Creole Italian

Creole Italian is an engaging new book in the burgeoning field of ethnic food studies. Justin A. Nystrom promises to shake, rattle, and roll New Orleans Francophiles and traditionalists. He argues that the city's vaunted French Quarter might more accurately be called the Sicilian Quarter. Who knew? The Sicily–New Orleans connection opened in the nineteenth century, when technology and commerce brought highly prized lemons from the Mediterranean island. Ships also brought desperate Sicilian emigrants, who found work in Louisiana's agricultural and sugar cane fields. The sheer numbers are stunning: Sicily, the size of Vermont, sent 1 million immigrants to the Americas. New Orleans became a center for the traffic of produce and humans. The author deftly interweaves the rise of the New Orleans oyster bars and cafés with the extraordinary abundance of the Gulf of Mexico. New foods also captivated Crescent City diners. The chapter with an enticing title, “Blood and Macaroni,” traces a surge of popularity in cafés serving pasta, as well as the dozens of factories manufacturing the exotic import

Ancient history · Archaeology · Creole language · Economic history · Emigration · Ethnology · Geography · Immigration · Political science · Popularity · Riviera · Sicilian · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy