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Italians love the chicory family of vegetables, of which escarole is a member. Escarole was one of the abundant leafy green vegetables that they could readily find in the States. Today it has fallen out of favor, but when I opened Buonavia, my first restaurant, in 1971, we were cooking escarole by the bushel. We served it in soups, braised with garlic and oil as a side dish, in salads, and for an appetizer; or we would stuff it, as in the recipe below. In Italy, stuffed greens served with beans would often have been the whole meal, not just a side.

This is my favorite way to eat mussels. It is how we cook them in Trieste and the surrounding area. Prepare this only when the mussels are super-fresh, and you will taste the sea in your mouth, made all velvety by the bread crumbs. I love dunking the crusty bread in the sauce. If there are any leftovers, remove the mussels from the shells and return them to the sauce; tomorrow you’ll have a great pasta-with-mussels dish.

The Mediterranean is rich in mussels, in particular in the rocky coastal regions. They are also abundant in the coastal regions of the United States. Cozze, or mussels, are a very popular dish in Italy, especially around Naples. It seems that just about every Italian American restaurant has some rendition of a mussels dish: alla Posillipo (spicy tomato sauce), alla marinara (mild fresh tomato sauce), and so on. Well, here is a spicy one. Mussels are not an expensive seafood and deliver a lot of flavor if fresh and still briny from the sea. Otherwise, save your San Marzano for another dish.

What makes this dish truly good is the old bread soaked in milk. Not only is it flavorful and mellow, but the traditions are steeped in preserving and respecting food: waste not, want not. It makes for a great vegetarian main course. With some old bread and whatever was growing in the garden, the Italian immigrants could make a delicious meal.

These are the crab cakes from the Faidley Seafood counter in Baltimore, the best I have ever had. Under the crisp outer layer of the crab cakes, big chunks of succulent sweet crabmeat were barely held together by condiments and what I later found out were crisp crushed saltine crackers. I managed to work out this fairly close recipe, since Faidley’s would not part with the original one. Rémoulade is a condiment that kept resurfacing on my research trip all over America. It appeared in Baltimore with the crab cakes, in New Orleans with fried artichokes, as a topping for po’ boy sandwiches, and some rendition of it has even turned up as a topping for today’s Big Mac. The closest Italian traditional condiment to the rémoulade is the aglio e olio (aioli—the emulsified rendition of olive oil and garlic which is used on the Ligurian and French coast). The French-sounding name implies some French heritage, but, then, the French played a big role in the founding of America, in particular in the Louisiana Territory.

Italians will stuff anything, but when it comes to a nice summer tomato, this is the recipe. It is good just out of the oven, and delicious at room temperature. Wonderful as an appetizer, a vegetable, and also a main course, this dish is popular at Italian family gatherings and festivities, and it looks great on the buffet table.

This shrimp dish is most extravagant if made with big, crunchy shrimp, but if you are price-conscious, medium-sized or even small shrimp will still be delicious. Keep in mind that the cooking time decreases as the size of the shrimp decreases. The amount of peperoncino you use to obtain the “Fra Diavolo,” or “Brother Devil,” is to your liking. Fra Diavolo sauce, originally made with lobster chunks still in the shell, is a creation of Italian immigrants in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century.

You might be used to breaded and fried zucchini cut in French-fry fashion, but when my mother fried zucchini, she would always cut them in rounds or slices. I liked them that way: they made great sandwich stuffers, especially when the flavors and moistness of the zucchini seeped into the bread. For over-the-top flavor, add a few slices of Swiss cheese and melt under the broiler or in a sandwich press. The perfect Italian lunch.

Breaded shrimp is universal, but shrimp parmigiana is distinctly Italian American. I first encountered this dish when we opened Buonavia, our first restaurant, in 1971, and Chef Dino put it on the menu. Shrimp parmigiana was a regular weekly special; people loved it, and it is still a delicious dish today.

