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When I was in high school, I was invited to dinner at a friend's house. As we sat down at the table, my friend's mother, knowing of my heritage, said smilingly, "You'll like dinner tonight, Nicole. We're having Italian food!" A few moments later, she proudly served the "Italian" feast: a bowl of limpid spaghetti, with a dollop of canned sauce on top. As I bravely dug in (I had to be polite, after all), my sense of horror multiplied ten-fold when I realized that the pasta had actually been rinsed in a colander. I choked down what I could, wondering how people could eat this way.

Until that moment, I had never fully realized that, to the average American family, "Italian" when it came to food meant exactly what I had been served: overcooked spaghetti, sauce from a jar, perhaps a bowl of over-sauced meatballs. My own family's take on Italian food was a bit different.

My father came to the United States from a small town in the Abruzzi mountains at the age of 20. He left a region that was not completely poverty-stricken, but had, only a decade or so before, suffered terribly in World War II. Hunger during those times was all too real; one of my father's earliest memories was of seeing his own mother eat dirt, having given her last crust of bread to her seven children. A lifelong obsession with food was to result from this difficult period in my father's life.

Once in the U.S., my grandparents and all of their unmarried children lived together in a modest house located in the suburbs on Philadelphia. Relatives and friends lived nearby, many on the same street. To keep family ties strong in the face of life in a new and unfamiliar country, the tradition of Sunday dinner was born. These dinners lasted for hours and included the dishes that in Italy my grandmother had saved for feast days and other special occasions. In America, food was cheap and plentiful; my grandparents grew or made what they couldn't buy. My grandmother cooked and cooked, the memory of hunger still fresh in her mind; her offspring ate and ate, the same memory urging them on.

Unlike other Italian American families I knew, my family was lucky enough to have authentic recipes on the table, relatively unchanged in method and preparation. Because of my grandparents' "recent" immigration, (meaning that by the time they arrived in the U.S., there were already Italian communities established and thriving, unlike those who had arrived a few decades earlier), the same ingredients they had used in Italy were,

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