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Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong
- miffe 4y agohttps://archive.is/4gwGh https://archive.is/4gwGh
- mcv 4y agoAbout a year ago (maybe more?) I read an article from someone who'd found a medieval pizza recipe and wanted to try it out. Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. Pizza with toppings was apparently invented after the unification of Italy in the 19th century, when someone created three flat pizzas with different sets of toppings. The most popular one was named after the new queen of Italy. And it was mostly Italian immigrants to the US who remembered this and started experimenting with more pizza styles. When they returned to Italy in WW2, they were surprised not to find any pizzas there, and local Italians quickly started making and inventing pizzas for these Americans.
- WorldMaker 4y agoTomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century. It shouldn't be a surprise at all that pizza in the middle ages was nothing like today's pizza.
- AlanYx 4y agoTomatoes were also viewed with suspicion initially in Italy and used only ornamentally. It wasn't until the 18th century that tomatoes really became accepted in Italian cuisine.
- TylerE 4y agoTo this day there remains a sharp geographic gradient. Northern italians do not use many tomoatoes - practically never red sauces.
- manuelmoreale 4y agoDo you have a source for this? Because my experience tells me quite the opposite.
- alanfranz 4y agoNorth-East italian here. Never knew that.
- fmajid 4y agoThey are a member of the nightshade family after all, which includes many poisonous plants.
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoThey also were rather acidic compared to most foods people ate at the time. Acidity + pewter plates makes for a bad time.
- fmajid 4y agoI doubt any but the very rich could afford pewter tableware.
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoNobody but the very rich could afford tomatoes.
- WorldMaker 4y agoEggplant parm is such a fascinating dish for its mix of nightshades. Relatedly, I've known Americans that rate Italian-American restaurants on their eggplant parm as their preferred benchmark dish.
- fmajid 4y agoI'd use risotto as the benchmark myself, but then again I loathe eggplant.
- WorldMaker 4y agoReminds me of the risotto scene early in "The Big Night" (1996), which is also an interesting movie generally in the context of this discussion. The scene is about Italian immigrants trying to run a restaurant in America, and revolves around the kitchen dispute that happens when an American customer requests a side of spaghetti to go with the risotto.
- TylerE 4y agoI will die on that hill that an olive oil base is so superior that tomatoes do not belong on pizza. Especially these days where so many places "tomato" sauce is basically corn syrup and food coloring.
- smcl 4y agoI am curious about it and I'm quite sure that it is great but on that hill you are fighting an ... err ... uphill battle. To flip a contemporary saying around "pizza is like sex, even if it's bad it's still good" :D
- switch007 4y agoWhy not both! Olive and tomatoes (and salt) are a match made in heaven
- yamtaddle 4y agoToo runny. Pizzas I use olive oil on always end up messy as hell. Tomato politely stays put under the cheese, any exposed sauce cooks and dries so it's not runny, and oils and greases from other sources tend to sit on top of it rather than displacing it and turning into a kind of icky liquid-fat blend. I still use it for certain pies, but would absolutely not rate it higher than tomato sauce for this purpose, overall.
- nonethewiser 4y agoWhere have you found this type of pizza?
- throw0101b 4y ago> Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century. The same holds true across the Pacific: > Chili peppers spread to Asia through their introduction by Portuguese traders, who—aware of their trade value and resemblance to the spiciness of black pepper—promoted their commerce in the Asian spice trade routes.[10][14][15] They were introduced in India by the Portuguese towards the end of the 16th century.[16] In 21st-century Asian cuisine, chili peppers are commonly used across many regions.[17][18] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A... All the 'traditionally' hot dishes of India and Thailand that have chili peppers are post-1492. I think that after a few hundred years it's okay to call the cuisine 'traditional'. See Mann's book for some more on this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World_Columbus_Created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
- ahzhou 4y agoI’ve always considered traditional food to be based on generation. If your grandparents grew up eating it, it’s traditional. Many foods comes from cultural cross-pollination.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoThere's an article on the US origins of pizza at https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/pizza-isnt-italian https://eccentricculinary.substack.com/p/pizza-isnt-italian.
