During the mid-20th century, American families had a pretty good idea of what to expect when they stopped into a so-called “Italian” restaurant.

Whether you were sitting down to lunch at Geno’s Pizzeria or the Primo House of Spaghetti, the drill was pretty much the same. First, you’d park yourself at one of those family-style picnic benches covered by a cheap vinyl red-and-white checkered tablecloth pockmarked with cigarette burns. There, you’d find large glass shakers full of oregano and grated parmesan cheese, a spring-loaded black-and-chrome napkin dispenser, and a small tabletop jukebox offering an encyclopedic selection of moldy oldies by the likes of the Four Seasons, the Archies, and Tommy James & the Shondells.

After you were issued your requisite large red translucent plastic tumbler full of a syrupy fountain soft drink, you’d order one of three things listed in hastily arranged individual plastic letters on the Coca-Cola menuboard behind the counter. Your options were a pepperoni pizza pie; a massive mound of pasta topped with a tomato-based, ground-beef sauce; or a hefty hunk of veal, chicken, or eggplant that had been soaked in olive oil and dredged through breadcrumbs before being deep fried and bathed in salty mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. The latter two choices always came with stacks of thick-sliced, oven-baked bread weighed down with butter and garlic salt.

It was comfort food in the purest sense: heavy, predictable, and unerringly consistent in flavor, form, and delivery.

Chef Dan Scherotter, of San Francisco’s Palio d’Asti restaurant, calls that particular variety of New World Italian fare “Brooklyn Italian” or “heavily done Southern Italian.”

“What happened was that Italian immigrants in the early part of the 20th century came to the United States, and meat was so cheap here that they used a lot of it,” Scherotter explains. “So instead of meatballs made properly, using milk and breadcrumbs, they would use large amounts of ground beef.