There’s a lot of nose-turning when it comes to Italian cuisine abroad, and even more snobbery when that cuisine is prepared in the US. And yet, the cuisine of our overseas migrants — who arrived en masse in the twentieth century on the shores of North America, many of them through the rigorous medical and bureaucratic checks of Ellis Island in New York — deserves just as much respect as any other culinary tradition.

Italian-American cuisine is not Italian cuisine. Rather, it is a branch, a variation, an adaptation. More than that: it’s a style of Italian cooking created over decades by emigrants and their descendants who inevitably had to adapt to a new context, using whatever ingredients were available and catering to the tastes of a vast, unfamiliar country.