Tomato

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.

Pasta with spring vegetables—or, for that matter, any vegetables—has always been a staple of Italian cuisine. But Sirio Maccioni, the renowned Italian restaurateur who has owned Le Cirque for decades, claims to be the one to baptize it primavera in 1974. Along with Romeo Salta, and the Giambelli brothers, Sirio was at the lead in bringing the fine Italian dining experience to New York. Sirio runs a restaurant that is French by name but serves pasta primavera.

If there is one dish that I can affirm is Italian American, this is it. It has all the pedigree of being Italian, though it was definitely born in America. This is one of those few recipes that crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, and the Italians in Italy have been enjoying it as well. The first references we find to vodka sauce are from the early 1980s.

The braciola, stuffed beef rolled and braised, was and still is part of the Sunday pasta sauce tradition in many Italian American homes across America. If you travel through the Italian communities around America today and ask people, “What dish do you remember eating at home on Sunday?,” the answer is often pasta with braciole and meatballs. Meat was far more available in America than back home in Italy, and adding it to a tomato sauce enhanced the ritual Sunday meal, when the whole family was assembled around the table. A braciola is easy to make: once you have gathered all the ingredients and rolled them into a thin beef slice, it cooks in the tomato sauce for several hours, rendering a delicious pasta sauce to coat some rigatoni and fork-tender braciole to eat with braised escarole and olive-oil-mashed potatoes.

What is important to remember about this dish is that the steak and the sauce never cook together. That way, all the meat juices remain in the steak; if you were to cook them together, the juices would seep out. Meanwhile, the pepper-and-mushroom sauce remains bright and fresh with the flavor of the tomatoes and vegetables.

This is a recipe that everybody loves, easy to make and exemplary of Italian home cooking. Its roots are most likely somewhere with the shepherd community of the Apennines. Traditionally, it includes pasta, ricotta, and some meat in a casing, like sausage or salami. The other ingredients are delicious contemporary additions.

Italians eat a lot of lamb, especially in the spring and summer. I recall that on every major holiday I would always see the whole animal slowly turning on the spit, and it was indeed delicious. I particularly liked to nibble on the rib bones, and my second-favorite was part of the shoulder blade. But when there was no holiday, the slaughtered animals were butchered and sold and enjoyed as lamb shanks, chops, and stews. For this dish, either the boneless shoulder meat or boneless leg of lamb could be used, but the shoulder is more economical, and I am sure this cut is what the Italian immigrants used. In this slow cooking process, the flavors harmonize and the meat becomes fork-tender.

As the impoverished residents of Amatrice moved to Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this recipe came along with them; today it is as Roman as the Colosseum, but you would never know it. Throughout America, 99 percent of Italian restaurants have this tubular-spaghetti dish on their menus, so it might as well be American now. You can use garlic here instead of onions, as the original recipe calls for. But unless your amatriciana contains guanciale (cured pig jowl), you are not even close to the original. Since pig jowl is not found in every corner store, making the dish with bacon or pancetta will yield delicious results as well. In this recipe I used onions, as in most of the American amatriciana recipes, but the bay leaves are my addition. The precursor to amatriciana sauce is sugo alla gricia, which does not contain tomatoes. The dish seems to have roots before the discovery of the New World; tomatoes came back from there to Italy. The gricia sauce contains guanciale, coarsely ground black pepper, and grated pecorino cheese to dress the pasta. This dish is still made today and is very popular in and around Rome, where it is called pasta alla gricia.

The important thing is that pesto is a raw sauce and should not be cooked when dressing the pasta. Just toss the hot pasta with a little of its cooking water and the pesto. Stir well, add some cheese, and dinner is ready.

Puttanesca sauce originated in Naples and derives its name from “ladies of the evening.” The story goes that, between clients, the women of the evening in Naples would make this quick and delicious pasta dish. The easy procedure and simple ingredients—found in the cupboard, most likely—created a quick dish they could make without any major interruption of business. This dish was big on the Italian American restaurant scene in the seventies, I guess because it called for authentic Italian ingredients that were newly available then. Cured olives and cured capers are used a lot in southern Italy, to deliver a wallop of flavor with a small investment, and so this traditional dish continues today in Italian homes and restaurants across America.

