Italian Food Is More American Than Apple Pie : Cuisine: A passel of new cookbooks testify to this country’s hearty appetite for pasta, pizza and what goes on them.

There was a time, only a few decades ago, when spaghetti and meatballs was exotic, and a time, a little later, when fettuccine Alfredo was daring.

Today, Italian food could hardly be more American.

“We’ve come to the point in this country where Italian has become the most important cuisine,” said Lynn Rossetto Kasper, author of “The Splendid Table”, one of at least half a dozen Italian cookbooks published this fall.

“It’s the most democratic,” she said. “Can you think of anyone who doesn’t like Italian?”

Kasper, admittedly, is obsessed with Italian food, but there is plenty of evidence that Americans who may not have even a drop of Italian blood have embraced food that harks back to Italy.

A National Restaurant Assn. survey conducted in 1990 showed that 46% of adults had eaten Italian food within the preceding month, with only Chinese and Mexican food approaching that figure. And a third of adults said Italian food was their favorite ethnic food.

In 1990, Americans ate an average of 18.4 pounds of pasta each in 150 shapes, and 60% of all restaurants served pasta, according to the National Pasta Assn., a trade group that is not surprisingly pleased by Americans’ enthusiasm.

Many of the items that became standard American restaurant fare--fettuccine Alfredo, pasta primavera and shrimp scampi--were unknown to the Italians who emigrated to the United States in the late 1800s, John Mariani wrote in his history of restaurants, “America Eats Out.”

Those dishes and, perhaps most of all, pizza, were adopted and adapted to American palates and ingredients. No other ethnic cooking, Mariani wrote, “has come close to the all-conquering success of Italian-American food.”

Even baseball stadiums sell pizzas.

“Look at Domino’s, Pizza Hut--there’s nothing Italian about them,” said Victor Weingast, operations and sales manager at Bel Canto Fancy Foods, an importer in New York. “I don’t think there’s a supermarket anywhere in the country that doesn’t have a frozen pizza.”

French cuisine still sets the professional standards, but most people are not coming home from work and preparing even the easiest of French suppers. Pasta is probably the key to Italian food’s blazing success in the United States.

“Pasta is the perfect food for the American mind-set,” Weingast said.

It’s cheap, generally fat-free, easy, and can be simple or sophisticated. Anyone can make it, and it goes with just about any other ingredients.

Italian food seems to have moved simultaneously in two directions--becoming more Americanized in fast-food restaurants and supermarkets, and becoming more sophisticated, with restaurants and specialty shops offering regional foods.

Twenty years ago, Marcella Hazan, probably the country’s most influential Italian cookbook writer and cooking teacher, had trouble finding ingredients. Pasta always was overcooked and covered with too much sauce.

But not everything is better these days, said Hazan, in New York to promote her new book.

Too many dishes, she said, are made “for the sake of novelty.” Sun-dried tomatoes, for example, are used like pickles in Italy. In the United States, “I find it in everything. Enthusiasm--without thinking about the taste.”

Hazan, who now lives in Venice, is getting a chance to make her point with the nearly 500 recipes in “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” (Alfred A. Knopf), which integrates her popular books from the 1970s, includes 50 new recipes and revises many others to reduce fat.

In an unusual approach to pasta, Hazan gives sauce recipes and recommends pastas to go with them. The rules for pairing the two “cannot be ignored by anyone who wants to achieve the full and harmonious expression of flavor of which Italian cooking is capable,” she writes.

Several new books provide history and culture and a sense of place, often with an emphasis on Italy’s home cooking. Three of them--”Foods of Tuscany” by Giuliano Bugialli (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), “Savoring Italy” by Robert Freson (HarperCollins) and “Tuscany the Beautiful” by Lorenza de’ Medici (HarperCollins)--are big, evocative picture books that make you want to book an airline ticket.

“All of a sudden this year, we were bombarded,” said Arlene Gillis, co-owner of the Books for Cooks store in Baltimore. Italian food books are the most consistently popular of her books, she said.

Kasper, who is of Venetian and Tuscan heritage, has written a detailed book outlining the history, recipes and legends of Emilia-Romagna, the section of northern Italy said to offer the country’s best food. There are wonderful tidbits, such as which pasta is served to celebrate the birth of a girl (lasagna) and which for a boy (tubes such as penne).