New Books In Food

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Justin Nystrom about his latest book, Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture, published in 2018 by the University of Georgia Press as part of the Southern Foodways Alliance series Studies in Culture, People, and Place. The book was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Book Award in 2019. Nystrom argues in Creole Italian that the discourse about New Orleans has been narrowed to a single story and controlled by something vaguely defined as “Creole” which has “long robbed the city of the potential for a richer cultural self-image.” This view of New Orleans history and culture privileges the story of a minority of social elites, obscures the diversity of the city, and elides the existence and contributions of a great many groups, including Sicilian immigrants and their descendants. Nystrom complicates the received narratives of Sicilians in New Orleans, resisting the stereotypes that link all Italians with organized crime