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Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration
Millions of immigrants were drawn to American shores, not by the mythic streets paved with gold, but rather by its tables heaped with food. How they experienced the realities of America’s abundant food―its meat and white bread, its butter and cheese, fruits and vegetables, coffee and beer―reflected their earlier deprivations and shaped their ethnic practices in the new land.
Hungering for America tells the stories of three distinctive groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic “Italian” food that inspired community pride and cohesion. Irish immigrants, in contrast, loath to mimic the foodways of the Protestant British elite, diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And East European Jews, who venerated food as the vital center around which family and religious practice gathered, found that dietary restrictions jarred with America’s boundless choices.
These tales, of immigrants in their old worlds and in the new, demonstrate the role of hunger in driving migration and the significance of food in cementing ethnic identity and community. Hasia Diner confirms the well-worn adage, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”
Hungering for America tells the stories of three distinctive groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic “Italian” food that inspired community pride and cohesion. Irish immigrants, in contrast, loath to mimic the foodways of the Protestant British elite, diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And East European Jews, who venerated food as the vital center around which family and religious practice gathered, found that dietary restrictions jarred with America’s boundless choices.
These tales, of immigrants in their old worlds and in the new, demonstrate the role of hunger in driving migration and the significance of food in cementing ethnic identity and community. Hasia Diner confirms the well-worn adage, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”
320 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 17, 2012
So good. I particularly liked the chapter on Italian immigrants, although it made me really hungry. Imagine having to depend on some local lord to dish out olive oil a few times a year. I guess I had an image of Italians as big hearted, giving people (way to stereotype, Ngaire), and was a bit shocked that the nobility and landowners were a bunch of mean, stingy, misers who didn't care if their poorer neighbors existed primarily on bread and water. No wonder so many people left Italy and emigrated to America (and Australia, too, I believe). Things were still pretty tough, but at least you didn't have to grovel for some spaghetti.
The chapters on the Irish made me sad. To have the potato forced on you by your political overlords and colonial masters, and then for it to periodically fail because of blight. How awful. At least when Irish people fled to America, they could finally discover some other foods, even if they didn't really incorporate them into their identities as Irish. It made my blood boil that some Americans were so dismissive and rude about the Irish and make fun of the fact that Irish women couldn't cook (of course they couldn't cook - all they had were potatoes. Either that or they were literally starving!). What a pack of bastards - I guess the tables have really turned there, since I've met several people in the US who couldn't boil an egg if they were paid to, and I saw mostly good food in Ireland during the three weeks I spent there a few years ago.
The chapters on Jewish immigrants were fascinating too. I had no idea that kashrut played such a powerful role in Jewish communities in Eastern Europe - that it was sanctioned by the state. Things got a lot looser when people came to the US, which had no interest in enforcing kashrut. Of course, this led to conflict in communities and families, as some wanted to keep to the old ways, and others were happy to try American foods. So much good food, though. Another chapter that totally made my mouth water. I really need to find a recipe for kugel that doesn't contain wheat flour, because this book made me hanker for it.
The chapters on the Irish made me sad. To have the potato forced on you by your political overlords and colonial masters, and then for it to periodically fail because of blight. How awful. At least when Irish people fled to America, they could finally discover some other foods, even if they didn't really incorporate them into their identities as Irish. It made my blood boil that some Americans were so dismissive and rude about the Irish and make fun of the fact that Irish women couldn't cook (of course they couldn't cook - all they had were potatoes. Either that or they were literally starving!). What a pack of bastards - I guess the tables have really turned there, since I've met several people in the US who couldn't boil an egg if they were paid to, and I saw mostly good food in Ireland during the three weeks I spent there a few years ago.
The chapters on Jewish immigrants were fascinating too. I had no idea that kashrut played such a powerful role in Jewish communities in Eastern Europe - that it was sanctioned by the state. Things got a lot looser when people came to the US, which had no interest in enforcing kashrut. Of course, this led to conflict in communities and families, as some wanted to keep to the old ways, and others were happy to try American foods. So much good food, though. Another chapter that totally made my mouth water. I really need to find a recipe for kugel that doesn't contain wheat flour, because this book made me hanker for it.
