Grandi said that Wisconsin Parmesan, not Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano, has “stayed more or less true to the original recipe.” He also told me the name of a Wisconsin company that he thought was making just this type of old-school classic Parmesan: Sartori.
Sartori, founded in 1939, is now a fourth-generation company headquartered between Milwaukee and Green Bay. It sells a variety of cheeses that are likely available in your local supermarket, as well as 72 countries worldwide. And Sartori’s Parmesan does look very different from contemporary Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s smaller, with that black rind. It also appears to have a different texture.
Frankly—I had to have it.
After I ordered the Sartori Parmesan online, I dived into how Wisconsin and Parmesan became two words you could say next to each other and have them make any sense. It all has to do with taste, inventiveness, and the business acumen of Italian immigrants.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 3.5 million Italians crossed the Atlantic Ocean bound for America. Many of them were from southern Italy and spoke regional dialects. They would not necessarily even have identified as Italian—Italy had become a unified nation only in 1861. They were also coming out of poverty, from homes with dirt floors, with no running water, and where cooking still happened over fireplaces. Their diets would have been heavy in vegetables they could grow themselves. Meat was a luxury. Upon arriving in New York City, some of these immigrants would move on to cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, establishing Italian enclaves across the country.
And in those urban enclaves, these new Americans had to start doing something they had never really done before: buy, instead of grow, their food—something they could, at least, now afford to do. “The food that the American food industry provided them even if they were poor—the white flour, the butter, the eggs, coffee, sugar, beef, and pork—was something that was really special-occasion food for them back in southern Italy,” said Simone Cinotto, a professor of modern history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy.
Using these newly accessible ingredients, southern Italian women started to reimagine dishes from back home. In the process, they began to create Italian–American red-sauce cuisine, in which abundance itself is a kind of ingredient. Think of restaurants with red-checkered tablecloths serving fried chicken cutlets the size of plates and baked pastas slathered in cheese.