- ardit33 4y agoThat article is very annoying as it is anchoring into silly technicalities. Yes, modern pizza came from Napoli and Italy (as a unified country) didn't even exist back then. But it is a complete sillyness not saying modern pizza is not Italian. "Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian. Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really. "
- calimoro78 4y agoEven in Italy we say Italian pizza and Neapolitan pizza are distinct concepts. Sicilian pizza too, to be clear. Italian pizza definitely comes from the export of Neapolitan pizza. Oh wait, then there is Roman-style pizza! It's very nuanced.
- pazimzadeh 4y agoSome people think that it was Marco Polo's attempt to reconstruct a Chinese dish which led to a Neapolitan chef inventing pizza. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_surrounding_the_invention_of_pizza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cong_you_bing#Chinese_legend_s...
- jaclaz 4y agoNot really-really (pizza with the same ingredients existed before, and it was just renamed as Margherita): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29132535 What is true is that pizza was common only in the south of Italy, but what made it more common in the north (I would say much later, in the '60's) was the flux of people relocating from the south to the north in those years.
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- wnevets 4y agoMy favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention.
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- taeric 4y agoThis generalizes more than you'd think. $(Foreign food) in $(Country) is largely an invention of $(Country) This has changed with modern travel. But it surprises me how much of what people believe about food is basically propaganda. At best.
- pcurve 4y agolol... That's part true. But I wouldn't use "almost entirely"... Egg foo young, chow mein, fried rice, lo mein, and many other items are real Chinese dishes also found in China. Sure, ingredients have been localized... but no more so than localization that also take place elsewhere. :)
- csa 4y ago> My favorite example of this kind of thing is Chinese food in America. Its almost entirely an American invention. It depends on where you are and what you order. I live in California. We definitely have Americanized chinese food here, but we can also easily get authentic tasting: - dim sum of various types - mapo tofu - kungpao/gongbao chicken - twice cooked pork - scallion pancakes - Peking duck - noodles of various types The list could go on. I’ve also had some mind-blowingly good Cantonese food in NYC and Philly.
- simonsarris 4y agoEven then, mapo and kungpao often contain a lot of chilis, which came from the Americas via the Portuguese. So it's not untouched by American (continent) influence, just much earlier.
- wnevets 4y agoWhat percentage of this menu [1] would you say is tradition Chinese food? [1] https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden-/ https://www.restaurantji.com/pa/philadelphia/szechuan-garden...
- smcl 4y agoThe fact that food and drink evolve over time isn't too controversial. Beer, for example, evolved from having darker "ale" being more popular, to lighter lager/pilsner/ležák being the predominant type. I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza, but that we should maybe more widely embrace the other types if we like them. To be honest I hadn't encountered a "pizza bianca" 'til I left the UK, and I would've taken some convincing it wasn't some weirdo UK thing if I encountered it there :D
- mcv 4y agoI suspect the evolution of beer is quite a bit more complex than that. Beers have been brewed from a wide variety of grains, and the colour was mostly determined by what exactly they used. Subtle mixes are a fairly recent thing, and while the mass market beers are usually pale, darker beers are still very popular too. > I don't think this means the tomato-based modern pizza is less of a pizza Quite the contrary, it's more of a pizza. I've seen pizza bianca in my supermarket. I do wonder, if you don't put tomato sauce on it, what's the fundamental difference between a pizza bianca and a flammkuchen?
- smcl 4y agoIt definitely is more complex than that but currently the most popular type of beer now was not the original beer (or was not among the first beers, certainly not until the 1800s) and is relatively modern.
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoThe mediocre lager/pilsner dominance is pretty interesting, because it started off as the premium product. Then it got so popular it dominated the market, became the default, and then the older less-premium products ended up specializing into premium/luxury products. A similar thing happened to tequila as opposed to other mezcals.
- smcl 4y agoActually I didn't reference any decline in quality but in some locales, like Scotland where I'm from, you're absolutely right. Tennent's lager is now the most popular, it is not good. Where I am currently the most popular beer is between two lagers/ležáky - in western Czech Republic ("Bohemia" aka Čechy) the most popular beer is Pilsner Urquell, and in Moravia, where I live, it's Radegast - both higher quality beers. So it depends, but occasionally where I live allows me a very minor flex of "I can walk into most pubs and get spectacular ležák :)
- dariusj18 4y agoHeard a pretty good interview with this author https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-pizza/ https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-pizza/
- A_D_E_P_T 4y ago>Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. They mention in the article that, etymologically, pizza may be derived from "pita" -- the still ubiquitous term for a round flatbread.
- jakupovic 4y agoGrowing up 'pita' was rolled dough stuffed with various ingredients, like meat and onions or cheese, technically burek and sirnica or pita :). Pretty close geographically to Italy, couple hundred miles flying distance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6rek
- bitwize 4y agoI'm to understand as well that the basis for modern pizza was one created in the late 19th century, based on the colors of the new Italian flag: red (tomato sauce), white (cheese), and green (spinach, I believe).
- occamrazor 4y agoThe green on pizza Margherita is basil.
- fsckboy 4y agothe green is basil, it was called the Margherita pizza after Queen Margherita. but we're talking about simple ingredients and flavors that were already being put together in various ways.
- bigbillheck 4y ago> Turns out that in the middle ages, pizza was just round bread. Not remotely resembling anything we today would consider pizza. "None pizza, left beef"?
- cjpearson 4y agoWas pizza popular in America prior to WW2? I recently read an article [0] from 1949 that was written as if most Americans wouldn't be familiar with it. Maybe it was a regional thing and those soldiers were from an immigrant neighborhood? [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/643861/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1949/10/pizza/6...
- nerdix 4y agoMy dad was born in the 50s in a small southern town. He didnt learn about pizza until the 60s. My great uncle moved to Queens and came back home to visit with his kids one day. The kids asked my father "Where is the pizza place here?" to which my father replied: "What's pizza?". I think most immigrant origin foods start in a big city. Then migrates to smaller cities in the same region to other big cities across the country. Only after that will it go "nationwide". And it usually takes a popular chain to make it happen (Chinese being an exception. It was everywhere before Panda Express and Pf Chang's)
- banashark 4y agoI always enjoy articles about commonly accepted traditions/facts that turn out to be relatively modern inventions. Similarly with the counterpart of ideas that seem like modern concepts, but have been practiced much further back than I had anticipated.
- dendrite9 4y ago"And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture" My initial thought is considering how much modern Italian food was meant as a way to unite the various regions, I'm not sure he wants the outcome that may come with it. I always found it interesting to hear comments about people from other regions of Italy by commenting on how/what they eat. Like the rice eaters in the North. I keep meaning to read this book "Gastronativism" but I haven't gotten around to ordering it http://cup.columbia.edu/book/gastronativism/9780231202077 http://cup.columbia.edu/book/gastronativism/9780231202077 "Fabio Parasecoli identifies and defines the phenomenon of “gastronativism,” the ideological use of food to advance ideas about who belongs to a community and who does not. As globalization and neoliberalism have transformed food systems, people have responded by seeking to return to their roots. Many have embraced local ingredients and notions of cultural heritage, but this impulse can play into the hands of nationalist and xenophobic political projects. Such movements draw on the strong emotions connected with eating to stoke resentment and contempt for other people and cultures."
- fmajid 4y agoRoland Barthes had an interesting take on the semiology of steak-frites in his book Mythologies.
