Hey whaddaya mean all my cuisine is a fiction?
Getting thrown out of Naples for insisting everyone call pasta “Chinese food”, smiling as I never have before
I was chatting with this plumber while he was doing some work (a pipe burst behind a wall at my house) and he was jovially talking about Italian food and I mentioned that tomatoes aren’t native to Italy but were instead imported from the Americas. He got so fucking mad he stopped talking to me.
Italy’s mighty food and drink sector, which, by some estimates, accounts for a quarter of GDP
Italy’s 800 protected designations, products whose quality is recognised by the EU as inextricably linked to their area.
One more point for economies are vibes based. Italy is creating a cuisine as a brand and using it to try and carve out monopoly rents.
Ok right off of the bat the article is getting stuff wrong.
that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe.
Yes, a modern “carbonara” with milk, cream and mushrooms is an American invention. But I think pretty much everyone agrees with that, and some won’t even consider it a carbonara. A classic carbonara, a long thin pasta with a sauce of pig cheek and the fat rendered from frying it, with pecorino cheese, egg, starchy pasta water and freshly ground pepper is definitely not an American invention. It got popular during ww2 yes, but it was still in Italy, even if it was served to American troops. And dismissing any previous history of the dish as “ahistorical” is really weird. I’m sure the idea of emulsifying hard cheese with eggs and pork fat existed before 1940. I don’t think most modern Americans, even Italian Americans, would even recognise the original dish.
Yeah, what most people consider pizza (a bread with all the meats and sauces) would definitely not be a thing in Italy. Lots of older Italians hate that shit. I remember seeing an older Italian nonna freak out at a Debonairs pizza advert here in South Africa. Pizza came from the South of Italy, so yeah many in the north probably never had it until the post war boom in the 1950s. But that’s true of anything really, cuisine is exclusive to one area and spreads once the conditions allow it. Plenty of examples with Italian food there, like northern vs southern style lasagne.
When asked if the obsession with a national cuisine started with the baby boomers like him, a generation that never experienced Italian cooking before the postwar period of expansion, he smiles: “Indeed, like many other things, this too is all our fault.”
Hahahaha yeah that’s pretty funny. And I agree with that, the weird ingredient prescription would not exist with people just trying to survive. And honestly even in modern times, as long as all the big pieces are there, it should be fine.
It got popular during ww2 yes, but it was still in Italy, even if it was served to American troops. And dismissing any previous history of the dish as “ahistorical” is really weird.
I think the transformation into big-C Carbonara is what’s being described rather than any of the many styles of carbonara that existed in many forms depending on who and where you were in Italy. What became popular was palatable to Americans. So if it’s dismissing something it’s dismissing that carbonara is any single thing throughout a heterogenous country and that it somehow defines italianess.
I love getting a chance to break out that photo of Alfredo di Lelio hand-feeding JFK fettucine. All-time favorite piece of White House photography
