Food historian shows how immigrant recipes have survived and served America

[antiquity]

The roots of wedding soup


Donna Gabaccia was researching stories of immigrants when food became an obvious sidecar to her study in the 1980s. But there was a dearth of information from other historians then, and there isn't much more today.

Six years ago, Harvard Press published her book "We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans."

"There was this fixed story about how immigrants came here, went through crisis and change and then assimilated, abandoning what made them different," Gabaccia said. "But the story of immigration actually contradicts that. They don't abandon their food. Everybody else adapts."

A native New Yorker and Italian-American, Gabaccia is in her first year as the Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. In looking more closely at Italian immigration, she has made a discovery that might startle some Western Pennsylvanians: Italian wedding soup is not only exclusive to this area, it is not Italian.

This emblematic food probably takes its name from a linguistic misunderstanding, she said. A Neapolitan concoction of broth with greens and meatballs was called, in translation, married flavors" she said. "It probably arrived in Naples with the Spanish," but died out: "There is no such thing as wedding soup in Italy."

James Ehler, a longtime chef in Key West, Fla., who founded and works full-time for www.foodreference.com, hadn't heard of it, either, but said, "This kind of thing probably happens more than we know."


Gazpacho on the go


Spices, once considered as valuable as gold, began enhancing food in Europe during the lucrative spice trade to and from the Orient in the 15th century. It was the most purposeful transfer of food in history, but wherever men have imposed their culture, the imposed-upon have adopted and adapted something.

Alice B. Toklas concluded that wars, occupations and conquests must have moved her beloved gazpacho around the map.

With her friends' descriptions of the Greek tarata, the Polish chlodnik and the Turkish cacik, she realized, she wrote, "that each one of these frozen soups was not a separate creation. Had the Poles passed the recipe to their enemy the Turks at the siege of Vienna, or had it been brought back to Poland much earlier than that from Turkey or Greece? Or had it been brought back by a crusader from Turkey? Had it gone to Sicily from Greece and then to Spain? It is a subject to be pursued..."

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04204/349727.stm