August 16, 2008
For a "scholarly" book, this was an enjoyable read. Dr. Diner's concept of negotiation between the availability of food in the old country and in nineteenth century America was fascinating. The comparisons between Italian and Irish immigrant "foodways" also proved interesting. I'd definitely recommend this if you are studying American history, the history of food, immigration or culture.
September 7, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Food History
Food history can sometimes feel like a sideshow to the “real” stories of migration—overshadowed by politics, labour, religion, and identity. Yet in Hungering for America, Hasia R. Diner demonstrates with clarity and elegance that foodways are not side stories at all but at the very heart of how communities imagine themselves, how they survive, and how they integrate into a new land. Her book is, in essence, a culinary ethnography of migration: a comparative history of how Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants to America carried, reshaped, and reinvented their relationship to food in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I first read this book in 2019, somewhere between revisiting Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar and re-reading Harvey Levenstein’s Fear of Food. Placing it in that sequence, Hungering for America felt like a bridge. Abbott and Levenstein analyse sweeping structures—how commodities shape societies, how anxieties govern our diets—while Diner zooms in on three migrant kitchens and shows how those global structures lived on the dinner table. She makes hunger and abundance human, intimate, and textured. Her narrative is part scholarship, part storytelling, and part meditation on what it means to cook and eat when the homeland is both gone and yet alive in memory.
Diner begins with hunger—not as metaphor, but as visceral, lived reality. For the Irish, the defining trauma was, of course, the Great Famine of the 1840s. When so much of your communal history is marked by the absence of food, migration to America was saturated with dreams of plenty. Food abundance was not just welcome but symbolically redemptive. The immigrant Irish relationship to food in America, however, was marked by a paradox: while the famine experience made them deeply conscious of scarcity, their actual culinary practices in the U.S. often lacked the vibrancy or distinctiveness of Italian or Jewish foodways. Corned beef and cabbage became the emblem, but as Diner shows, it was a distinctly American adaptation rather than an Old World inheritance.
For Italians, hunger was also part of the push to migrate—southern Italy was wracked by poverty and malnutrition—but their response in America was different. Italians brought with them deep regional culinary traditions, which became both more plentiful and more standardised in the New World. Dishes that were once local specialities—pasta with tomato sauce, Sunday meatballs—became central identity markers of a new “Italian American” cuisine. Abundance, for Italians, meant the chance to cook familiar dishes with greater generosity, transforming scarcity into feasting.
For Jews, hunger was bound not only to poverty but to religious law. Kashrut—dietary restrictions—ensured that food was always about more than survival. Eating kosher in America was both a logistical challenge and a cultural negotiation: it helped preserve identity but also marked Jews as distinct from the mainstream. For Jewish immigrants, maintaining dietary tradition became a way of resisting the pull of assimilation, even as younger generations gradually moved toward more flexible practices.
Diner’s framing is brilliant here: hunger and food were not merely background forces; they were the very grammar of migration. They gave shape to how each community imagined America, how they explained their past, and how they built futures in unfamiliar cities.
The core of the book lies in its account of adaptation—how immigrant women, as primary cooks, negotiated between inherited recipes and new ingredients. Here Diner’s research is meticulous, drawing on immigrant letters, cookbooks, oral histories, and memoirs. She paints vivid scenes: women substituting American cuts of meat for familiar ones, stretching recipes to feed large families, and turning industrial white flour and canned tomatoes into staples of everyday meals.
For the Irish, adaptation often meant simplification. Without a deep canon of distinctive regional dishes, Irish immigrants fell into eating patterns that were plain, utilitarian, and centred on meat and potatoes. Their food practices, Diner suggests, often mirrored their socioeconomic struggles in America—hard labour, little time for elabourate cooking, and few culinary resources to draw upon. The Irish kitchen became a place where survival, not spectacle, defined meals.
