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Olives picked for home curing

Food, of course, has a primal role in Italian culture, and it is that part of Italian cultural most readily experienced (literally, consumed) by the American public at large. It may not be generally known that food traditions show a tenacity and longevity unmatched by any other area of Italian folklife—possibly because entrusted primarily to women (generally the conservators of family food traditions), partly because what we are taught to eat and how we are taught to eat it becomes so deeply ingrained, is so integrated into a sense of well-being (social and physical), that we do not easily change such habits.

Traditional foodways range from herb and vegetable gardens to curing olives, making wine, to various forms of socialization around food (family dinners to festive occasions). It is no coincidence that many Italian families are involved in some aspect of food production and distribution, often as family-owned businesses. In the past these included: canneries, pasta and cheese production, grocery stores, delis, and restaurants— many of which continue today (e.g., Costa Pasta Mfg., Claro’s Markets). In California furthermore, Italians have historically played a central role in wine and agriculture, as well as in (San Pedro) fisheries (Further reading: Gloria Ricci Lothrop, Italians of Los Angeles, Historical Society of Southern California, 2003.)

Street food vendor at the San Gennaro

festival 2004: fresh raw seafood by Frankie
A common food language. What in linguistics is called a koiné (a common language which emerges when different linguistics groups come into contact) may be found in Italian American food as well. A common food language has arisen that cuts across Italian regional lines (but finds its main sources in central and southern Italian cuisine). When pan-Italian club events take place (the common dinner dance, a picnic, or festival) the structure of a typical dinner will include pasta with red sauce, meat and vegetables (sometimes heaped together on a single plate, American-style), and perhaps cannoli for dessert. At a picnic or less formal event, the pepper and sausage sandwich might be found. Memory of regional specialties is frequently lost (e.g., Northern specialties such as polenta or risotto are rarely seen at such events). On the other hand, regionally-based groups such as the Fameja Veneta now offer polenta dinners to their members. And the growing attention to regional Italian foods in area restaurants, suggests that regional consciousness may be growing more generally.

Snails (lumache) picked in the wild and

Many families of Italian heritage conserve some traditional dishes (or at least fond memories of them). Piedmontese women may still make bagna cauda, Ischietane (from the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples) their fish dishes alla pescatora, and Sicilians their eggplant and fava bean specialties. The abundance of fish in communities such as San Pedro makes it fairly easy to continue a predominantly fish-based diet, as has proved the case with the Ischietani, for example. In San Pedro until recently, one could even have fresh fish delivered to one’s door by fish retailer Andrea Briguglio or go straight to the docks for the Saturday morning fish market. Even if they have become predominantly American-style meat-eaters, even 3rd and 4th generation Italians conserve at least a few family recipes typically prepared for important festivities. All groups have, for instance, their distinctive (often egg-based) pasta for Christmas and Easter, even though the homemade egg pasta entrée might well be followed by a traditional American turkey or ham.

Traditional, homemade Christmas sweets

Italian festive sweets still to be found among Sicilians are cudureddi, sfingi, and cassadini (sweet ravioli), for Ischietani instead casatella. Because Italian ‘country’ cooking has become so popular with upscale Americans (e.g., Kleiman’s Angeli), there has been a resurgence of dishes once exclusively in the domain of the Italian lower classes—such as panzanella, bruschetta, polenta. Alongside myriad commercial publications (e.g., Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking), there exist various cookbooks produced by the local community, which reflect the cooking of Italian Americans. Compilations of recipes collected from individual cooks themselves include: 1) The Women’s Extension of the Garibaldina Society has produced two cookbooks of (authored) family recipes, collected from members: The Best of the Best in Italian Cooking, and Let’s Cook Italian; 2) Dolores Lisica ed., Around the World, Around Our Town: Recipes from San Pedro (illustrated by Leo Politi), Friends of San Pedro Library. The centenary cookbook produced in San Pedro includes 500 recipes from the community’s best cooks (not exclusively Italian). Many of course, also have informal family recipe collections inherited from parents and grandparents.

Evolutions. Foodways are in flux as Italian Americans are expanding their culinary vocabulary, in part due to the general Italianization of California cuisine, the high status of Italian cuisine, and the increasing availability and decreasing prices of Italian products in Southern California. Mozzarella di bufala no longer costs $14/lb. or radicchio rosso $7.98/lb., as they did when they first came on the market, since these and other Italian food items are gaining currency across the Southern California population. While they are not as common as pizza and pasta, signs point in that direction.

Luisa Del Giudice, “Italian American Food and Foodways,” in S. LaGumina, F. Cavaioli, S. Primeggia, J. Varacalli, eds., The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, New York: Garland, 2000: 245-248.

Cuccagna: Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine. The mythic Land of Cuccagna (Cockaigne in English) was popular from the Middle Ages onward, projecting a gastronomic utopia or “poor man’s paradise.” It featured mountains of cheese, rivers of wine, and other sensual delights, as well as punishment for those who worked. This Topsy Turvy world represented a time and place of perpetual feasting. This mythic land survived in Italian popular consciousness for centuries, became one of the driving myths behind mass emigration to America (otherwise known as Cuccagna) and although transformed, still animates aspects of Italian and immigrant culture in America. The greased pole found at public festivals is known as l’albero di Cuccagna. Climbing to the top, one finds special foods, perhaps money, and other prizes. Further reading: Luisa Del Giudice, “Paesi di Cuccagna and other Gastronomic Utopias,” in Imagined States: National Identity, Utopia, and Longing in Oral Cultures, ed. by Luisa Del Giudice and Gerald Porter, Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001: 11-63.

