Pasta in America

The Pasta Renaissance

For centuries, the Italian peninsula had comprised disparate states under different rulers, whose people spoke different dialects. In 1862, after insurrection, revolution and war, King Vittorio Emanuele II, the ruler of Sardinia, helped unite the warring states into the nation of Italy.

With peace, travel was much safer and more frequent. Italians gained exposure to pasta-making techniques and recipes of other regions, with an explosion in creativity and proliferation of shapes. Then, in the decades from 1880 to 1900, waves of southern Italians began to immigrate to America, bringing pasta with them.

American Pasta

However, pasta first came to the U.S. much earlier. Thomas Jefferson served as minister to France from 1785 to 1789, and was introduced to pasta during a trip to Naples. He returned to the U.S. with crates of “maccheroni” and a pasta-making machine (which he proceeded to redesign). While Corby Kummer references a pasta factory established in Philadelphia in 1798 by a Frenchman (Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating gives the date as 1794), any name and details beyond this are lacking.

A modern pasta machine for home and artisan pasta makers. Photo courtesy Williams-Sonoma.

Most sources, including the National Pasta Association, credit a later Frenchman with establishing America’s first pasta factory, in Brooklyn in 1848. A flour miller from Lyon, Antoine Zerega, had a horse in his basement to turn the millstone; and like the Neapolitans, he hung his spaghetti strands on the roof to dry. Today, the fifth generation of Zeregas run the leading supplier of pasta to the foodservice industry in North America.

Spaghetti and meatballs had yet to appear. Macaroni had been brought to England earlier by the Genovese sailors, and the British baked it with cheese and cream—in essence, making macaroni and cheese, a preparation also popular in the north of Italy. They also baked pasta in sweet dessert custards, similar to German-Jewishnoodle puddings. These recipes crossed the pond and were enjoyed by 19th-century Americans. According to Corby Kummer, upper-class Americans also purchased pasta imported from Sicily, which then, as today, had more cachet than the domestic product. The information in the remainder of this article comes largely from Mr. Kummer’s extensive piece, Pasta: Where It Came From And How It Got There.

As other pasta factories sprouted up, the cost of pasta became more affordable. By the time of the Civil War (1861 to 1865), even the working classes could afford a pasta dinner. Cookbooks of the period indicate that the common way to prepare pasta was still baked with cheese and cream.

• In the mid-1880s, according to food historian Karen Hess, cookbooks published as far west as Kansas included recipes for macaroni, some involving a tomato and meat sauce.
• But pasta did not become the beloved dish it is today: It lost its cachet once the masses could afford it. The fashionable restaurants of New York, which served Continental cuisine, did not serve pasta or any other traditional Italian dish, even though many of these restaurants were run by Italians.

The huge wave of Italian immigration that began toward the end of the 19th century was ultimately responsible for pasta becoming an American staple.

From 1880 to 1921, more than five million Italians immigrated to America, three quarters of them from the regions south of Rome. Two scholars have studied the food of the Italian immigrants extensively: Harvey Levenstein, a professor of history at McMaster University in Ontario, and Joseph Conlin, a professor of history at Chico State University in California. They report that the immigrants from Campania became established as grocers, such that the tomato paste, oregano and garlic basic to their region’s cuisine were more readily available thanseasonings typical of other regions, such as Sicilian pine nuts, wild fennel, and saffron or ginger for the cuisine of Basilicata, the region to the east of Campania.

Map of Italy, highlighting Campania, whose ingredienets gave rise to Italian American cuisine. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Thus, the seasonings used for “Italian food” in America were primarily the classic ones of Campania carried in the local grocery stores, because it was difficult and expensive to obtain ingredients from other regions. What became Italian-American cuisine was different from the old country cuisines for other reasons, too. There were fewer varieties of fruit, vegetables and cheeses available than in Italy, and much more meat which was cheap and plentiful in America.

