most delicious sauce as well. In immigrant Italian American fishing communities, such as those in Delaware and Rhode Island, this dish was made by the fishermen’s wives from the unsellable catch.

This is the quintessential Italian American dish: from the 1950s through the 1980s, every Italian restaurant had it on the menu. It is still one of America’s favorite dishes and is easy to make. The important part of the recipe is to begin cooking the meat and mushrooms separately, then combine them at the end so the flavors blend. Marsala is the special ingredient in this dish. Around the city of Marsala, Malvasia, a varietal of a very aromatic grape, grew in abundance. Wine has been made from this varietal for centuries, and the English took note of it and began importing it. The history of England and the New World needs no retelling, and this is most likely how Marsala made it across the pond. When the Sicilian immigrants settled in America, and rediscovered it, it was a natural reunion.