10 Ways the Italians Changed the Way America Eats

From meatball heros to pizza, Italian immigrants have left an indelible mark on the American diet. In honor of Columbus Day, Robert Sietsema reveals how your favorite red-sauce classics came to be.

Robert Sietsema

All photos by Robert Sietsema (@robertsietsema)

This Columbus Day, we have many things to be thankful for, even though Columbus didn’t really discover America. But we might consider the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria as a sort of advance scouting party for the millions of Italian immigrants who were later to arrive, encounter abject discrimination, persevere, and eventually triumph as one of the greatest influences on contemporary American culture—especially in the area of food.

When they arrived here, many from the southern regions of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, Italian immigrants found most of the things they were accustomed to cooking with—air-cured pig products, sheep’s-milk cheeses, multiple forms of dried pasta, fresh herbs, and buffalo mozzarella, to name a few—simply not available. So they remade their own cuisine with quintessentially American products, creating a new sum much better than its constituent parts, and eventually making Italian-American cuisine one of the world’s best (and most underappreciated).

Here are 10 signature Italian contributions to American gastronomy.

Pizza

Back in Naples, pizza was basically a pita bread dabbed with tomato sauce, a street snack that didn’t receive its anointment of mozzarella until about the same time pizza arrived here on the Lower East Side. At Lombardi’s in downtown Manhattan, where pizza was invented for a coal-fired rather than a wood-burning oven sometime late in the 1890s, pizza changed from an individual snack to a communal celebration, the pies strewn with New World ingredients and now fit for a gathering of people. From there, the dish seized the imagination of the world, so that now Italian-American pizza is imitated all over the globe, even it Italy itself.
Meatballs

Italian cooks accustomed to fresh and cured pig parts as their main (and often sporadic) source of meat arrived here to discover butchers’ display cases filled with ground beef, a legacy of previous waves of German immigration and mainly destined to show up in meat loafs and hamburgers. What to do with these was a major question confronting immigrant Italian housewives. So they rolled the meat into giant spheres and plunged them into tomato sauce or Sunday gravy. Until recently, you’d never see a meatball in Italy. But making perfect spheres of onion-laced ground beef turned out to be a geometric and culinary triumph here in the States, never more so than in spaghetti and meatballs, which has become an American classic enjoyed by every ethnicity from coast to coast.
Heros

There’s no such thing as a hero sandwich back in Italy. They arose here in the 1920s when French baguettes (and French pastries in general) became such a big fad that Italian bakeries started making them. As with pizza, the opulence and diversity of products available in America inspired cooks to load up the baguettes in an extravagant manner with all sorts of cold cuts, and hot items that ranged from breaded eggplant and veal cutlets to roast beef and fried calamari, making a handheld feast for Italian-American workers at lunch time.
Baked Clams

Sicilians had a special passion for seafood, and when they arrived here they were delighted to find clams—a shellfish they’d used as a topping for spaghetti back home—cheap and in abundance. That dish was cooked here, but so were a host of new ones, including stuffed clams. While ovens had been scarce back in Italy, mainly communal and used to bake bread, here every tenement had one, and it was used to bake clams with a flavorful bread-crumb stuffing, giving rise to yet another Italian-American classic.
Mozzarella

Back home, mozzarella had been made with buffalo milk and was rather expensive. Here, the housewife found a tidal wave of fresh, cheap cow’s milk. What to do with it? Make it into a fresh cheese that they dubbed “mozzarella”—buffalos be damned! Back home, this cow’s-milk cheese came to be known as fior di latte, or "milk's flower," but here Italian-Americans raced to use it in countless ways that would have never been seen back home, turning it into baked pasta casseroles and sandwiches, wrapping it with prosciutto to make a roulade, and generally deploying it with a free hand in multiple contexts.
Italian Roast Beef Hero

A sandwich just as famous in Chicago as it is in Brooklyn and Hoboken, the Italian roast beef hero is a spectacular invention, layering roast beef (unknown in Italy, even today) with mozzarella on a hero roll, then sluicing it with a brown gravy probably borrowed from the English. The result is one of the world’s most delicious and filling sandwiches.
Meatball Hero

The newly invented meatballs rolled in many directions, but never so successfully as in the meatball hero, now available in nearly every pizza parlor and Italian greasy spoon in the land. Have it with mozzarella or without (as in the Staten Island example above). By the way, ever wondered why the with-cheese version is called “meatball parmesan,” when the sandwich is made with mozzarella rather than parmigiano reggiano? Well, “parmesan” refers not to cheese, but to the Northern Italian city of Parma, where cheese-meat combos are common.
Ziti Slice

Of all the strange mash-ups that Italian-American cuisine has spawned, none is stranger than the ziti slice, a carb-intensive combo of pasta and pizza crust, glued together with cheese and a light tomato sauce. We dare you to eat more than one.
Fried Calamari

This is one dish that arrived from Southern Italy nearly intact. It came here, prospered, and eventually turned into a bar snack not just all over the country, but all over the world. The deep-frying technique probably came from the Portuguese (though Jews were also doing it in Rome), and it’s just one more instance of how the location of Sicily at the crossroads of the Mediterranean benefitted its cuisine – and eventually ours, as well.
Fried Calamari Hero

Among Italian-American cooks, experimentation was ever-present, and one day, we imagine, a Sicilian-American sandwich maker, wanting to make his lunch tastier and more filling, decided to load of a hero roll with fried calamari and tomato sauce. Even in New York, this sandwich is hard to find. Hopefully, it will become more common.

10 Ways the Italians Changed the Way America Eats

Pizza

Meatballs

Heros

Baked Clams

Mozzarella

Italian Roast Beef Hero

Meatball Hero

Ziti Slice

Fried Calamari

Fried Calamari Hero

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