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Best Food Book of 2014 by The Atlantic
Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition. | Cover Title Page Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: The Social Origins of Ethnic Tradition Chapter 1: The Contested Table Chapter 2: "Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!" Chapter 3: An American Foodscape Part II: Producing and Consuming Italian American Identities Chapter 4: The American Business of Italian Food Chapter 5: "Buy Italian!" Chapter 6: Serving Ethnicity Epilogue Notes Index | "Written with passion and clarity, The Italian American Table represents a stunning achievement. While tackling an irresistible topic—the meaning of food in the lives of Italian immigrants and their children—Simone Cinotto has managed to write a book that should please a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars and readers."—The Journal of American History
"Insightful, pathbreaking research. . . . a new perspective on the linkage between food and family. Recommended."—Choice
"In clear, bright prose Cinotto focuses on the period spanning from 1920 to 1940, and thus extends beyond the years of intense Italian immigration to include generational change and later cultural reproduction... The book appropriately cleaves between Italian American immigrant's food culture and later attempts at selling 'Italian' food to white Americans... Food is part of a larger cultural economy here, and Cinotto sheds some light on its production as a symbol and commodity over several generations."—American Historical Review
|Simone Cinotto teaches history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy, where he is the director of the Master's Program in Food Culture and Communications: Food, Place, and Identity. He is the author of Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California.
Looking at the historic Italian American community of East Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, Simone Cinotto recreates the bustling world of Italian life in New York City and demonstrates how food was at the center of the lives of immigrants and their children. From generational conflicts resolved around the family table to a vibrant food-based economy of ethnic producers, importers, and restaurateurs, food was essential to the creation of an Italian American identity. Italian American foods offered not only sustenance but also powerful narratives of community and difference, tradition and innovation as immigrants made their way through a city divided by class conflict, ethnic hostility, and racialized inequalities. Drawing on a vast array of resources including fascinating, rarely explored primary documents and fresh approaches in the study of consumer culture, Cinotto argues that Italian immigrants created a distinctive culture of food as a symbolic response to the needs of immigrant life, from the struggle for personal and group identity to the pursuit of social and economic power. Adding a transnational dimension to the study of Italian American foodways, Cinotto recasts Italian American food culture as an American "invention" resonant with traces of tradition. | Cover Title Page Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: The Social Origins of Ethnic Tradition Chapter 1: The Contested Table Chapter 2: "Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!" Chapter 3: An American Foodscape Part II: Producing and Consuming Italian American Identities Chapter 4: The American Business of Italian Food Chapter 5: "Buy Italian!" Chapter 6: Serving Ethnicity Epilogue Notes Index | "Written with passion and clarity, The Italian American Table represents a stunning achievement. While tackling an irresistible topic—the meaning of food in the lives of Italian immigrants and their children—Simone Cinotto has managed to write a book that should please a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars and readers."—The Journal of American History
"Insightful, pathbreaking research. . . . a new perspective on the linkage between food and family. Recommended."—Choice
"In clear, bright prose Cinotto focuses on the period spanning from 1920 to 1940, and thus extends beyond the years of intense Italian immigration to include generational change and later cultural reproduction... The book appropriately cleaves between Italian American immigrant's food culture and later attempts at selling 'Italian' food to white Americans... Food is part of a larger cultural economy here, and Cinotto sheds some light on its production as a symbol and commodity over several generations."—American Historical Review
|Simone Cinotto teaches history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, Italy, where he is the director of the Master's Program in Food Culture and Communications: Food, Place, and Identity. He is the author of Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California.
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