- Scubabear68 4y agoI love the last paragraph of this article: “In the same house, in the 1980s, Nonna Fiore once served some English guests lasagna, per my uncle’s request. The lasagna was cooked from frozen, her story goes. Life was busy and, anyway, she had no qualms about serving a supermarket ready meal; people could only dream of such a luxury during the war. None of the guests suspected that she hadn’t made it from scratch and everyone was delighted, her Italian son included. She reminds me of this, then looks up at me and winks”.
- karaterobot 4y agoI'm skeptical whenever someone talks about traditional national food as opposed to traditional regional food. Seems like the further back you go, the less likely you are to find a unified food culture (or any culture really) across a nation of significant size. Even in the U.S., it's much more meaningful to talk about traditional midwest cuisine, or traditional southern cuisine, or traditional northeast cuisine than it is to talk about "traditional American food", because people in those places had access to different ingredients and had much more distinct cultures, until recently. This is a crude oversimplification, but in general I think cuisine can be either traditional, or national, but rarely both.
- qorrect 4y agoI'm picturing midwest cuisine as hot dogs with canned cheese.
- bombcar 4y agoYou're forgetting the dishtopass and the hotdish.
- earthling8118 4y agoThat sounds a little too Minnesotan to be called Midwest
- memalign 4y agoApple butter with fritters, biscuits and gravy, fried bologna, sugar cream pie. At state fairs: battered and fried everything: oreos, snickers, pickles, Twinkies… Not healthy but it is delicious!
- robofanatic 4y agoCompletely agree. I am Indian and grew up in a rural area of a western state and I had never heard of chicken tikka masala or saag paneer or any of the typical Punjabi dishes you get in an Indian restaurant outside of India, until I was in my 20s when we moved to a large city.
- dariusj18 4y ago> he jokes he should only leave his house “with personal security guards, like Salman Rushdie” Given what I know of Italian food culture, this is only slight exaggeration.
- Kon-Peki 4y agoI mean, he says that authentic parmesan cheese can be found in Wisconsin and not Italy. That's a really brave man!
- panabee 4y agosynthesizing this article with one from history.com [1], it seems accurate to say the modern pizza was invented by italy but popularized by america. key passage from history.com === Queen Margherita’s blessing could have been the start of an Italy-wide pizza craze. But pizza would remain little known in Italy beyond Naples’ borders until the 1940s. An ocean away, though, immigrants to the United States from Naples were replicating their trusty, crusty pizzas in New York and other American cities, including Trenton, New Haven, Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. The Neapolitans were coming for factory jobs, as did millions of Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they weren’t seeking to make a culinary statement. But relatively quickly, the flavors and aromas of pizza began to intrigue non-Neapolitans and non-Italians. === [1] https://www.history.com/news/a-slice-of-history-pizza-through-the-ages https://www.history.com/news/a-slice-of-history-pizza-throug...
- fsckboy 4y agoI've had pizza in italy, it's very much each person orders their own and eats it with a knife and fork, it's a restaurant, experience. I think this meshes with something I've read, that there's an additional factor in the American links in these food chains, in that America into the 20th century was simultaneously "inventing" the trend toward portable foods, eating on the go, simple lunches. Many europeans even today take 2 hours for sitdown lunch (with sometimes 1/2 of that for a nap). The hot dog, the hamburger, the sandwich, etc. were not distinctly American, but eating them for lunch was. In the US the "work more and strive" culture looked for foods that were all-in-one, like slices of pizza, and the consumers were from a mix of origins so there was much less of a "it's not done this way" culture to fight against.
- hardwaregeek 4y agoChinese food is an interesting case too. For one, it's a moving target. Stuff like mala xiang guo (dry hot pot), skewer hot pot, boba, and so on are all modern inventions. And of course, these modern inventions were borne out of experimentation and fun ideas. What if we took hot pot base and made a stir fry out of it? What if we took grilling skewers and dumped them in hot pot? What if we took tea and added tapioca pudding? So why bother with an obsession on authenticity that requires slavish reproduction of how things are done in the old country? With that said, I do think there's something to be said about keeping the provenance of ingredients and flavor. I don't think you need to make mapo tofu exactly how they make it in Chengdu, but it might be good to understand the core ideas of mala (spicy-tingly flavor) or the importance of doubanjiang (fermented chili bean paste). Likewise there's something to be said about Italian food's focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients.
