By Lolis Eric Elie

New Orleans Times-Picayune, November 28, 2003

In his new book, “The World on a Plate: A Tour through the History of America’s Ethnic Cuisine,” Joel Denker restores our city in general, and our Sicilian citizens in particular, to positions of national prominence.

He tells the story of how once exotic foods were shipped through New Orleans en route to becoming standard American fare.

“Before the Civil War, ships were traveling between Palermo, Sicily and New Orleans with cargoes of lemons, oranges, and other citrus fruit,” Denker writes in “That’s Amore,” the chapter of his book dealing specifically with the Italian role in broadening the range of foods eaten in America.

Trains left New Orleans bringing fruit to the Midwest and West and returned with grain and other products to be exported to Italy. The Crescent City was becoming the Capital of the fruit trade between the Mediterranean and America.

Adding variety, flavor

Denker’s books is not primarily about our city or our people. He is interested in the ways in which immigrants to our country have expanded our palates to the extent that yogurt, curry and frankfurters have become common dishes on American tables.

The roots of a lot of ethnic food, and even very sort of basic products that people see in the supermarket, people sort of took these things for granted. They didn’t realize that the roots of these things lay in some sort of immigrant enterprise, or ethnic ventures.

I gradually began sort of shaping the idea of a book that would tell the story of how immigrants shaped American food and were shaped by American culture themselves.

Denker begins his book talking about the influence of the Northern Italian immigrants who settled in California.

But soon he is telling about the people who lived in Piccola Palermo, or Little Palermo, a crowded French Quarter tenement where many Sicilians took up residence.

Giuseppe and Eleanora Uddo moved there soon after their arrival from Sicily in 1907. Giuseppe started a business traveling to the rural areas of Kenner and Harahan every morning at 3 a.m. to buy produce he would then sell in New Orleans.

“The roads were terrible and the mosquitoes were so big, you could put saddles on them,” Giuseppe’s son Frank told The Times-Picayune in 1981.

From those humble beginnings, the national brand, Progresso Foods, was born.

A lasting impression

Progresso Foods was sold in 1969 to Imperial Tobacco, a Canadian firm. Ultimately, the brand name became the property of Pillsbury, which owns it today.

But, because of the history taught to me by Joel Denker, I have a new fondness for the Progresso brand name, even if it’s no longer New Orleanian.