For Italians, adaptation was the opposite: embellishment. Cheap American meat and vegetables allowed them to cook with abundance. Tomato sauce, which had been a rarity in rural southern Italy, became ubiquitous. Meat, once a Sunday luxury, became more frequent. Over time, Italian immigrant kitchens gave birth to a standardised cuisine—pizza, spaghetti with meatballs, and lasagna—that became icons of American dining. This was not nostalgia so much as invention, and Diner is careful to note that much of what we think of as “Italian” food is really an Italian-American creation.
Jewish kitchens, meanwhile, became battlegrounds of tradition. Kashrut required vigilance, but it also required adaptation to American markets. Some families remained strictly kosher, others bent rules, and children often rebelled against the restrictions. Jewish foodways in America became a complex negotiation: the bagel and the deli emerged as public symbols of Jewish identity, while Sabbath meals and Passover seders kept the Old World alive at home. Diner’s portraits here are moving—meals were both acts of continuity and of compromise.
Diner’s most powerful contribution is her argument that food was not just sustenance or habit but a language of negotiation between identity and assimilation. In the immigrant kitchen, every meal carried layered meanings. Was eating corned beef an assertion of Irishness or a sign of American adaptation? Was serving pasta with abundant meatballs a nostalgic return to Italy or a celebratory embrace of American plenty? Was keeping kosher a form of resistance or a strategy for survival in a hostile culture?
Meals were also social markers. Inviting neighbours to dinner could reveal differences or create bonds. School lunches exposed children to ridicule or admiration. Public feasts—parades, festivals, church suppers—became performances of ethnic pride. At every turn, food mediated between private memory and public identity.
Diner reminds us that these negotiations were not always smooth. Children often resisted parents’ food traditions, preferring hamburgers and hot dogs. Women bore the brunt of cultural preservation, cooking the labour-intensive meals that kept traditions alive. Men often viewed food more casually, leaving the work of cultural continuity to mothers and grandmothers. Generational tension simmered as strongly as any pot of Sunday gravy.
What sets Hungering for America apart from other food histories is its comparative lens. By placing Italians, Irish, and Jews side by side, Diner shows how migration stories are at once unique and interconnected. She demonstrates that foodways reflect not just cultural inheritance but also the particular circumstances of migration: the trauma of famine for the Irish, the poverty of southern Italy, and the religious frameworks of Jewish communities.
This comparative method also reveals larger patterns. All three groups used food as a way of making sense of abundance in America. All three found that kitchens became sites of both assimilation and resistance. And all three produced iconic foods that eventually seeped into America’s broader culinary identity.
Yet the differences matter too. Irish food became plain, practical, almost invisible. Italian food became exuberant, public, and celebratory. Jewish food became guarded, coded, and ritualised. Together, they show that there is no single immigrant story—only overlapping trajectories shaped by hunger, memory, and adaptation.
One of the book’s quiet strengths lies in its attention to the emotional charge of food. Hunger in the Old World left scars that abundance in America could not erase. For Irish immigrants, potatoes were reminders of famine, yet they remained central to the diet. For Italians, meals became occasions for joy and solidarity, a way to turn poverty into ritualised plenty. For Jews, food carried the weight of survival, both in the face of religious persecution and in the daily work of maintaining tradition.
Diner treats these emotions not as sentimental anecdotes but as serious historical forces. The memory of hunger shaped eating habits for generations. The longing for familiar tastes made adaptation bittersweet. The act of cooking and eating became a way of remembering, grieving, and redefining.
Reading Hungering for America made me reflect on my own shelves of food history. Where Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar shows how a commodity transformed the world, and Samira Kawash’s Candy explores cultural panic around sweets, Diner gives us something different: a textured, comparative portrait of immigrant kitchens as crucibles of identity. If Abbott and Kawash reveal the macro-histories of taste, Diner shows us the micro-histories of survival and belonging.
Her prose is elegant, her research meticulous, and her insights lasting. This is a book that reshaped how I think about immigrant food stories—not as quaint folklore, but as central to the American experience.
This book is an elegant, deeply researched study that reminds us food is never just food—it’s history, trauma, adaptation, and cultural expression. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand how immigrant kitchens built the foundations of American cuisine.