A 17th-century Italian print depicting the mythic

Gardens The Italian presence in California agriculture is well-known (e.g., Oberti olives, Del Monte fruits and vegetables, Mondavi vineyards, etc.), but even urbanized Italians have enjoyed their vegetable and herb gardens, and gardening formed, at least until recently, a traditional topic of discussion (something like discussing the weather) among Italians deriving from the land (as the majority of Italians in America have). It was often the case in the past that land used for non-fruit producing plants (i.e., flowers), was seen as wasted space better used for fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs. But while gardens may still be an important part of Italian home life (it is difficult to gauge to what extent), their importance is becoming secondary as California’s abundant and varied agriculture increasingly produces foods once cultivated only in private gardens (e.g., basil, Italian parsley, rosemary, arugula or rucola, radicchio, etc.). If the majority of Italian Americans no longer grow vegetables such as eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, fava beans, and so forth, many continue to grow herbs, despite the fact that they are now widely available in markets. The most cultivate herbs in home gardens include basil, broad leaf Italian parsley, oregano, and rosemary. Vegetables, fruits, and greens difficult to find in markets may still be grown: cicoria, figs, olives, etc. Although vegetable preserving is not all too common today, it still survives, as does olive curing in several central and southern families in whose home regions olives grew, that is Central and Southern Italy (e.g., Fernando Di Bernardo of San Pedro, the oldest surviving fisherman from Ischia, over 100, who also continues to make wine). Slowfood is helping to revive traditions of home-style food processing (See: “tomatomania” events, as well as olive curing seminars, FOOD ASSOCIATIONS, Slowfood)…

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Italian-derived architecture in the Los Angeles area can be attributed to the broad enthusiasm for Mediterranean culture that still inspired the educated and well-to-do a century ago. As had Jefferson at Monticello, so too did the scions of Victorian Industry continue to dream of Italy. The McCormick’s (=International Harvester), even employed a score of Italian masons for decades on their Riven Rock Estate. Boosters were convinced that coastal California would become America’s Riviera, truly Our Italy, as Charles D. Warner entitled his 1891 enticing descriptions. While few evocations of Italy may quite rival Abbot Kinney’s 1904 Venetian folly (see: ART & ARCHITECTURE, Points of Special Interest: Venice Beach, CA), in capillary fashion domestic builders made much use of the loggia and the portico—amenities as expressive of this mild Mediterranean place as the olive and the vine. Recall, too, that longstanding admiration for Italy converged seamlessly with the simultaneous resuscitation of the Hispanic Missions. Ramona (1884) was born of Helen Hunt Jackson’s collaboration with Abbot Kinney to ascertain the sorry state of the Franciscan Missions and their Native American converts. A kindred New England transplant, Charles Lummis, Los Angeles’ librarian, launched the Landmark Club to save, most conspicuously, the Missions (circa 1895). The lovingly restored Missions stood as exemplars for many a mundane building (from train stations—signally those of the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe—to schools and libraries, to markets and even Protestant churches). The common Roman ancestry of the arch and the column fostered a Mediterranean symbiosis, which proved prolific well on through the 1930’s. For ex., only an architectural historian rambling through, say, Palos Verdes (name coined 1932) can alert us that Wallace Neff’s villas are often “more Italian than Spanish,” or that the Gard House (Cutter) was “to be read as Spanish, but, in truth, many of its architectural details came from rural villas in Tuscany,” just as the Schoolcraft House (Cline) is “a rural Tuscan villa with extensive tilework, windows and doors brought from Italy” (R. Winter & D. Gebhard, An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles, revised ed. 2003, pp. 85-86). The porticoed Malaga Cove piazza even has a 2/3 scale Fontana del Nettuno from a 1563 Bolognese original as its centerpiece. Yet just as William Wrigley ordered Avalon “Mediterranean-ized” (ca. 1934 by Otis Shepard) and Santa Barbara’s city fathers crafted a “Mediterranean” building code, Frank Lloyd Wright was deriving ispiration from Mayan excavations, while energetic Mitteleuropean émigré architects were bringing with them International Moderne. Stark flat surfaces, aimed at creating “pure” geometric volumes, rendered Mediterranean Historicism passé.

Yet the Wheel of Fashion ever turns: the American Academy still granted Rome Prizes and the Caput Mundi remained seductive. By the early Sixties, two Princetonians, stirred by their Italian sojourns, militated for a return to complexity and Italian allusions. Both Robert Venturi’s radical Historicist recoveries (1966) and Michael Grave’s chromatic evocations restored Italy as architectural inspiration. The affluent 1980’s saw a new, post-modern wave of Californians eagerly (re-)discovering Italian wine, cuisine, and design—upscale, hip, and stylish. This new Italian wave, so conspicuous in the restaurant and design sectors, shows no signs of receding any time soon. Architecturally it is manifest in wide use of materials such as terracotta, marble, and tile, as well as structural recoveries such as arcades (with arches), courtyards, spaces focused around fountains. New sites vaguely reminiscent of Italian urban landscapes are rising (e.g., the hilltop Getty Museum, the grander malls such as the Grove, or the Beverly Hills Connection), while developers once again give Italian names to their creations (e.g., “Palazzo,” and a plethora of “Villas”).…

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