Peasants who worked all day in the field packed a hunk of bread and maybe an onion for their lunch. For dinner, there was bean soup, and yet more bread. As minimal as this sounds, the Sicilian pantry became even more spare during periods of famine, which in Sicily amounted to “a time without bread.” A Sicilian proverb recounted by Mary Taylor Simeti in Pomp and Sustenance sums it up beautifully:
If I had a saucepan, water, and salt,
I’d make a bread stew—if I had bread.
A loaf of bread for Sicilians embodied the basic goodness of life. Where we might say a person is “as good as gold,” a Sicilian says “as good as bread.” A piece of bread that fell to the ground was kissed, like a child with a scraped knee.
When Sicilians described America as the land of bread and work, they imagined a country without hunger, which, in their experience, was just as miraculous as a city paved in gold. One thing they never imagined, however, was that bread would fall into their hands like manna from heaven. Richard Gambino, describing the powerful work ethic that guided his Brooklyn neighborhood, remembers a phrase often repeated by the local men, “In questa vita si fa uva,” literally translated as, “In this life, one produces grapes.” In other words, each one of us has been put on this earth to be useful. Gambino also remembers his grandfather’s Sicilian friends holding up their calloused workers’ hands and saying “America e icca,” meaning “America is here—this is America.”14 For the Sicilian, bread and work were locked together in a kind of dance that began early in life, the day the young Sicilian was old enough to contribute.
Sicilians carried their bread tradition to America, where it continued with certain necessary revisions. On Saturdays in Sicily, women did all their baking for the coming week, a way to preserve precious fuel. In cities like New York, the Italian laborer, now on his own, purchased his weekly ration each Saturday in Little Italy. Here, Italian peddlers sold loaves prepared expressly for the “diggers and ditchers,” immense crusty loaves nearly the size of a wagon wheel. Anyone who could not afford to buy their bread fresh, bought stale loaves, a special sideline of the retail bread trade controlled by women. Bread that was once thrown away was sold by the larger bakeries and retail houses to middlemen who, in turn, sold it to the peddlers, women who sat on the curbstone, their goods piled in a blanket beside them. As the immigrant’s finances swelled, his diet branched out in new directions. Pasta, eggs, and, eventually, meat diverted some of his affection for bread but never replaced it. In the Mangione household, bread was eaten with every course of the Sunday feast, except for the pasta. A bowl of soup without bread was bereft of its faithful companion. Meat without bread was considered sinful.
Curbside bread peddler on Mulberry Street, selling her wares from a basket.
Elizabeth Street in the 1930s hosted two groceries, two butcher shops, one fish store, and one candy store, but six bakeries. In New York, the typical Sicilian loaf was a simple round bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, weighing roughly two pounds. On holidays and feast days, however, the baker’s imagination took flight, and the Elizabeth shops offered fantastic bread sculptures, each shape tied to a particular saint. One resembled a curving bowl of flowers, another was shaped like a swirling backward S with frilled edges. Though each of these fanciful shapes was created for the saints, the baker hedged his bets by including breads that were braided or knotted, traditional forms of protection from the evil eye.
When they lived on Orchard Street, the Baldizzis relied on bread as a food of survival in much the same way it had been for generations of Sicilian peasants. It was eaten at every meal, and for breakfast it was the meal. Stale or hard bread was never thrown away. Instead, Rosaria would rub it with a little water and oil and put it in a warm oven to soften it up. Bread that was too far gone to revive was turned into bread crumbs, the indispensable ally of all Sicilian cooks. Bread crumbs were used to stretch more costly ingredients like meat, and sometimes to replace it entirely. Combined with oil, parsley, and garlic, bread crumbs were used as a stuffing for peppers, zucchini, artichokes, and other vegetables. Bread crumbs, parsley, and eggs were used to make frittata, a standard midday meal for the Italian laborers who dug the New York subway system. Bread crumbs were also toasted in hot oil and sprinkled over pasta or pizza as a replacement for the more expensive grated cheese. Even as their incomes rose, Sicilian-Americans continued to cook with bread crumbs, a former food of necessity. Nothing made a crunchier coating for fried calamari or arancini, the creamy, fist-size rice balls filled with ground meat or cheese, sold as street food and prepared in the home for holidays and parties. Today, they appear on the menus of old-time Sicilian restaurants and delicatessens. Below are two bread crumb recipes. The first is for a bread-crumb frittata.