Food history can sometimes feel like a sideshow to the “real” stories of migration—overshadowed by politics, labour, religion, and identity. Yet in Hungering for America, Hasia R. Diner demonstrates with clarity and elegance that foodways are not side stories at all but at the very heart of how communities imagine themselves, how they survive, and how they integrate into a new land. Her book is, in essence, a culinary ethnography of migration: a comparative history of how Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants to America carried, reshaped, and reinvented their relationship to food in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I first read this book in 2019, somewhere between revisiting Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar and re-reading Harvey Levenstein’s Fear of Food. Placing it in that sequence, Hungering for America felt like a bridge. Abbott and Levenstein analyse sweeping structures—how commodities shape societies, how anxieties govern our diets—while Diner zooms in on three migrant kitchens and shows how those global structures lived on the dinner table. She makes hunger and abundance human, intimate, and textured. Her narrative is part scholarship, part storytelling, and part meditation on what it means to cook and eat when the homeland is both gone and yet alive in memory.
Diner begins with hunger—not as metaphor, but as visceral, lived reality. For the Irish, the defining trauma was, of course, the Great Famine of the 1840s. When so much of your communal history is marked by the absence of food, migration to America was saturated with dreams of plenty. Food abundance was not just welcome but symbolically redemptive. The immigrant Irish relationship to food in America, however, was marked by a paradox: while the famine experience made them deeply conscious of scarcity, their actual culinary practices in the U.S. often lacked the vibrancy or distinctiveness of Italian or Jewish foodways. Corned beef and cabbage became the emblem, but as Diner shows, it was a distinctly American adaptation rather than an Old World inheritance.
For Italians, hunger was also part of the push to migrate—southern Italy was wracked by poverty and malnutrition—but their response in America was different. Italians brought with them deep regional culinary traditions, which became both more plentiful and more standardised in the New World. Dishes that were once local specialities—pasta with tomato sauce, Sunday meatballs—became central identity markers of a new “Italian American” cuisine. Abundance, for Italians, meant the chance to cook familiar dishes with greater generosity, transforming scarcity into feasting.
For Jews, hunger was bound not only to poverty but to religious law. Kashrut—dietary restrictions—ensured that food was always about more than survival. Eating kosher in America was both a logistical challenge and a cultural negotiation: it helped preserve identity but also marked Jews as distinct from the mainstream. For Jewish immigrants, maintaining dietary tradition became a way of resisting the pull of assimilation, even as younger generations gradually moved toward more flexible practices.
Diner’s framing is brilliant here: hunger and food were not merely background forces; they were the very grammar of migration. They gave shape to how each community imagined America, how they explained their past, and how they built futures in unfamiliar cities.
The core of the book lies in its account of adaptation—how immigrant women, as primary cooks, negotiated between inherited recipes and new ingredients. Here Diner’s research is meticulous, drawing on immigrant letters, cookbooks, oral histories, and memoirs. She paints vivid scenes: women substituting American cuts of meat for familiar ones, stretching recipes to feed large families, and turning industrial white flour and canned tomatoes into staples of everyday meals.
For the Irish, adaptation often meant simplification. Without a deep canon of distinctive regional dishes, Irish immigrants fell into eating patterns that were plain, utilitarian, and centred on meat and potatoes. Their food practices, Diner suggests, often mirrored their socioeconomic struggles in America—hard labour, little time for elabourate cooking, and few culinary resources to draw upon. The Irish kitchen became a place where survival, not spectacle, defined meals.
For Italians, adaptation was the opposite: embellishment. Cheap American meat and vegetables allowed them to cook with abundance. Tomato sauce, which had been a rarity in rural southern Italy, became ubiquitous. Meat, once a Sunday luxury, became more frequent. Over time, Italian immigrant kitchens gave birth to a standardised cuisine—pizza, spaghetti with meatballs, and lasagna—that became icons of American dining. This was not nostalgia so much as invention, and Diner is careful to note that much of what we think of as “Italian” food is really an Italian-American creation.
