Category: Living in Italy

Introduction

Italians love food. This might seem a bit of a “bear shits in the woods” statement but I really want to impress on you what this means on a daily basis. You can’t seem to avoid talking about food with Italians at some point. Even Italian idioms and proverbs are mostly based on eating and drinking. The greatest thing about Italy is that you can buy good food everywhere. Step into any café, bar or restaurant and you will eat something freshly prepared, simple and good. Eating out is something that happens at least once a week because it’s relatively cheap, given the quality of the food available. There are multiple butchers, grocers, fishmongers, Pasticceria (cake and pastries shops), Sfogline (handmade pasta shops), Pane (bread shops) Salumeria (cured and cooked meats and cheeses) as well as markets and various speciality food shops over and above those.

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Italians simply wouldn’t stand for it if great produce became so unaffordable as to be elitist, but also recognise the value (and cost) of food produced slowly with skill, care and tradition and are willing to pay more money for it. As Italy has retained its specialist food outlets and market shopping culture people tend to eat seasonally and locally so food miles are largely irrelevant. It’s hard to buy out of season here. If you want to eat sausages from Sicily you go to Sicily. In western countries we can have a lot of food waste because people want the premium cuts, but not the other meat that is left once they are removed which has led to the rise of “Nose to tail” eating. In Italy they eat most of the animals they butcher. They have built food industries around the inventive and delicious ways they transform the less preferred parts such as the Florentine speciality Lampredotto (cow’s stomach sandwich) etc.

Often people we meet are really surprised we have moved here. People usually move away to places like the UK for work and to progress their careers. This reversal makes them curious. When we say “for the food” they spread their arms warmly, smiling and nodding because it’s obvious and it makes sense to them. Even people who have initially seemed hostile melt when they know we are interested in their food. They know they have great food. They will start advising you on what’s best to eat, where and when. They want to know what you have eaten already, where and what you thought.

If we have to generalise* and for reasons of space and humour we are going to, Italians are hyper regional. Everyone you meet is likely to tell you where they are from, as in which specific part they were born in as soon as tell you their name, because in Italy it’s a really important part of your identity. Tied to the regional identity is a sense of pride about whatever food that region produces for example a Neapolitan talking about pizza is an obvious one, but they will detail the dough, the mozzarella and the tomatoes. You will get the same from Florentine talking about beef steak, bread and olive oil and Bolognese talking about tortelloni, or tagliatelle or Ragu etc.

A very brief history of Italy

To put this into some context you need to remember that Italy has only existed as a country since 1861, the same year in which “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens was released in book form, HMS Warrior the first completely iron ocean going ship was launched, Abraham Lincoln became US President and the American Civil war started (84 years after the start of the American war of independence) and Tsar Alexandra emancipated Russian serfs. Before this time Italy was a set of city states which occupied the same peninsula, often at war with each other and many of which were variously occupied by foreign powers and empires. Even in 1861 not all the city states joined immediately with some joining after 1918 when Italy defeated Austro-Hungary in WW1. While others like Piedmont were broken up with Nice given to France in return for their military support. San Marino still hasn’t joined and retains its independent status.

The result is that those regional identities and traditions are very strong and many people speak the dialect of their home region with some older people only able to speak dialect and not modern Italian at all. This accentuates the things that the regions have in common as part of a communal identity; such as their dedication to their food. Much of the history of Italy that we know is centred on the History of the Roman empire, the Holy Roman Empire (dissolved 1906) and the Roman Catholic church or the powerful families such as the Medici’s who ruled city states, with the rest of what is now Italy only being included in historical reports as geographical conquests by various others. ‘Italian Unification’ (En.wikipedia.org, 2019)

Regionality and food

Each region has a set of speciality products because of the unique geographical and agricultural features of that area. I’ve been told that the Island of Sardinia, contrary to what you might imagine, does not enjoy a coast that is particularly good for fish, except in one specific area. However, it is quite mountainous so it’s famous for its sheep products. Apparently, Bologna does not have olive oil because all the olive trees on the surrounding hills were killed in an unusually prolonged spell of very cold weather a couple of hundred years ago. The oil produced had not been great whereas the olive oil in nearby Tuscany is so instead of replacing the olive trees they planted Sangiovese (red) and Pignoletto (white) grape vines to create the wines which the region is now famous for and used butter for cooking.

As well as being proud of their home regions food, Italians have extensive knowledge about the produce from every region and understand where the best examples of each kind of food can be found and when it is at its best, by breed, by species and by season. They believe in the “terroir” of food. Someone gave me the example of a Neapolitan chef making pizza at a high end place in New York who had taken to shipping the pizza ingredients from Naples to New York, everything from the flour and water to the tomatoes, mozzarella and herbs in an effort to get the pizza to taste as good as it does at home. It still did not taste right so he bought a machine to recreate the exact humidity too because it all matters.

Bologna is in the region called Emilia Romagna, but this is comprised of two regions that have traditionally fought each other, so you hear a lot of arguments about where Emilia ends and Romagna begins depending on with which one your allegiances lie. Emilians don’t rate piadine as these are Romangnola, but swear by crescente, which to the less discerning eye are incredibly similar flat breads you fold food into. Generally, I have found that when I am recommended something as the best tomato variety for a summer salad with mozzarella and basil everyone will agree where you go to get that tomato. There is a generosity in recognising the superiority of another area’s product e.g.  the Bolognese for example will all happily agree that they are rubbish at any other types of bread and recommend the bread of other regions.

Food fight

Of course, with this much everyday passion and knowledge about food for Italians they don’t really understand that this is not usual for everyone or why we make mistakes with their food. Part of the problem for the rest of us is that our cookbooks and TV chefs have continued to provide inauthentic recipes for Anglicised or Americanised versions of dishes, but kept the Italian names or given them Italian names that they don’t deserve or suggested that they are somehow Italian when they aren’t. No one has any issues with adapting dishes, but when you have spent centuries cultivating your produce and the resulting dishes to their optimum its galling to have someone present something entirely other and say it’s the same thing. We don’t have that same kind of repeatable food culture, ours is much more of a make do and mend approach to cooking. If I can’t find what I need for the dish or don’t have what’s on the list, I will substitute it for something else. That’s fine, it makes sense, who hasn’t done that, but it’s a different dish. Bearing in mind most Italian dishes are very simple and only involve a small number of ingredients, any substitution is a significant change.  Perhaps we should take more credit for our inventiveness and give our dishes new names. If we really feel the need we can always say Inspired by and then name the dish we didn’t quite make. While it’s true a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, you would be annoyed if you paid for a dozen red roses and some badly sprayed daffs turned up.

“Carbonara is not an opinion”

Massimo (Italians mad at food)

An example of this food adaptation is “Spaghetti Bolognaise”. This dish is neither Italian nor from Bologna. Italian people even tell me that it doesn’t exist. Why, I hear you ask? Firstly, it uses spaghetti, right there in the name. Spaghetti is a dried pasta from further south and does not contain egg. The Bolognese specialise in fresh egg pasta such as tagliatelle or stuffed egg pastas like tortelloni and tortellini. Everybody knows spaghetti is not from Bologna. Secondly, the sauce is not one that Italians recognise. There is a Bolognese meat sauce called Ragù. Indeed, a traditional Bolognese dish is Tagliatelle alla Ragù. Ragù is not the same as the meat sauce in most of the “Spaghetti Bolognaise” recipes you see in UK and US cookbooks and definitely not related to anything you can buy in a jar. It is often made from veal and pork rather than beef mince and is closer to a kind of stew. So even if the Bolognese sauce being referred to was Ragù, there is no way it would be served with spaghetti. There are restaurants in Bologna (and elsewhere in Italy) that cater to the tourists’ insatiable enthusiasm for an “authentic spaghetti Bolognaise” by putting it on their menus and, like the locals, we avoid those places.

 “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

Miles Kington

Italians are proud of their pizza too and something which comes up in my classes all the time is putting pineapple on pizza. They think this is disgusting and want me to confirm if it is true that other countries do this or not because they are not sure if it’s a kind of urban myth. There are only a handful of truly original pizzas which includes the margherita and the marinara. This has been extended to include other Italian products such as salsiccia and friarelli (sausage and a kind of broccoli), the four cheese and four seasons pizzas etc. However, they have not extended into adding any non-Italian foods such as Pineapple. In fact, many will tell you they never have fruit on pizza, but it is possible they don’t recognise the fig as a fruit (tomatoes not withstanding).

At other times the pitfalls can be harder to miss for a non-native. The other day I was running a conversation class, where a small group of English language students are given a topic to discuss in English, when as usual we moved onto food. They were trying to describe something called Arrosticini to me, which in my defence they described as meat on sticks cooked over a flame, so I said innocently “Ok, like a kebab” and wrote Shish kebab on the board. There was a collective sharp intake of breath followed by some vigorous head shaking and furious declarations that these were not the same at all. One woman said to me “You must not say that again. It is not like a kebab. People will be offended”. I obviously erased the words and moved the conversation on, hoping that they were writing it off as my English ignorance about the culinary world. I know people in England can get upset about the correct content of a Cornish pasty (as well as the crimp), or whether you should put cream or jam on a scone first, but these people are few and far between, so the depth of the reaction I caused came as quite a surprise. Anyway, for the uninitiated arrosticini is meat or fish and vegetables on a skewer and then cooked over flame, which as “any fule kno” is not like a kebab at all, ok?

If you would like more information on how we get Italian food wrong or how passionate they are about it there is a Facebook account for that: Italians mad at food

Artisanal food production and modern life

You only need to go to nearby places like Parma (Parma Ham and Parmesan cheese) and Modena (Balsamic vinegar) to see that tradition as well as place is a big part of the Italian attitude towards food. Often eschewing modern production methods which might increase yields but would damage quality the artisanal nature of the product is respected. It is the price required for the quality of the resulting product. Processes and recipes largely unchanged for generations. Handmade pasta is the preserve of the Nonna, with pretty much everyone telling you about their memories of their Nonna making pasta by hand for special occasions, like Christmas and Easter (something which is dying out if you are to believe www.pastagrannies.com).  Pasta is made on a more commercial scale now in shops full of experienced Sfogline hand rolling, cutting and stuffing pasta to fill seasonal orders. The artisan is a figure revered in Italy and while modern life is eroding this to some extent it is still very much in evidence in all aspects of Italian life. Apparently people used to cook at home every night and then buy food at the weekend because they were busy, now they buy ready meals or eat out in the week because they are busy with work and only cook at the weekends because then they have more time.

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It is not just in terms of when they cook and who is cooking that Italians attitude to food is changing. I noted that the students in my school were very excited because a KFC had just opened. Now in Bologna this may have had a little extra frisson because Chicken is not a local speciality so it isn’t on every menu and not all of the city super markets (express supermarkets) sell whole chicken or unprocessed chicken, but it might be because these are brands they have grown up with in the cinema or on TV but didn’t have. Certainly, the McDonalds I pass by twice a day in the centre of Bologna is depressingly full. I hope they know that is not how good burgers should taste.It is not just in terms of when they cook and who is cooking that Italians attitude to food is changing. I noted that the students in my school were very excited because a KFC had just opened. Now in Bologna this may have had a little extra frisson because Chicken is not a local speciality so it isn’t on every menu and not all of the city super markets (express supermarkets) sell whole chicken or unprocessed chicken, but it might be because these are brands they have grown up with in the cinema or on TV but didn’t have. Certainly, the McDonalds I pass by twice a day in the centre of Bologna is depressingly full. I hope they know that is not how good burgers should taste.

I heard that Starbucks was going to open a branch in Bologna and it made me sad. Italy. All of Italy, everywhere. Makes excellent coffee. An espresso in an artisanal coffee place where you can pick your beans costs £1.20. A perfect cappuccino £1.70. I have never had a Starbucks that was a patch on any coffee I ever had in Italy, although to be fair my Starbucks experience is limited to two branches. However, I was heartened when I spoke to someone in one of my business groups and he explained that, for them, Starbucks was not about the coffee. It was somewhere to hang out, somewhere to have a meeting. In Italian coffee bars you go to get an espresso, drink it and leave. Customers are rarely in the shop for longer than it takes to eat a brioche. Starbucks would not replace Italian coffee bars but did offer something else.

