Posted on 03/16/2021 5:30:13 PM PDT by nickcarraway
New Jersey is a wonderfully diverse place. Though a relatively small state, it has the highest population density in the U.S. It's also brimming with an immense amount of Italian-American residents.
I'm half-Italian, but I didn't grow up speaking a lick of the mellifluous tongue. From pizza and pasta to "The Sopranos," I was raised in a place where the notion of Italy is celebrated. However, it took me some time to note that this was not Italian culture, per se, but a slightly different "sect" altogether — an Italian-American history and culture that's rich in and of itself.
It wasn't until culinary school that I began to embrace all that the Italian-American experience has to offer, which is so much more than chicken parm. From bolognese and gnocchi to caponata and fennel, the breadth of Italian-American cuisine began to come into full view, and I've been eager to learn and consume as much as possible about the storied culture's food and history ever since. (It also didn't hurt that I have a killer Italian accent.)
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Ricotta is great with baked ziti.
Where did gabagool come from?
It’s sauce, not gravy...
If someone know what gabagool is then you have a pretty good sense of exactly where they grew up.
How did squid become calimari?
Despite my Freeper name, I no longer live in New Jersey.
I am a refugee from the high cost of living and high taxes.
What do I miss most from New Jersey? The Italian restaurants.
It’s just not the same in the South.
It was calimari first, that word goes back to the 16th century. Squid only goes back to the 17th century.
A woman with an FBI T-Shirt (Full Blooded Italian) criticized my pronunciation. I told her I was part Italian and that was how my mom pronounced the words. My mom is from the east coast.
The woman with the FBI T-shirt said she was from Chicago. So evidently Chicago was populated by northern Italians.
I don’t like those pronunciations.
I miss real Italian bread with the crunchy crust.
All the bread stuff seems to just be better up there. Pizza crust and hard rolls.
Freegards
Many Italians started dropping vowels as soon as they arrived in America.
I am told that Italy has more dialects than Carter has pills.
We have a branch of Italians in our family and even that one branch is diverse. There are Sicilians, Neapolitans, and if you go back farther there are some from Tuscany in the north and some from Apulia in the south, where they speak a form of Greek (Griko).
If an “FBI” criticizes your accent just tell her...oh, you know...
All 4 of my grandparents were from Sicily. My parents spoke to each other in the Sicilian Italian dialect, but spoke to us only in English. Wanted us to learn the correct Italian taught in our school.
For mozzarella cheese they say ‘moozadell’. Northeast Italian Ebonics.
They couldn’t afford to keep them.
Its cappocolo, a dried Italian meat
I’ll just drop this here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcp8rN-YqLw
The same way that the conch sea snails turned into scunizzi.
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