Parma is quiet at night. The man sitting opposite me is paranoid someone will overhear our conversation. “They hate me here,” he explains in a hushed voice. He checks behind him, but the only other person in the osteria is a waitress who has had nothing to do since serving us our osso buco bottoncini. The aroma of roasted bone marrow wafts up from the table. Amy Winehouse’s cover of “Valerie” plays on a faraway radio.
“Can I badmouth them?” he asks. I tell him he can. After all, he hasn’t been invited here to expose corporate fraud. He has come to tell me the truth about parmesan cheese.
There’s a dark side to Italy’s often ludicrous attitude towards culinary purity. In 2019, the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggested adding some pork-free “welcome tortellini” to the menu at the city’s San Petronio feast. It was intended as a gesture of inclusion, inviting Muslim citizens to participate in the celebrations of the city’s patron saint. Far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini wasn’t on board. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said.
(sorry if this is the wrong com for this)
saying things like “so and so INVENTED beef stroganoff” (which is literally just pasta with ground beef mixed together lmao, calm down)
It’s even less specific than that. Neither ground beef nor pasta are required for the dish to be stroganoff. I’d say the sour cream based sauce does it, but I’ve also had versions where it’s a creamy mushroom sauce without the sour cream. Definitely a creamy sauce on beef over a starch. I wanna see someone serve it over potatoes and see who it gives an aneurism to.