Jewish kitchens, meanwhile, became battlegrounds of tradition. Kashrut required vigilance, but it also required adaptation to American markets. Some families remained strictly kosher, others bent rules, and children often rebelled against the restrictions. Jewish foodways in America became a complex negotiation: the bagel and the deli emerged as public symbols of Jewish identity, while Sabbath meals and Passover seders kept the Old World alive at home. Diner’s portraits here are moving—meals were both acts of continuity and of compromise.
Diner’s most powerful contribution is her argument that food was not just sustenance or habit but a language of negotiation between identity and assimilation. In the immigrant kitchen, every meal carried layered meanings. Was eating corned beef an assertion of Irishness or a sign of American adaptation? Was serving pasta with abundant meatballs a nostalgic return to Italy or a celebratory embrace of American plenty? Was keeping kosher a form of resistance or a strategy for survival in a hostile culture?
Meals were also social markers. Inviting neighbours to dinner could reveal differences or create bonds. School lunches exposed children to ridicule or admiration. Public feasts—parades, festivals, church suppers—became performances of ethnic pride. At every turn, food mediated between private memory and public identity.
Diner reminds us that these negotiations were not always smooth. Children often resisted parents’ food traditions, preferring hamburgers and hot dogs. Women bore the brunt of cultural preservation, cooking the labour-intensive meals that kept traditions alive. Men often viewed food more casually, leaving the work of cultural continuity to mothers and grandmothers. Generational tension simmered as strongly as any pot of Sunday gravy.
What sets Hungering for America apart from other food histories is its comparative lens. By placing Italians, Irish, and Jews side by side, Diner shows how migration stories are at once unique and interconnected. She demonstrates that foodways reflect not just cultural inheritance but also the particular circumstances of migration: the trauma of famine for the Irish, the poverty of southern Italy, and the religious frameworks of Jewish communities.
This comparative method also reveals larger patterns. All three groups used food as a way of making sense of abundance in America. All three found that kitchens became sites of both assimilation and resistance. And all three produced iconic foods that eventually seeped into America’s broader culinary identity.
Yet the differences matter too. Irish food became plain, practical, almost invisible. Italian food became exuberant, public, and celebratory. Jewish food became guarded, coded, and ritualised. Together, they show that there is no single immigrant story—only overlapping trajectories shaped by hunger, memory, and adaptation.
One of the book’s quiet strengths lies in its attention to the emotional charge of food. Hunger in the Old World left scars that abundance in America could not erase. For Irish immigrants, potatoes were reminders of famine, yet they remained central to the diet. For Italians, meals became occasions for joy and solidarity, a way to turn poverty into ritualised plenty. For Jews, food carried the weight of survival, both in the face of religious persecution and in the daily work of maintaining tradition.
Diner treats these emotions not as sentimental anecdotes but as serious historical forces. The memory of hunger shaped eating habits for generations. The longing for familiar tastes made adaptation bittersweet. The act of cooking and eating became a way of remembering, grieving, and redefining.
Reading Hungering for America made me reflect on my own shelves of food history. Where Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar shows how a commodity transformed the world, and Samira Kawash’s Candy explores cultural panic around sweets, Diner gives us something different: a textured, comparative portrait of immigrant kitchens as crucibles of identity. If Abbott and Kawash reveal the macro-histories of taste, Diner shows us the micro-histories of survival and belonging.
Her prose is elegant, her research meticulous, and her insights lasting. This is a book that reshaped how I think about immigrant food stories—not as quaint folklore, but as central to the American experience.
This book is an elegant, deeply researched study that reminds us food is never just food—it’s history, trauma, adaptation, and cultural expression. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand how immigrant kitchens built the foundations of American cuisine.