Two students were completing an activity where they had to discuss the available options on their pre-printed hand outs and decide where to go for dinner. At the end of the activity they revealed they had picked the fast food restaurant. I explained that with all the great produce and food in Bologna I was surprised and disappointed. They argued that they had wanted to go to the seafood restaurant, but fish is expensive and they were only students. Then they pointed out that there wasn’t any other choice as there wasn’t an Italian restaurant on the list!

Italians and new food ideas

There is a side effect from all this history and local food pride that we had not expected but that probably was inevitable. Italians can appear unadventurous when it comes to food. Don’t let me be misunderstood, they will eat every single bit of the pig, tripe is a speciality of the beef region (Firenze), meats are often cured not cooked, some fish and meat are best served raw, etc. Italians are not squeamish about food, but they know which of their foods go together and so the idea of trying anything outside of their, as I already detailed, encyclopaedic knowledge of food seems unnecessary. This isn’t to say that every family doesn’t have their own secret nonna recipe for the food of their region, but it will be variation on process and possibly varieties rather than key ingredients.

There are some Chinese restaurants, there is in increase in appetite for Sushi (often served by Chinese restaurants) and now Mexican too. Mexican might seem odd in this context but given that a fajita or burrito is not that dissimilar to a piadine, being that it is round flat bread with something folded into it, is not all that surprising. Aside from the occasional Arabic Kebab shop with the trademark Doner slowly turning behind the counter, and the usual usurping fast food chains, these are the only foreign food establishments you are likely to find with any regularity. Most of the Italians I have spoken to in Bologna have eaten in one or all of these and enjoy them however, it must be stressed that Bologna is a famously cosmopolitan University city so there is possible more appetite for opening up to new cultures and food ideas here than in other parts of Italy.

Italy is not preserved in aspic, it has not been cut off from the rest of the world for generations, they just don’t really think of food outside of what they are familiar with. There is a certainty that this is the way to do it. They are really good at what they do and it leads them to produce some of the best products in the world, but this rigidity to what can be eaten with what and when can also seem to be its limitation. For example, there is a three Michelin starred restaurant in Modena, called Osteria Francescana with an Italian chef Massimo Bottura, who has also worked in the US. He had upset the locals of Modena by changing Italian classics for example by producing a pesto recipe that does not use pine nuts. While he is happy to celebrate and present the fabulous food and produce of Italy, he is also not afraid to change and challenge, which has not always earned him fans here. However, I note that his name often comes up in class as an example of the international recognition and acclaim for Italian food and, especially amongst the young professionals, the restaurant is suggested as a goal for a once in a lifetime food experience.

Italians and the future

To sum up there is a strong, embedded and enviable food culture that honours and promotes the history, geography and skill of quality food production and which generates an unprecedented number of unique, fantastic products. Its value is passionately felt at all levels by Italians as a source of regional and national pride. It’s possible that the rigidity which has preserved these processes, skills and ideas about food could also stifle creativity and innovation. This could be especially problematic given the current socio-economic situation, Trump’s EU trade tariffs and the environmental impacts of global warming on the conditions that allow some of these products to be produced here. Each of these issues could be incredibly damaging for the diversity and volume of production. However, it should be remembered that Italians have been cultivating their produce in largely the same way for centuries, despite numerous wars, the rise and fall of empires, occupations and invasions, floods and droughts. It might be a different kind of challenge but with passion for food being part of the Italian identity, I think they got this.

*disclaimer: this article also includes suggestions, anecdotes and explanations repeated verbatim that may not have any bearing on reality and with which other Italians will strongly disagree.

References

‘Italian Unification’ (En.wikipedia.org, 2019) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_unification#Background> accessed 29 November 2019