Red Sauce Cuisine is a style of cooking developed by Italian immigrants in the United States, blending Old World traditions with American ingredients and tastes. For many Americans, it becomes the defining image of "Italian food," built around tomato-based sauces, pasta dishes, baked specialties, and hearty portions. Although regional Italian cooking remained largely unknown on a national scale until the 1970s, Red Sauce Cuisine established an enduring Italian-American culinary identity that shapes restaurant menus, home cooking, and popular expectations of Italian flavor. - AsNotedIn
Drawing on inspiration from Southern Italian cuisine, early Italian immigrants to America developed new recipes and modified old ones. Ethnic Italians invented dishes like lobster fra Diavolo, spaghetti and meatballs, and veal parmigiana, and popularized foods like pizza and baked lasagna that had once been seen as overly foreign. Eventually, the classic red-checkered-table-cloth Italian restaurant would be replaced by a new idea of what it means for food to be Italian, even as 'red sauce' became entrenched in American culture.
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