Pork meat, which is nutritional and economical, is used a lot in Italy. Using the tenderloin for this dish guarantees a tender result, but one can use boneless shoulder or leg meat instead, cutting it into thin slices. You can also make this dish with chicken breast or boneless chicken legs. The sun-dried tomatoes bring a lot of flavor to the dish; I use them whole, or sometimes purée them in a processor and spread the paste on the meat, but in this recipe I slice them.

This is one of those “I have nothing in the refrigerator” dishes. Well, look in the cupboard. Capers, the small unopened buds of the caper bush, have been used for thousands of years. They are mentioned as an ingredient in Gilgamesh, possibly the oldest written story known, which describes events dating back to about 2000 B.C., found on ancient Sumerian clay tablets.

You might be familiar with this salad made with stale bread, but for some more texture and taste, try making it with taralli, often sold as pepper or fennel round bread biscuits at Italian specialty stores in the United States. Actually, taralli are small bread rounds, much in the style of bagels, which are baked and toasted to a crisp. It is a traditional food from Puglia, Calabria, and Basilicata. The story goes that the taralli were made specifically for the shepherds and workers to take to their fields. The taralli lasted and traveled well, and, once tossed with some condiments, they would revive and be delicious.

I found the St. Louis pizza to be different from any other pizza I have had before. The crust has a texture between a cracker and shortbread, and the cheese mixture recalls the milky-velvety mozzarella cheese found in Italy. The pizza is cut into squares, which makes it easy to eat. Here is a recipe I developed after several visits to Imo’s in St. Louis, and I think it is quite close to the St. Louis original

Salumeria Italiana is the place to go in the North End of Boston to buy Italian specialty foods. The store is small but meticulously furnished with some of the best of Italian imported and domestic products. For nearly five decades, the Martignetti family has upheld the time-honored tradition. It was early on a rainy morning when Tanya and I, camera and notepad in hand, paid a visit to the Salumeria. The workers were beginning to set up the products and sandwich of the day, getting ready for lunch. The resident salumiere, a timid elderly gentleman, repeatedly skirted the lens of our camera, but we did get some really good close-ups of the Salumeria panino of the day. No one was willing to share the recipe, either, so here is my rendition of what we saw and tasted; it is simple and simply delicious. Don’t miss out on visiting Paul Revere’s house, almost around the corner!

Legumes are a big part of the culinary tradition in Italy, and they found a place in Italian American homes as well. Almost every Italian American I spoke with wanted to share a memory of his or her favorite lentil dish. Legumes, especially lentils, deliver a lot of flavor, plus nutritional and economical value, and everyone could afford them. The immigrants ate them a lot, and they are still a favorite in Italian American kitchens. Pasta and beans, pasta e fagioli—or, as Italian Americans call it, pasta fazool—is a traditional meatless Italian dish, although it usually refers to white beans, such as cannellini or borlotti. Pasta fazool probably came from Neapolitan immigrants, derived from the Neapolitan word for beans, fazul. The recipe below is a soup consisting of lentils and pasta, but you can turn it into a dry pasta dish instead of a soup by adding only 5 to 6 cups of water. Or even make the lentils as a vegetable dish by eliminating the 4 cups of water and omitting the ditalini. The pancetta is added for flavor, but to make the soup vegetarian, omit the pancetta and start with the onion.

When I ate my way through Baltimore, crabs were to be had in many ways. It was spring, and soft-shells were on every menu, as were crab cakes, crab cocktails, and crab salads. Most of the dishes had some version of tartar sauce, ketchup cocktail sauce, or rémoulade served with them. I got a yearning for a crab salad Italian-style, so, without much ado, here is one that evokes a lobster salad they often make in Sardinia.