About 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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'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.
I love the last paragraph of this article:<p>“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”.
Chinese 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?<p>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.
I 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.
A lot of the key ingredients in various cuisines came from what's now known as Mexico, and the Americas in general:<p>- Tomatoes (Italian food)<p>- Chilies (A ton of asian food)<p>- Avocados<p>- Corn<p>- Cacao (Swiss chocolate)<p>- Vanilla<p>- Potatoes<p>It's no surprise that a lot of dishes are not truly "authentic" (Whatever that means).
This is an interesting read. I had read some of it before but not all of it.<p>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.<p>Like the author interviewed in the piece, Lawrence Zhang has received a certain amount of animosity for writing about it (<a href="https://marshaln.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GFC1601_06_Zhang-3.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://marshaln.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GFC1601_06_Z...</a>).
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect</a><p>“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”
> he jokes he should only leave his house “with personal security guards, like Salman Rushdie”<p>Given what I know of Italian food culture, this is only slight exaggeration.
synthesizing this article with one from history.com [1], it seems accurate to say the modern pizza was invented by italy but popularized by america.<p>key passage from history.com<p>===<p>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.<p>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.<p>===<p>[1] <a href="https://www.history.com/news/a-slice-of-history-pizza-through-the-ages" rel="nofollow">https://www.history.com/news/a-slice-of-history-pizza-throug...</a>
Chilis 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.
"And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture"<p>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.<p>I keep meaning to read this book "Gastronativism" but I haven't gotten around to ordering it
<a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/gastronativism/9780231202077" rel="nofollow">http://cup.columbia.edu/book/gastronativism/9780231202077</a><p>"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."
why 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.<p>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.<p>italian restaurants are usually always providing a bad experience. the waiters are stuck up or even down right arrogant pricks. any alternative is preferential.<p>italian olive oil. well-documented [1] trash. go for greek.<p>i give them pasta science, tomato sauce and i love making pizza socially.<p>1: <a href="https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/lebensmittelskandal-die-schmierigen-geschaefte-der-olivenoel-mafia-a-805678.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/lebensmittelskanda...</a>