Good Italian Food

[Rich One]

Hey Rich One, Thant's a fantastic site.

How did you get the videos in English?

Thanks, T/

Somehow last year there was a sign under the video to listen in English...? no longer there? well watching the video you can figure out the preparation. and the list of ingredients?

 

[nlaruccia]

I'm not Serafina, but...

Ignore the web site where you found these. Alfredo sauce has nothing to do with Italy - it is an American invention, as is Italian Cream Cake. And anyone who recommends anything at Olive Garden should be blacklisted from writing about food anywhere.

I know. Half those dishes aren't even Italian. They're North American inventions.

 

[Rich One]

What is true Italian Food? So many different regions in Italy at least 10 major culinary regions , (Cucina Genovesa, Lombarda Fiorentina Romana Calabresa Marchesa? Napolitana Siciliana Pugliese, etc) .

The vast majority of Italian immigrants were peasants that came from the deep countryside in the Mezzogiorno...!
The cooking they brought to the USA were simple recipes from the nona in small villages, not haute cuisine from Milan or Rome.
This accounts for the food in Little Italy canoli and heavy meatballs , etc

Sure some expats are descendants form Milanese industrialists.....

 

[Girino]

Of course it is pointless to travel back in time and play "who invented this first". Just think about any dish with tomato... Clearly we are talking about something created after Europeans traveled to Americas and brought back tomatoes.

 

[Rich One]

Of course it is pointless to travel back in time and play "who invented this first". Just think about any dish with tomato... Clearly we are talking about something created after Europeans traveled to Americas and brought back tomatoes.

Or when the southern Sicilian labourers brought the tomatoes to the north, that until then favored white sauces the so called Polentones

 

[estebandepraga]

If it is delicious and not bad for you(well it can even be ONCE IN A WHILE A LITTLE BAD) who cares where it originally came from? I am not a purist in this sense.
I have had superb "sparkling wine=champagne) not from the champagne region as well as Parma ham and many other things not eaten in their namesake. Wiener schnitzel is great in Wien as it is in Prague! Gulash in Budapest is delicious as a soup and delicious in its other form more well-known with spaetzle
Bon appettit! Buen Provecho! Dobou chut'Jo Etvagyat! Guten Apetit!Enjoy!

 

[Matt84]

The word you're looking for is "Abbondanza".
I feel we had this conversation about Italian authenticity at least once before. This is a good blog post about it: http://survivinginitaly.com/2015/03/18/is-there-such-a-think-as-authentically-italian/#more-34161

excerpt:

Since the olive trees got some kind of nasty plague last year a large amount of the olive oil in Italy was actually shipped in from Greece. “Not real oil!” My husband said. I turned, “Damn, well, what about that Salami? I hear that the pig was actually half british on the sow’s side. A real whore if you ask me.”

 

[ElQueso]

I spent a couple of months working in Ravenna, in the north, in the late 90s. While there, we often ate at a place built like a huge barn (so it appeared on the outside), made of stone and wood. Everyone ate at long lines of tables, all together. My favorite pasta dish was fettuccine pasta with a thick white, creamy, parmesian-cheesey sauce that tasted a whole lot like Alfredo sauce...

We called the restaurant "the Volume House", but that wasn't it's real name. Been so long I no longer remember it. But they had the best food there!

Also, on the subject of Marco Polo - many (maybe not most, but a significant number perhaps) scholars are thinking that the stories of Marco Polo are invented, that Marco Polo was a merchant who never really left the Mediterranean region, but rather related to a writer, later in his life, stories that he'd heard (plus some he flat-out invented).. There are too many things that simply don't match up with real life, including his descriptions of monsters and fairies and all other manner of crap and no mention at all of common things like foot-binding. Of course, some of what he had to say was verifiable (such as the use of paper script for currency in place of precious metal coins, for example), but could have been learned by talking to other traders.

As is the story that he brought back pasta to Italy perhaps a bit exaggerated. In fact, his "account" mentions that he had a pasta in China similar to lasagna, which means he was already familiar with pasta before he went to China. Many peoples over the millennia used pastas. Perhaps, if Marco Polo really did travel to China, he brought back a different recipe...but it's more likely that pasta was brought to Italy during the Arab conquests of Siciliy in the 5th century.

 

[Matt84]

History of Ravioli (Jiaozi) from a Chinese perspective
http://www.lagranepoca.com/jiaozi-el-ancestro-chino-de-nuestros-ravioles