ZUCCHINI FRITTATA
4 large or 6 small zucchini
1 small onion sliced
3 tablespoons olive oil
5 eggs
½ cup grated Romano cheese
1/3 cup bread crumbs
Salt and pepper
Rinse and grate zucchini using the large holes on a hand-held grater. You could also use the shredding disc on a food processor. Place grated zucchini in a colander over the sink. Sprinkle with a teaspoon of salt, toss, and let sit 15 minutes or longer, until the zucchini begins to “weep.” Squeeze out the extra moisture with your hands. Put aside.
Sauté the onion in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil until lightly golden. Add the zucchini. Cook until zucchini is slightly browned in spots and most of the remaining moisture has cooked away. Season with salt and pepper, and remove from the stove. Meanwhile, beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the warm zucchini, along with the grated cheese and bread crumbs. Let the mixture sit a minute or two, so the bread crumbs can drink up some of the egg. Add remaining oil to the frying pan, and let it get hot. Add egg mixture, then turn down the heat. Cook over a low flame until frittata starts to set around the edges. Place under a hot broiler to finish cooking the top. Slide onto a plate. Eat at room temperature.15
The pasta recipe below comes to us from Concetta Rizzolo, an immigrant from Avellino, a town east of Naples, who settled in New Jersey in the 1910s. The toasted bread crumbs can be stored in the refrigerator for several weeks.
SPAGHETTI CON AGLIO E OLIO
½ cup olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
½ to 1 tsp red pepper flakes
10 black peppercorns
1 pound spaghetti
½ cup chopped parsley
½ cup toasted bread crumbs
To toast bread crumbs, coat a frying pan with olive oil and heat over a medium flame. When the oil is warm, add 1 cup homemade bread crumbs. Stir bread crumbs to prevent them from burning or sticking. They are ready as soon as they turn a uniform golden-brown.
Boil water for spaghetti. Meanwhile, heat oil over low flame. Add garlic and peppercorns. Cook garlic over a very low flame until it is soft and translucent, but do not allow it to brown. Add pepper flakes and continue to cook for about five minutes.
Drain pasta but reserve about a cup of cooking water. Add to oil and garlic mixture and heat over low flame. Toss with spaghetti and serve immediately with parsley and toasted bread crumbs.16
Living on Orchard Street, in the heart of the Jewish East Side, the Baldizzis formed close relationships with their Jewish neighbors, Fannie Rogarshevsky in particular. After her husband died, when Fannie assumed the role of building janitor, Mr. Baldizzi, a trained carpenter, often helped her with repairs. The two became good friends. Sometime in the early 1930s, to alleviate crowding in the Rogarshevsky household, one of Fannie’s grandsons was sent to live with the Baldizzis. Conversely, Fannie regularly fixed school-day lunches for the Baldizzi kids when their mother was at work. (Rosaria Baldizzi worked for a short time during the Depression but had to give up her job or forfeit her check from Home Relief.) The young Josephine, Fannie Rogarshevsky’s designated shabbos goy, was fascinated by the way the Jewish homemaker koshered her chickens, scrubbi
ng them at the kitchen sink the way an Italian mother might scrub an especially dirty child. Every evening, Mr. Baldizzi stopped by Schreiber’s Delicatessen on Broome Street for a glass of schnapps, his ritual nightcap. On weekends he took the kids on long walks that carried them over the Manhattan Bridge and back again, stopping along the way for hot potato pancakes, that quintessentially Jewish snack sold by the East Side vendors. Even so, when it was time to shop for groceries, Mrs. Baldizzi found limited use for the pushcart market directly below her window. Instead, the food she depended on could be found a few blocks away, in the Italian pushcart market on Mulberry Street. By the time of the mayor’s pushcart commission in 1906, Mulberry Street was already a full-ser vice open-air market catering to the Italian homemaker. Satellite markets sprang up on Elizabeth and Bleecker streets and along First Avenue below 14th Street. The largest of all, however, extended