<p><span class="deck">A restaurant critic who’s a food historian and the fortunate recipient of an Italian grandmother’s cooking follows the course of America’s favorite ethnic fare in its rise from spaghetti and a red-checked tablecloth to carpaccio and fine bone china.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">It’s a politician’s bromide, and it also happens to be a profound truth. No war, no national crisis, has left a greater impress on the American psyche than the successive waves of new arrivals that quite literally built the country. Now that arguments against immigration are rising again, it is well to remember that every single one of them has been heard before.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, you can visit a haunting re-creation of a life that was, at once, harder and better than we remember.</span></p>
