When Italians first began coming to this country in numbers, back in the 1880s and 1890s, many of them did what Irish and German and other immigrants did before them and went into business serving the food and drink of the old country to their fellow immigrants. Italian food and drinkways, being rather more alien to the prevailing American standard than either German or Irish ones were, took extra work.

Things had to be imported. Good, dense pasta asciutta in all its myriad shapes, olive oil, the essential cheeses and cured meats, so on and so forth. After all, you can’t make a saltimbocca alla Romana without prosciutto or a stracciatellawithout well-aged parmigiano, and life without saltimbocca or stracciatella is no kind of life at all.