In the 1990s, Tuscan cuisine blazed across the culinary firmament like a comet. Helped along by Frances Mayes’ book-turned-movie, Under the Tuscan Sun, Americans were besotted with the region’s simple and elegant cooking. We savored pungent pecorino and rustic salami as a first course, just-made pastas lightly sauced as a second, and third courses of meat, fish, or fowl unencumbered by sides or starches. And the cuisine’s emphasis on fresh and locally sourced ingredients was to profoundly influence New York dining in the decades that followed.

But, once translated into the American dining idiom, there was little in this sea of red-sauced abnegation that could be described as truly Tuscan. We simply lacked the original ingredients and the will to faithfully replicate the cuisine. Chefs came to use the term as code for any approach that emphasized pasta and a greater proportion of produce, ushering in an era when even TV dinners and cans of cat food were labeled "Tuscan."