I’m about as “down home” as any professing Italian American. I was born in Brooklyn and the first in the family to go to college. My Mezzogiorno pedigree is mutt-worthy. But for the life of me I’m still stumped by the low-class mentality that still pervades our community.
It’s the way so many Italian Americans identify their heritage solely with food and gritty stereotypes. Perhaps it’s the reason so many of our community ran to the nearest exits over the generations. In 1995, my colleague Bob Masullo did a penetrating review of the book Crossing Ocean Parkway by Marianna (De Marco) Torgovnick. The author explained why her stifling Italian neighborhood led her to marry into the Jewish side of that Brooklyn boulevard. (You can read the review in The Italic Way issue XXIV in our Research Library at www.italic.org.)
Masullo asserted that De Marco was not fully grounded in her heritage, like the majority of Italian Americans. To paraphrase Masullo, revering your immigrant culture and a having a passion for Italian cuisine are not enough to make you an informed Italian American. Yet, today we are witnessing a new generation of half-baked Italian American influencers with the same limited perspective. They want to celebrate heritage not study it.
A new Netflix movie titled Nonnas is garnering praise from many as an homage to family cooking skills. It is based on a true story of a middle-aged Italian American man who opens a restaurant on Staten Island, NY, staffing the kitchen with Italian grandmothers instead of professional chefs. It’s a so-so movie that uses the term ‘Sunday Gravy’ as the restaurant owner’s name for that meat-ladened tomato sauce we all enjoyed growing up. Many of us still enjoy that Sunday ritual, if not the misnomer “gravy.”
My family calls it sauce and we eat it with macaroni not pasta—family vocabulary varies. But this isn’t about sauce vs. gravy. It’s about our cuisine defining our existence. I once cringed when I heard a food commercial that featured an Italian American housewife saying, “We’re Italian, we live to eat.” It seems that no other ethnic group enjoys food to the degree we do. Dare I say it, in that regard we are not far removed from the Black community where the Baconator and KFC appear to be their raison d’etre.
I have a recurring image of Italian American influencers watching Goodfellas while gorging on pepperoni pizza. Of course, it could be Margarita-style for the purists among us. But the movie could be Rocky, The Godfather, My Cousin Vinnie, or any number of fictitious goombahs. We have lots of cinema heroes that keep America amused. Is this the kind of superficial culture that drove Marianna DeMarco to cross Ocean Parkway?
Not to be a killjoy about our world-renown cuisine, but can we lighten up on debating the secret ingredient in a good tomato sauce (aka gravy) and how many hours it needs to simmer on the stove? Does it need four hours? Puree, crushed, or paste? Is adding sugar or wine the secret? How about using pork? And does it really require a nonna’s “love” to transform it into the nectar of the gods?
I get it. We’re proud of our cuisine and just as proud of our stereotypes. But even our cousins the Greeks and our neighbors the Jews know more of their history than most paesans. They may run diners and delis but their kids are given a classical foundation not a primer on cannoli. And have you ever seen Chinese and Indians wolf down their buffets? They live to achieve, not eat.
We have managed to take the stress out of self-awareness. All we need to know about 3,000 years of Italian heritage we learned at the dinner table. Unfortunately, we also picked up some lousy Italian like “maat·suh·reh·luh” (or worse: “mut-za-del”) and “pro-shoot.”
But that’s okay, we’re from the ‘hood. -JLM
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