Mozzarella Sticks with Marinara

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:15:00 +0000

The mozzarella stick is Italian-American cooking at its most gleefully unrepentant, and it is older than the diners and sports bars that made it famous. Fried cheese has a long European pedigree: mozzarella in carrozza, the Neapolitan fried cheese sandwich, dates to the nineteenth century, and medieval French cookbooks describe battered fried cheese fingers with something close to the modern method. What the twentieth-century American kitchen added was the industrial context — the low-moisture block mozzarella that could survive freezing and frying, the deep fryer, and the tub of marinara on the side — and turned a regional trick into a national bar snack.

Baked Ziti with Sausage and Three Cheeses

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Baked ziti is the dish that shows up when there are people to feed and not much money to do it with: a First Communion, a wake, a Sunday when the cousins are coming. It is Italian-American to its bones, a casserole that took the frugal southern-Italian habit of baking leftover pasta with cheese and scaled it up for big American families and big American ovens. You assemble it ahead, slide it in, and pull out a bubbling, golden dish that feeds eight and asks almost nothing of you at the table. Every family that makes it swears their version is the right one, and every version is delicious.

Italian-American - vo.rs

Mozzarella Sticks with Marinara

Baked Ziti with Sausage and Three Cheeses