by Marla Gulley, Italian Cuisine Expert for the Menuism Italian Food Blog
When you think about Italian food, the first foods that spring to mind might be pizza, pasta, Parmesan, or gelato, coffee and maybe even bread and olive oil. You certainly wouldn't be wrong. However, the long list of Italian food stretches far beyond these particular boundaries to include risotto, polenta, fish and meats, along with copious varieties of salami, cured meats and cheeses, with vegetables certainly not forgotten. When you step off the plane with phrase book clutched tightly in hand, Italian cuisine and culture may reveal a few startling surprises. What we Americans know and love in the US as classic Italian food is not necessarily what you find being served in Italy. I am of the opinion that there is no such thing as "wrong"; it's just that these "classic" dishes have evolved and transformed themselves to local ingredients and tastes, some not even originating in Italy.
Take Caesar salad. This dish's origins are in dispute, although it seems to have been created by an immigrant Italian restaurateur with restaurants in Mexico and the U.S. Although Caesar salad uses classic Italian ingredients, you won't be finding it on any menu in Italy.
Keep in mind that Italy has, just this past year, celebrated 150 years of united togetherness. Italians tend to identify themselves first from their region before identifying themselves as Italians. Americans, used to eating the wide range of Italy's national cuisine, will be surprised at how very regional Italian cuisine can be. Finding particular dishes and ingredients that one thinks of as being quintessentially Italian, may be extremely challenging because they may actually be quintessentially Sicilian, Roman, Tuscan, Sardinian, Piemontese and so on, and thus not offered where you happen to be dining.
What unites Italians, north and south, is a passion for genuine food, simply prepared, allowing the natural flavor to shine through. Emphasis is on quality, not quantity, with the focus on balancing flavors to harmonize or contrast as desired.
There are some differences that might surprise you.
On that note, I will leave you to digest my initial musings on Italian food culture and encourage you to join me again in the weeks to come, as we explore the richly varied mosaic that is the cuisine of Italy.
Related Links from the Menuism Italian Food Blog:
• The History of the Pizza
• 10 Things to Know About Pasta
• 10 Things to Know About Olive Oil
Marla Gulley Roncaglia is an American expat living in the Italian Alps. Marla is an accomplished pastry chef, and a master at high-altitude baking. She and her husband Fabrizio (who has also worked as a chef) run a bed and breakfast named Bella Baita ("beautiful mountain house"), where they are active supporters of the slow food movement.
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Let mr guess. It's not cooked by Mexicans!
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Sicilian food, on the other hand, is delicious.
The food was the most disappointing. The hard crusty dried small slices of bread topped with chopped tomatoes and olive oil just didn't cut it for me.
Florence and Venice were the same. However, I discovered Taramasu! I would have starved to death having experienced some really bad food. It looked good, I was starving, so I gave it a try & it was the most delicous thing I have ever eaten. I've ordered it here in the US and it doesn't hold a candle to the way the Italians make it. I couldn't wait to try the spaghetti and it came up as fast as it went down when I noticed after my first big bite that there were octupus in the spaghetti.
AND LOTS OF THEM.
We were served course after course of pastas, served by our waiter from a huge bowl and thrown onto our plates, not spooned, actually thrown onto our plates.
Many courses but all tasted the same!! Wine, wine and more wine and I'm not a lover of bitter wine (sorry) so I ordered a beer! Yum warm beer, just not what I was expecting. I would have paid 10.00 for a cold glass of American beer. Would I tour Italy again? In a heart beat.
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Mama Leone's in New York was the evil stepmother of The Olive Garden -- bad food served to people who didn't know the difference.
I do think that there are some aspects of the traditional Italian food culture - such as the emphasis on fresh, high quality ingredients, the love of good food in general, preparing dishes so that individual flavors really stand out, and so on - that we can say are objectively better than much of what characterizes the food culture of America, at least for much of the 20th century. But this generalization can be taken only just so far. Italians obviously don't have unanimously refined taste, or else the Slow Food movement would not have evolved in Italy specifically in reaction to the enormous popularity of McDonald's over there, and parliamentarians in Rome would not have had to lobby vigorously to keep Pizza Hut out of their country.
I mention these issues because I often detect in these discussions a fair amount of American self-loathing and over-idealization of Western Europe as some sort of culinary Holy Land.
Mama Leone's was actually at one time quite the fancy place to eat; it kind of went downhill after Restaurant Associates Industries bought it in 1959, and it turned into something more akin to an Olive Garden (although perhaps not as brazenly déclassé) than to anything you'd actually find in Italy. After having closed in the eighties and then re-opened in a different location, it finally closed for good in 1994.
It was nothing to brag about and it was a fast meal and nothing like what an Italian meal that was mentioned as far as leisurely. We felt rushed. The food wasn't bad though.
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http://casa-giardino.blogspot.com/2012/04/pizza-night.html