Pasta and the Regional Foods of Italy

Though pasta and noodles are indigenous to many nations, I think few people would strenuously disagree with my assertion that it is found at its most glorious in Italy. When I was growing up in a typical Asian-Hispanic-Jewish-Black-Italian-Irish-etcetera neighborhood in New York, the Italians I knew were mostly immigrants from Naples and Sicily and their American-born children. Their kitchens smelled of tomatoes and garlic, and it seemed as though a big pot of water was always boiling on the stove. This, I later learned, was for spaghetti. Many of these Italians were somewhat religious and tied to traditions I knew nothing about. In their homes, certain foods always seemed to appear at the same time each week or each year. Their lives had what seemed to be a prescribed order, one that most of them accepted, believed in, and often cherished. This, I think, was their main link to the Old Country. For these Italians living in America, the rhythms of their daily lives were the vestiges of older, more basic rhythms that existed in Italy even before there was a Rome.