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WHEN I FIRST MOVED TO THE UNITED STATES IN 1998, MY GRANDMOTHER'S SISTER, who had emigrated from her village in Abruzzo, Italy, to America in the early 1930s, invited me to a dinner in Delaware organized by her daughters and many of her descendants. Food, abundant and delicious, eliminated any distance between my numerous cousins and me during that emotional and unforgettable event. I soon realized some of the dishes served had the same names as those I used to eat back home, but they looked and tasted different. Moreover, the way they were served was new to me: most dishes came to the table at the same time, and there was no trace of the sequence of appetizers (antipasti), primi, secondi, side dishes (contorni), and desserts that structures big, festive meals in Italy. However, the interactions around the table, the body language, the sounds, were reminiscent of many of the family occasions that took place in Italy. Somehow, I was at home away from home. After my first exposure to Italian-American cuisine, puzzlement was replaced by amusement and curiosity, which over time led to more systematic and theoretical questions.
How do culinary traditions develop as they do among migrants? Why are certain food objects, behaviors, norms, and values from their places of origin maintained, more or less transformed, to become important points of reference in the formation of a sense of community and belonging, while some disappear and others resurface only after periods of invisibility? What role do cooking and other food-related practices play as migrant communities negotiate their presence in postindustrial societies where individuals and groups define their identities around lifestyles and consumer goods? Among other strategies, immigrants cope with the dislocation and disorientation they experience in new and unknown spaces by recreating a sense of place around food production, preparation, and consumption, both at the personal and interpersonal levels. In fact, the solidification of these practices and the norms and ideals that develop around them is not just a by-product of the relationships within already existing dynamics, but actually constitutive of their emergence.
Food is as exclusive a human behavior as language. Lévi-Strauss has pointed out that
cooking, it has never been sufficiently emphasized, is with language a truly universal form of...