for nearly a mile from 100th to 119th streets on First Avenue in East Harlem. The pushcart markets were the single most important source of food for immigrant New Yorkers from the 1880s through the late 1930s, when Mayor La Guardia, the son of immigrants himself, finally prevailed in the decades-long battle between the pushcart peddlers and the city government. In anticipation of the upcoming World’s Fair and the multitudes that would soon descend on New York, La Guardia shut down one market after another, consolidating some and moving others into newly built market buildings more befitting a modern city. The Mulberry Street market fell to the mayor’s ax in 1939, the year the fair opened. In the meantime, however, the Mulberry Street pushcarts supplied Italian cooks like Mrs. Baldizzi with foods unknown in the Jewish quarter. The Italian peddlers, for example, did a brisk business in mussels, periwinkles, conch, oysters, and clams. The last two items were sold as street food, the Italian equivalent to the Jewish knish.
Clams on the half-shell, a common street food in Little Italy.
Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
In the Old Country, Italian women foraged for snails, a free source of precious protein. In America, the snail peddler became a fixture of the Italian pushcart market. His mode of advertising, unique among street vendors, was an upright board with the snails clinging to it. The bulk of his delicate stock could be found in a crate under the pushcart to keep the snails shaded and cool. Italian cooks soaked their snails in cold water, prompting the animal to inch out of its shell, then fried it with garlic, creating a savory and inexpensive topping for pasta. Other sea creatures sold at the market were squid, octopus, and eels, which the Italian cook stewed with tomatoes.
But the most remarkable feature of the Italian markets was the selection of greens and other vegetables that figured so prominently in the immigrants’ diet. Early accounts of the pushcart markets offer a partial list of the many forms of plant life sold by Italian peddlers. There was cabbage and cauliflower—though no mention of broccoli—cow peas, cucumbers, celery (distinct from American celery), fennel, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, onion, garlic, chickweed, beet tops, lettuce, and many other forms of leafy greens which the Americans had no names for. As a convenience to the homemaker, beans could be purchased dried or already soaked to hasten the cooking time. The Italian vegetable peddlers, many of them women, were fastidious in the presentation of their goods. As one observer noted, “They clean, cut, and freshen the vegetables, constantly rearranging them so that they appear to the best advantage on the stands.”17 The women scrubbed their celery and their fennel until the stalks gleamed; they buffed the peppers and sprinkled the lettuce with water to keep it from wilting. Americans, who still thought of salads as an assemblage of vegetables and meats, often bound with mayonnaise, were struck by the Italians’ more restrained approach to the same dish. “No other people in the world,” one observer remarked,
use so many salads. They never mix tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers as Americans do in their salads. Each is kept separate. For their tomato salad, they clean the tomatoes, but do not peel them, split or slice them, and dress them with oil, but no vinegar. Then they strew over them stems of “regona,” a herb of aromatic taste and smell which comes dried from Italy…Cucumbers they peel and eat with both oil and vinegar, regona, and garlic. The heart of the lettuce, which they call “lattuga,” is a prime favorite, dressed with olive oil and Italian vinegar.18
The Italian’s devotion to these simple preparations was also noteworthy. “The Italian invariably has a salad for dinner if he can afford it,” our observer adds, “and it seems often to supply the place of meat to him.” To the American, the Italian salad habit was a source of puzzlement. How could a plate of lettuce, they wondered, take the place of a good roast? More curious still, how could a diet so lacking in substance provide the nourishment required to sustain human life?
