What's cooking? – Part 1 – Italy

The Wannabe Food Police of the World

Welcome back, dear old and new subscribers, and Fijne Koningsdag (Happy King’s Day) 🇳🇱 👑 🧡 🦁 to my Dutch readers! This is part 1 of a series of two articles, the second of which will published in 15 days, whereas next Saturday, May 3rd, the new installment of Operation White Birch will land in your email inboxes, stay tuned!

Operation White Birch – Part 1

Brace yourselves because, sooner or later, it was bound to happen – I'm Italian and I'm going to write about food. I can already picture you rolling your eyes: “Here we go. 🙄 She's going to blather about how wrong it is to put pineapple on pizza, or cheese on fish, or have cappuccino after 8:30 AM, as if she were the chief kitchen legislator of the world.”

I admit that, when it comes to pizza, I'm not adventurous at all, and always choose Margherita with its holy trinity of basil, tomato, mozzarella. If I feel iconoclastic, I go for tuna and onions, and that's pretty much it. No Hawaii (ham and pineapple) heresy for me, but who am I to deny it to you, if that's your thing? By all means, kids, eat, drink and be merry, live long and prosper!

You Shall Have No Other Pizzas Before Me: pizza Margherita

I owe the concept for this post to my subscriber – and dare I say friend? – Tim Baynes, who writes (and draws) a fantastic Substack, and inspired in me the idea of exploring the various differences between the country I used to live in the past, and the one I'm currently delighting with my presence.

But fear not! This is neither the Ten Commandments of Italian Cuisine, nor a snubbing of all the other food cultures of the world. The former is beyond my reach, while the latter is a sin that some of my fellow countrymates are guilty of, and we don't even have to pass Italy's national borders to find evidence of this.

I still cringe when I remember an old episode of Jamie's Italy, in which a bunch of ignorant oafs, in the central Marche region, sneered and were incensed at Jamie Oliver for serving them vignarola, a rich vegetable stew from nearby Rome. In another episode of that show, Jamie cried with frustration in picturesque Amalfi, where, he said, local people categorically refused to have a taste of his perfectly cooked, traditional Northern Italian risotto. This food snobbery, as it happens, is more typical of the Central and Southern regions, probably as a kind of payback for being treated with contempt by the Northerners. It's a long disheartening story, even more so when you think that, in the current Italian government, one of the ruling parties had spawned out of that historical contempt (or, more to the point, of a thinly disguised sort of racism). I was born in the South, grew up in the Center and then the North, and let me tell you, what a gang of oiks!

And don't get me started on what the forced celebration of mamma's and nonna's cooking really entails. Someone should write an exposé about the dark side of traditional Italian food culture. As much as a slowly and lovingly prepared dish is preferable to ultra-processed fast food, the human cost behind it has always made me question its real worth. OK, I’m being overly dramatic here but, as a girl growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was aware that the burden of shopping for groceries, preparing the meals, setting the table, serving the meals, tidying up, doing the washing up – not to mention all the other chores required by housekeeping and child-rearing – were considered women's work, second-wave feminism be damned.

So, young lady, do you wish to become the country's Prime Minister, or an astronaut, or a top athlete, or just be financially independent? Be my guest, so long as you iron your dad's/brother's/husband's/son's shirts before you go, and come back home in time to cook lunch, dinner, supper, elevenses, coffee breaks and snacks. But do it with a smile, sweetie-pie, no one likes a little miss Grumpy, do you want to be an old maid? Now that you mention it, yes, I do, sign me in. Spinsterhood versus marital drudgery looks like an attractive proposition.

You might have heard how, about 20 years ago, McDonald's had to close down a restaurant they'd opened in Altamura, a small Apulian town, because people just wouldn't eat there, having much tastier and healthier alternatives to turn to. That's all very well but, a decade earlier in another small Apulian town, my parents' birthplace, a store specialized in frozen food and ready meals had to close down, because no one would go and buy its products. The reason? No self-respecting lady would dare to be seen in there, lest people should think she wasn't a good wife and mother, but a lazy, slovenly woman.

(BTW, apparently, pasta alla puttanesca does not mean “whore's pasta”, it rather refers to those contemptible slatterns who wouldn't go to the market daily to buy fresh products, but rely instead on jars and cans. Funny how a woman was considered of easy virtue, if she didn't tire herself out, cooking and cleaning all day long.)

