Origins of Ethnic Food - How Pasta Came to the United States and How It Has Been Modified for American Tastes
Every major culture influences the American culinary environment since the time the first explorers stepped on the great shores. It seems that the Unites States is the most significant area that adapted and Americanized a wide range of different culinary styles. Multi-cultural immigrant population enriched the United States with their culinary traditions and some of them blended into the American cuisine and became its integral part. It is reasonable to suppose that Italian food may truly occupy the top position. Italian cuisine experienced, probably, a less difficult and most successful way to be recognized and merged into culinary traditions of the United States and became deeply liked by the citizens. Due to historically-originated roots, the Americans always preferred to eat large amounts of nourishing and easily-cooked foods. In this respect such Italian dish as pasta obtained hearts of Americans for its rich taste, good portion size and relatively short time of cooking.
Pasta's origin is still debatable because a lot various cultures have in their national menus some sort of noodle-like food made from grain. For example, in China, noodles of millet or rice have been consumed for centuries, but as noodles were not made of durum wheat, an essential part of pasta, its similarity is not obvious.
Smith’s research proves that in the second half of the nineteenth century Italy, especially its southern and poorest regions, experienced a great increase of birthrate that resulted in a dramatic flow of immigrants going to America for better life and jobs (477). Apart from their luggage, they brought their culinary habits. They settled down in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and found out that these cities are inhabited with Italian immigrants from all regions of Italy. Slowly, their culinary traditions started merging and people from Naples adopted recipes from Sicily and so did the other immigrants, mixing the original Italian tastes. It was a beginning of Italian-American cuisine that became popular and beloved due to its variety and good taste. What is also important, the meal contained familiar ingredients and was not too exotic to meet struggle and rejection due to unknown and unaccustomed savor.
The Italian cuisine reached its robust rise when the American soldiers returned home from World War II carrying a new hunger for real Italian food. This inspired many Italian-Americans to open up restaurant of Italian dishes. Moreover, a lot of them were rated impressively highly and were proud to serve Italian food for respected and rich members of society. Delicious pasta was classified as an upper-class dish. Smith tells that changes of recipes resulted in the biggest changes concerning was the use of meat on a regular basis instead of just for special occasions (489). This increase in demand stimulated the flow of importation of cheese, pasta, olives and olive oils aiming to provide the American people with the products they demanded.
In the end of 1700s Thomas Jefferson …