Spaghetti And Meatballs: An Italian-American Dish

Levenstein and Joseph Conlin report that the immigrants from Campania became established as grocers, such that the tomato paste, oregano and garlic basic to their region’s cuisine were more readily available than seasonings typical of other regions, such as Sicilian pine nuts, wild fennel, and saffron or ginger for the cuisine of Basilicata, the region to the east of Campania.

The iconic Italian-American dish, spaghetti and meatballs, is unknown in Italy. It probably had its origin in several baked Neapolitan pasta dishes served at religious festivals such as Carnival and Christmas. (Naples is the capital of Campania.) But remembering that meat in Italy is costly, these dishes used meatballs the size of walnuts—unlike the American version that used meatballs the size of eggs—and also included other ingredients as ham and boiled eggs. The large portions served, and heavy seasonings of garlic, oregano and hotpepper flakes, are American developments.   Continue To Page 5: The Mainstreaming Of Pasta Go To The Article Index Above

The American version of spaghetti and meatballs, large meatballs showing off the plentitude of meat in America, is unknown in Italy. Photo © Robyn Mac | Fotolia.

The Mainstreaming Of Pasta

Although hundreds of small pasta factories opened in America’s Little Italys, Italians preferred to buy imported pasta, however expensive, because it was made from durum wheat. (American farmers did not grow durum until the 20th century.)

It’s easy to chart the subsequent quick growth of pasta. Some highlights:

• In the 1890s, the Franco-American brand of canned spaghetti was launched.
• World War I (1914 to 1918) brought imports to a halt, and the number of American pasta-makers rose from 373 to 557.
• Pasta was inexpensive at a time when food prices were rising. Recipes for spaghetti and tomato sauce started turning up in women’s magazines.

Millers sponsored “eat more wheat” campaigns in the early 1920s. Pasta manufacturers began to use durum, which they advertised as being higher in protein than soft wheat (it is, but not by much). Campbell’s, Heinz and other manufacturers brought out canned macaroni with tomato sauce. In 1927, Kraft introduced gratedparmesan cheese in a cardboard container with a perforated top, as a topping for spaghetti with tomato sauce. Cafeterias became very popular in the 1920s, and spaghetti and tomato sauce was a hot item. Italians nationwide opened “spaghetti houses” to serve blue-collar workers. By the end of the decade, the Italian restaurant had become the most popular type of ethnic restaurant in America, a position it still holds.

Spaghetti waiting to be cooked. Photo by Clara Neroli | Morguefile.

• The Great Depression of the 1930s made inexpensive food like spaghetti a necessity. Spaghetti and meatballs began to appear regularly on millions of American tables.
• Today pasta is a completely versatile food: from school cafeteria to the most exclusive restaurant, from main course to side to dessert, it fills any need asked of it.

And today durum wheat is a huge American crop: More than 100 million bushels are produced annually, largely in North Dakota.

According to the National Pasta Association, America manufactures more pasta than any other country in the world—more than five billion pounds a year. In 2000, five billion pounds of pasta were produced: 4.5 billion in dry pasta and .5 billion in frozen and fresh pasta.

In terms of being an “American” food: macaroni and cheese made the list of the top 10 foods of the century, according to an article in the Sacramento Bee that polled authorities on the foods most representative of American cooking in the 1900s³.

Spaghetti and meatballs did not make the list.

³The ten top foods are apple pie, barbecue, chili, chocolate chip cookies, fried chicken, hamburger/cheeseburger, Jell-O, macaroni and cheese, pancakes and pizza.

Pasta Terms From A (Agnolotti) to Z (Zitone):
A Vast World Beyond Linguine

• Introduction
• Glossary Begins

If you love pasta, you’ll love learning the terms you don’t already know.  For a visual chart of the different pasta shapes in this recipe, see our article on pasta shapes.

While this recipe includes international pastas, from Asian rice sticks to Polish pierogies, most of it focuses on Italian pasta. Think of Italian pasta in these general categories: