NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 120 go-to Italian American favorites for all the red-sauced, pan-fried, crispy-cornered, baked-until-bubbly comforting classics you’ll want to eat every night.   Food Network star Alex Guarnaschelli may be a French-trained chef, an Iron Chef, and a short-order-chef to her daughter, Ava, but at her core, she’s an Italian American home cook. Her mom’s heritage was Sicilian and her dad’s people were from Bari; she pledged allegiance to her father’s marinara on weekdays and to her mom’s on the weekend and grew up eating at many of the red-checked-tablecloth trattorias throughout New York City. She still stops in to chitchat with the shop owners in Little Italy, where she buys the milkiest fresh mozz, the most thinly sliced prosciutto, and the crunchiest biscotti.   These are the recipes that are favorites for so many of us, whether your family is from Italy or not. From Fettuccine Alfredo, Whole Chicken alla Diavola, and Carmella Soprano’s Lasagna (yes, that Carmella Soprano) to Stuffed Artichokes so big and bursting that they’re a main course unto themselves, these 120 recipes and 115 stunning photos are a celebration of garlic and tomatoes, Parmesan, pesto, and all the meatballs, sausages, and tiramisu in between. There are both simple weeknight suppers and slowly simmered Sunday sauces, and they represent the food we make to celebrate, commiserate, and just to be—it’s Italian, it’s American, it’s all of us. Alex Guarnaschelli is the host of Ciao House , Supermarket Stakeout , and Alex vs. America , all on Food Network. She is also a judge on Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay , and is one of three women chefs who have earned the Iron Chef title on Iron Chef America . She has been the executive chef at Butter in New York City since 2003 and lives in the city with her teenage daughter, Ava Clark. Introduction Midtown Manhattan in the 1970s was not a culinary mecca. On my block (Fifty-Fifth and Seventh Avenue) we did have the Carnegie Deli (Dad always got liverwurst sandwiches) and a bunch of quality coffee shops (where Mom ordered her grilled cheeses). I ate so many cheeseburgers growing up that my mother asked if I would ever care about food on any level . . . oh, the irony. At home, we cooked. A lot. Usually whatever protein was in excess and marked down that week at the store, like “London Broil” steaks (which could’ve been any number of beef cuts). My dad would heat a pan until it literally warped from the heat and the handle melted slightly. Then he would drop the steak in (without oil) and watch the pan turn every shade of gray to black. He would flip the steak and then open the front door to the hallway of our building as if it was a step in a recipe. Sometimes the smoke alarm for the whole floor would go off. Along with the steak, we ate frozen Birds Eye vegetables that my dad painstakingly heated with sugar, salt, and pepper. Or his doctored (shredded) green beans. Or his gently warmed lima beans. I loved the starchiness of those beans. They enabled me to pick out the virtues of salt, pepper, and sugar early on. My dad would put Walter Cronkite on the black-and-white Sanyo TV with a broken antenna. My mom would breeze in with a stack of cookbook manuscripts, and we ate, silently, in four minutes flat. I was growing up American for all I knew. Except for one small thing. My dad made tomato sauce as if he were auditioning to run the Pentagon. Canned tomato paste and canned tomatoes (never fresh), oregano, garlic and garlic powder, and tons of salt were in the mix. Onions. A generous dose of sugar. A quick simmer. “My sauce is better than Mom’s, eh?” he would semi-ask and semi-tell me, nudging me with his elbow and stirring the sauce. “Yes, Dad, it’s better, but don’t tell her,” I’d whisper diplomatically. The tomato sauce meant more to him than any other thing he cooked. We ate it on pasta, on meat, and even on rice. It permeated a lot of our dinners. It was the one thing I associated with being Italian. On weekends when Mom had more time, she’d make “her” tomato sauce with grated carrot, onion, and garlic quick-cooked in olive oil, with canned tomatoes (again, never fresh) and salt. She’d let it simmer for a spare twenty minutes and then spoon it over the pasta. “I think your father puts too much tomato paste and sugar in his sauce,” she’d mutter as the food processor whirred. “Don’t you?” she would ask me. Murky waters. My mom’s maiden name was DiBenedetto and my father’s side was all named either Guarnaschelli or Spinicelli. I was surrounded by temperamental Italians. “Your mother is from Sicily . . . Calabrese,” my neighbor Fran informed me with a sacred nod. Those words made my mom seem slightly more dangerous even though I had no idea what they meant. “Yes, Ma,” I’d tell her gently, “your sauce has so much more flavor than Dad’s.” Truth is, I felt bad for her because I felt my mom really needed “the win.” Each of my parents’ sauces became an express