Is naming and shaming women still a cornerstone of Italian macho culture, which was – unfortunately though not unusually – shared by a number of ladies too? I hope not anymore, but I suspect it still is. I lucked out and found a good man, as the below photo clearly shows:

Homemade lasagne, cooked by my super-duper husband

Let's move on to another vexata quaestio, the one about authenticity or, better said, what the inflexibility of our culinary culture perceives as authentic and indisputable. In 2021, a book (and subsequent podcast) by Italian academic and food historian Alberto Grandi, Denominazione di origine inventata (Invented Designation of Origin), debunked the myths on which most part of what we regard today as Italian traditional cuisine (and one of its byproducts, the Italian sense of self) has been built in the last 60 years. Good riddance, I say, enough with that self-aggrandizing sense of superiority, like Italy itself had invented food and taste, and the whole nation were a second Moses with his tablets of stone! I mean, the very people who came up with that naff abomination that is tiramisù (a recent, ludicrous invention) should hang their head in shame, and certainly not be snooty towards the rest of the world.

Here on Substack, I trust the learned, passionate, charming voice and mouth-watering recipes by Giulia Scarpaleggia and her Letters from Tuscany, which I urge you to visit and enjoy. She recently published an article, an interesting, open reflection on who gets to tell the story of Italian cuisine because, apparently, in the English-speaking world, the authorities on Italian cuisine are neither Italians, nor – if they are – do they live in Italy.

I report here a few excerpts from Giulia's brilliant post:

(…) I once came across an online conversation where an American tour guide, now living in Italy, claimed that Italians simply don’t have the tools to translate the culture they live and breathe every day for a foreign audience. In doing so, she implied a kind of silent hierarchy, where the outsider's voice is seen as more “authentic,” simply because it's been better tailored for an English-speaking public.

That's me, Portia, butting in: and doesn't that slightly smack of cultural appropriation?

And here's Giulia again:

(…) if you want to write about Italian food for an international audience, you must either be a foreigner living in Italy, with the wide-eyed wonder of someone discovering a new world, or an Italian living abroad, viewing home through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia. (…)

Perhaps the assumption is that, being so immersed in my own culture, I can't explain it to those observing from the outside. As if I lacked the tools to translate my everyday life into a language that international readers could understand.

But here's the risk: when stories are filtered and repackaged too much, we might end up amplifying the very stereotypes that are so hard to shake. (…)

And so I ask myself: who has the right to tell Italy's story?

To that, I answer without hesitation: anyone, as long as it's done with honesty. Some will speak from lived, everyday experience. Others will tell it as the land they chose for a new life, or as a cherished memory. What I dream of is a space for dialogue, where many voices—Italian, those with Italian roots abroad, and foreign enthusiasts—can coexist, without any of them being dismissed from the start.

Voices that are not Italian, or that view Italy from a different perspective, are essential. We're already far too self-referential when it comes to food, so much so that these “other” voices bring a freshness we often forget, too busy as we are defending dogmas that treat Italian cuisine like a set of sacred commandments that must never be changed. (…)

There's a deeply rooted idea that Italian cuisine must be told through a certain lens. Perhaps that's why, so often, those who succeed in international food writing have a background that allows them to bridge two worlds.

And then there's me (and many talented colleagues like me). Italian, living in Italy. Without the privilege of the outsider's gaze, without the charm of the expat experience. But with a perspective that is just as valuable: that of someone who lives and breathes Italian food every single day, in an authentic, natural way—without needing to build an epic narrative around a simple plate of pasta al pomodoro. Still, the market tends to favor those who tell Italy from afar, because a romanticized version of our cuisine often sells better than reality.

I don't want to create an idealised image of Italy. I want to tell the story of its food as it truly is: imperfect, ever-changing, sometimes contradictory, but always rooted in something real.

That's so well argued and enlightening, Giulia, and it's what you are doing. But what should I do to exorcise myself out of the tempting Zuccotto with Strawberry Biancomangiare, the alluring image of which has been haunting my dreams in these last 2 weeks? I could try and make it, I'm sure it will be even more delicious than it sounds, as I'm sure mine won't be looking so scrumptious, but more like roadkill.

Giulia's Tuscan Zuccotto with a Sicilian twist

I hope I'll meet you again on here next week, with Operation White Birch, and in 2 weeks (Inshallah), with What's cooking? – Part 2 – Netherlands.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, you can share it, leave a comment, or buy me a tea. I'd be very grateful to you, I'd appreciate it more than I can express!