Barbara Morini grew up in a small town in northern Italy, then lived for years in Rome and Milan. So when she emigrated here in 2016, she found Jersey Italian food to be quite…well, foreign. Case in point: spaghetti and meatballs. Whoever heard of such a thing? And when people started asking her about the Feast of the Seven Fishes, traditionally served in Italian-American homes on Christmas Eve, she was flummoxed. 

“To be honest, I went to Google,” Morini says. “I never heard of it in my entire life.” The day before Christmas, “we just eat fish,” she explains. “Not seven.” Another difference: making her own ragù from scratch, she uses no garlic. That’s southern Italian—the region that created the great wave of immigration to America a century ago.