I started writing Red Sauce to answer a basic question: where does it all come from. I was eating dinner with my wife at a classic Manhattan red sauce joint, probably drinking too much chianti, when we started talking about the origins of Italian American food. So different than contemporary food in Italy, I wanted to know who invented, where it came from, and why we think of it as Italian. Four years later, Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American was published.