Come spring, immigrants scoured the vacant lots of Brooklyn and the Bronx for wild dandelions, a food they had once gathered in the fields around their native villages. In New York, dandelions were a source of income for Italian women who collected the greens, cleaned them, and sold them at the pushcart markets, a washtub’s worth for a nickel. Italian cooks used the wild green for dandelion soup, or fried them in olive oil with tomatoes and pepper. When boiled for several hours, the filtered cooking liquid, “acqua di cicorie” was used as a tonic for “dyspepsia and general weakness.”19 An Italian summer delicacy was cucuzza, an extremely long squash with smooth, pale green skin and a hook at one end like an umbrella handle. Peddlers displayed the cucuzze by looping the hooked ends over a horizontal pole so they hung like stockings on a wash line. The leaves of the plant, sold as a separate vegetable, were heaped in crates on the pushcart below. Cucuzza was especially popular with Sicilian cooks, who added it to soups or fried it with garlic and tomatoes. Sicilian confectioners, meanwhile, chopped the squash into small pieces or shaved it into ribbons, then boiled it in sugar syrup until the opaque white interior had turned deep gold and was almost transparent.
Much of the produce sold on Mulberry Street was grown on immigrant “truck farms” in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey, a few hours commute from the wholesale markets in Lower Manhattan. A bit farther out from the city, Italians established a vibrant farming community in Vineland, New Jersey, which by 1900 comprised two hundred and sixty immigrant families. The Vineland farmers cultivated fruits and vegetables for the immigrant market using seeds imported from Italy. Their crops included garlic, peppers, cauliflower, cabbage, beets, fennel, cardoons (a relative of artichokes), chestnuts, figs, plums, and ten varieties of grapes.
In the nineteenth century, immigrant Jews carried their goose-farming tradition to America, establishing urban poultry farms in the East Side tenements. Several decades later, Italian immigrants brought their treasured home gardens to urban America, now reconfigured as a tenement window box. In wooden planters made from discarded soapboxes, Italian homemakers grew oregano, basil, mint, peppers, tomatoes, and lettuce. (The more ambitious urban farmers planted their gardens on tenement rooftops.) The tradition of the home garden continues today in Italian neighborhoods like Hoboken, New Jersey, and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where second-and third-generation immigrants grow basil and plum tomatoes in emptied institutional-size cans of pomodori pelati.
Though removed from the soil, transplanted Italian women moved to the rhythm of the agricultural year. Each fall, in New York’s Little Italy, they bought up great loads of peppers and preserved them for the coming winter. The peppers were split and brined in tubs of saltwater or packed in jars filled with vinegar. The women also dried their peppers in the sun, just as they used to in the Old Country. In New York, however, they threaded the peppers onto long strings and suspended them from the fire escapes in great dangling loops. Tomatoes were also dried in the sun, along with eggplant, which the women first cut into strips. Each of these dried vegetables was soaked in water for several hours prior to cooking, then fried in olive oil or added to soup. The eggplant recipe below is from Maria Gentile.
EGGPLANTS IN THE OVEN
Skin five or six eggplants, cut them in round slices, and salt them so that they throw out the water that they contain. After a few hours, dip in flour and frying oil.
Take a fireproof vase or baking tin and place the slices in layers, with grated cheese between each layer, abundantly seasoned with tomato sauce.
Beat one egg with a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of tomato sauce, a teaspoonful of grated cheese and two of crumbs of bread, and cover the upper layer with this sauce. Put the vase in the oven and when the egg is coagulated, serve hot.20
The contempt for Italian cooking that prevailed in this country a hundred-plus years ago is a buried fact in our culinary history and a surprising one, too, considering how much attitudes have changed. In the United States today, no immigrant cuisine is more embraced by the American cook, her kitchen stocked with tomato paste, canned tomatoes, jarred marinara sauce, olive oil, parmesan cheese, garlic, and above all pasta, mainstay of the American dinner table. And what food, if not pizza, is more beloved by American schoolchildren?
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