Southern Italian-American food, I read, is making a comeback, despite the fact that it has never been away. Yet, driven by endless articles about new, “authentic” pizzerias, the food media seem suddenly aware that Italian-American cooking has for more than a century been built on solid foundations of Neapolitan, Calabrian, Abruzzese and Sicilian tweaked by the immigrants who had to adapt their native dishes to East Coast American markets.

There was no buffalo milk in New York, so mozzarella was made from cow’s milk. Cattle breeds were different, as were seafood species. A North Atlantic lobster is a much larger, meatier critter than a puny Mediterranean lobster, the crabs of the Midatlantic coastline are fatter and sweeter than their European counterparts and the beautiful red snapper does not swim in the Aegean.