- tpmx 4y agoI mean, it's like 8 separate main cousines. Not all of them awesome.
- ProfessorLayton 4y agoA lot of the key ingredients in various cuisines came from what's now known as Mexico, and the Americas in general: - Tomatoes (Italian food) - Chilies (A ton of asian food) - Avocados - Corn - Cacao (Swiss chocolate) - Vanilla - Potatoes It's no surprise that a lot of dishes are not truly "authentic" (Whatever that means).
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- christkv 4y agoYeah what we think of spicy Asian dishes existed some time after the 16th century as the Europeans brought chilies with them eastwards. Funny thing is that it did not really get broad adoption in Europe.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago> Cacao (Swiss chocolate) It was used to flavor drinks for hundreds/thousands of years in the Americas. But chocolate in a solid form suitable for baking is a European invention; and bars/pieces of chocolate that you would eat as a standalone item are from the UK, if I'm not mistaken.
- christkv 4y agoChilis in Indian and Chinese cousins did not arrive until the 16th century. Before that the spicy spice to use was black pepper which had enormous trade value.
- derbOac 4y agoThis is an interesting read. I had read some of it before but not all of it. This reminds me of the gongfu method of tea preparation, which acquired a sort of reputation of being the "authentic" means of tea making in certain circles but turns out to be fairly modern outside of a specific region of China. Like the author interviewed in the piece, Lawrence Zhang has received a certain amount of animosity for writing about it (https://marshaln.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GFC1601_06_Zhang-3.pdf https://marshaln.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GFC1601_06_Z...).
- bazoom42 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect
- bazoom42 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect “In religious studies and sociology, the pizza effect is the phenomenon of elements of a nation's or people's culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-exported to their culture of origin”
- 2-718-281-828 4y agowhy is italian supermarket wine in the 5 to 20 euro range so crappy? big mystery. by now i just won't buy it anymore. french, spanish, argentinian, south african, australian, ... but f italian wine. also as a german i disregard italian coffee culture as a sharade. i want a proper cup of coffee to drink. not this tiny cup or variations on it. german style filter coffee, heck, even drip coffee, with a sip of milk and some sugar beats all that crafty nonsense any time of the day. italian restaurants are usually always providing a bad experience. the waiters are stuck up or even down right arrogant pricks. any alternative is preferential. italian olive oil. well-documented [1] trash. go for greek. i give them pasta science, tomato sauce and i love making pizza socially. 1: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/lebensmittelskandal-die-schmierigen-geschaefte-der-olivenoel-mafia-a-805678.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/lebensmittelskanda...
- pastacacioepepe 4y ago> italian olive oil. well-documented [1] trash. go for greek lol. If you consider greek oil a valid substitute then you've never tasted actual italian oil. Some exported italian oil was altered by mafia, so you stop using it altogether? What should we do with your cars after the diesel scandal then? > italian restaurants are usually always providing a bad experience. the waiters are stuck up or even down right arrogant pricks. any alternative is preferential. Tourist traps generally are. You have to be a pretty naive tourist to fall for it tho, there's plenty of great restaurants with great service. German waiters on the other hand are almost always unfriendly and restaurants close way too early in the evening.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agowell, i'm glad we at least agree about the coffee
- pastacacioepepe 4y agoWe do, I learned to enjoy the long, watery filter coffee Germans/Austrians like and I think italian espresso is overrated. Still espresso is my favorite after lunch, it works well as a digestive. Try Ligurian or Tuscanian fresh olive oil if you can, you'll be surprised how different it is from the classic mediterranean oil and even from the mixed italian oil you find usually abroad.