Vegetables are often used together with fish in traditional Italian cooking. This recipe is over the top and seems to have every available vegetable cooked with shrimp; to me it resembles jambalaya without the chicken and sausages, and it is great served over steamed rice or pasta.

This sauce seems like a chore, but once you get everything in the pot, it simmers and cooks on its own and yields enough sauce for several luscious meals. (It also freezes well.) When unexpected guests arrive, just cook some pasta and you have dinner ready. What makes this meat sauce unique is the cinnamon, which adds an unexpected, unidentifiably delicious flavor. The kids absolutely love it with gnocchi.

Although this dish has all the makings of an Italian dish, everything I have read points to its being an Italian American invention, mostly likely conceived in New York. In Italy they do make a sauce with lobsters with which they dress pasta and risotto, but it is in the form of brodetto, seafood stew—lighter than the Italian American Fra Diavolo, made with onions instead of garlic, and without oregano. Here I give you a delicious version that is a combination of both.

At our home, when we were newly arrived immigrants, for Sunday dinner it was either gnocchi or garganelli with sugo. The sugo, a rich sauce, was made of either chicken or cubed veal or pork—all second cuts of meat—which created a first-class sauce. The sugo does take two to three hours to make, so, if you have no time for the sugo and have a good piece of Gorgonzola, try this sauce. It will take no more than ten minutes once you have the gnocchi done.

Cioppino is a delicious Ligurian fish stew, and since many emigrants from Liguria settled in San Francisco, some of the best renditions of the dish on this side of the ocean are found in San Francisco. California Italians were great contributors to the American fabric, and I am sure they all enjoyed a good bowl of cioppino. It might be a bit more complicated to eat, and perhaps your guests will balk, but I like my cioppino with crab legs in their shells.

There are endless renditions of lasagna: with just cheese, with vegetables, with mushrooms, with meat. Once you have mastered the art of cooking and layering the pasta, the filling can be your choice. But here I give you the Italian American rendition, one that you make with store-bought dry pasta. The major effort here is in making the Bolognese sauce, and in the Bolognese recipe I give you on page 158, you can make the sauce in advance and freeze it, all ready for when you decide to make a lasagna.

Whenever stuffing anything, one may be tempted to overstuff. Well, the elegance in this dish is to stuff the calamari lightly. When you cook fish or meat, remember that it always tightens a bit, and if there is too much stuffing, it bursts out. So keep it light—follow the recipe.

I have had squid prepared many ways, but never in a Milanese cutlet style until Tanya and I encountered this dish on our trip to San Diego when we went to Anthony’s Fish Grotto. The calamari cutlet was a thick slab, like a veal cutlet, quite different in size from the smaller version of calamari I am accustomed to cooking on the East Coast, and yet very tender. This popular calamari may be up to 2 feet in length; the giant squid can get to approximately 43 feet; in 2003, a colossal species of squid was discovered that can be upward of 46 feet. I’m not sure which calamari was used for my Milanese at Anthony’s, but it was very good; I tested the recipe with the traditional-sized calamari, and it worked deliciously.

The Sicilians have a tradition of using bread crumbs in many of their recipes, like involtini di pesce spada, or swordfish rollatini, which are dressed with dried-oregano-seasoned bread crumbs and olive oil. It makes sense that the large Sicilian immigrant population in the States would keep up the tradition here using fillet of sole, an easier, more economical catch than swordfish, especially for the early immigrants.

Cannelloni—that delicious stuffed pasta, literally translated as “big reeds”—is always a sign of a festive occasion in Italy. This baked dish can be made in advance and serve a large group of people, and it is loved by most. What you stuff it with almost does not matter, although a meat-and-vegetable combination is the most common choice. Cannelloni was a big-hit item on menus of Italian American restaurants in the sixties and seventies. If you have a gathering of family and friends, as Italians often do, this is a good dish to make.

I cooked this simple dish in my first restaurant, Buonavia, which I opened in 1971. I made it with fresh lemon sole and fluke, bought directly from the fishermen on Long Island when in season. But you can make it with the fillet of any white fish. It is delicious and quick.