April 8, 2019
Hasia Diner's book is a great overview of the immigration experiences and foodways formulations of three key immigrant groups in the late 19th century--Italians, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. She dedicates two chapters to each group, noting how the particular histories of their homelands shaped their appetite for America (as a place of variety, a place of abundance, a place of access and choice) and how those expectations became structured systems of provisioning once they arrived. (In many ways this is a key argument and structure that I plan to use in my own work). I was especially intrigued by how both the Italian and Irish experiences were rooted in the particular hierarchies that limited access and choice within farming and self-sustenance—whether the contadini of Italy knew of the elite foodways, they could not access it freely without working through the pseudo-sharecropper structures of the feudal land management system. Similarly, a neglected point key to understanding the Irish Potato famine is the concurrent success of those crops cultivated for English use, relegating Irish diets to the potato while others benefitted from abundant grain and cattle supplies. That these two forces then shape subsequent attitudes about food—Italian-Americans making their foods highlight meat and pasta, two things hard for the poor to access back home, and Irish neglecting to formulate a proud Irish culinary tradition in the U.S. because of the residual trauma around food and hunger—helps us to understand how immigrant foodways have to be historicized in the stories of homeland as well as in the new destination. The two chapters on Jewish foodways are slightly more predictable in that they cover territory I know well (Eastern European culinary hybridity yet also class resentment over better supplies for wealthier Jews, and anxieties over kashrut and assimilation in the United States). Nevertheless, they provide valuable citations from across historical and literary texts, and in particular Diner does a great job mining folklore and informal cultural expressions (songs, community tall tales, etc.) for food meanings and knowledge. The one thing I wish she’d dedicated more time to is how these immigrant cuisines were received on racial terms—she briefly talks about how Irish immigrants readily adopted “American” ways of eating (Yankee cuisine) as their own because they wished to avoid their own food traditions. Yet what were the stakes of embracing whiteness and Americanness for immigrant groups that, in the late 19th/early 20th c., were still frequently branded as “other?” A subject for greater exploration in other texts, perhaps, but one note that only emerges here in the occasional mention of nutrition.
October 27, 2021
The main thesis of the author seems to be that people emigrated to the United States for the food. While that may be a contributing factor I would hope there are more reasons. In the case of Jews fleeing Pogroms, especially, I don’t believe food was more important than not getting killed or sent to serve in the Tsar’s army.
And the author’s take on Irish culinary history is just sad. According to the author, there is NO culinary history in Ireland only potatoes eaten whenever one is hungry and drink.
Even the Italians are said to have a rich culinary history, but just not enough food so people left and came to the United States.
Interesting read…but.
And the author’s take on Irish culinary history is just sad. According to the author, there is NO culinary history in Ireland only potatoes eaten whenever one is hungry and drink.
Even the Italians are said to have a rich culinary history, but just not enough food so people left and came to the United States.
Interesting read…but.
October 2, 2019
An enjoyable look into the history of how various ethnic foodways were modified (or invented) as their practitioners immigrated to the United States. A fascinating look at the way our thoughts about the world of food are informed by a unique blend of truth and myth. Some of the chapters could have used a stronger internal organization though.
Strong recommendation for anyone interested in food history, or Irish/Jewish/Italian history.
Strong recommendation for anyone interested in food history, or Irish/Jewish/Italian history.
July 31, 2018
I bought this at the Lower East Side Tenement museum in NYC and just got around to reading it. For a scholarly work, it was very readable. Although I knew a little about the subject (specifically that poor Italians never ate as well in Italy as what they created as Italian food in America), it was an interesting detailing of three of the major immigrant groups and their food.
December 10, 2023
read this book for my research paper, skimmed the whole thing and read the chapters on jewish food ways for my understand of Eastern European culture in American cuisine
September 20, 2015
The book was easy to read however I felt like it was written more like a college thesis than a book for general reading. There was quite a bit of repetition of main points. However I did learn some new and interesting facts, particularly about the immigrant groups before arriving in America. I thought there would be more information about the influence of these three groups upon one another as well.
October 11, 2015
This is an amazing book on the foodways of three different ethnic groups (Italian, Irish, and Jewish emigrants) and how they sustain and evolve their food traditions after emigrating to the United States in the 19th Century. I had actually read the Italian chapters in undergrad, but loved reading the entire book from a current grad class: Culture & Cuisine: New England. Definitely recommend.
May 28, 2008
An excellent comparative history of immigration through the lens of food. Enjoyable and informative.
May 8, 2014
I gained new insights thanks to this extremely well documented investigation.
October 22, 2022
The food histories on Italians, Irish and Jews were engrossing and something I refer to regularly; a fantastic read
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews