Is All Food Italian Food?
IS ALL FOOD REALLY ITALIAN FOOD?
Culinary History examined by Dean Christopher
In 1271 Marco Polo went out for Chinese. He didn’t get back to Venice until 1295, which shows how bad the take-out situation was in those days. On the brighter side, when he returned, Marco did have spaghetti with him. Ever since then, pasta has been the central premise of Italian cookery.
But many “Italian” dishes started out as something else, becoming Italian somewhere along the way. That’s because food, just like the people who eat it, can get naturalized.
The master chefs of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna and Sicily have transformed endless foreign foods into Italian delights.
Consider polenta, the hearty cornmeal side-dish of northern Italy. We can trace its deepest roots all the way back to the humble Aztec staple, the tortilla. Here’s how it was.
In the mid-1500’s, Norm “The Sword” Polenta, gadabout Genovese adventurer and flavor maven, launched his own personal reconquista in Mexico, struggling singlehandedly against impossible odds to recapture it from the Spaniards. As history records, his plan bore no fruit. But it did bear grain, inasmuch as Norm met—and was conquered by—corn, particularly corn in its conveniently portable tortilla form. Truly smitten, Norm crammed hundreds of piping hot tortillas into his sea-trunk for the long voyage home. But months of heavy seas not only cooled off the tortillas but also decomposed them. At dockside in Genoa, all Norm could show for his Mesoamerican caprice were dozens of tiny mounds of corn meal nubbies.
Luckily, he had arrived at dinner time, so the mounds were immediately heaped onto waiting plates as a kind of Mediterranean grits. Thus is brave Polenta’s name forever enshrined—thanks to an anonymous Aztec chef and the heaving blue sea.
From the steppes of Central Asia comes a little-known Italian delicacy—meatballs tartare. This taste thrill is rare in every sense of the word, and was discovered by Biff “Ghengis Cane” DiPietro, an accordionist on the caravan circuit not far from Marco Polo’s route. Biff didn’t get the press coverage that Marco did, so meatballs tartare never achieved the widespread popularity of its cooked equivalent, meatballs. The tartare version did, however, become required eating among the “in” crowd, who have plenty of leisure time for chewing, and who often serve the tangy raw meat patties with unboiled cappellini.
The original roving barbarian recipe called for the curing of meatballs tartare for several months in a bouncing saddle bag, but today’s urbanized Italians omit this step for the sake of hygiene. Another refinement: they make the meatballs from beef, not from prisoners as Attila’s boys did.
Few gourmets recognize the origin of tofutti in the Japanese tofu, the bafflingly tasteless bean gack that has become the inescapable darling of the anti-meat, anti-flavor lobby.
Tofu was brought from Japan by the man history remembers only as “Nunzio the Mistaken,” perhaps a cleric or a merchant; certainly no cook. It is likely that he expected tofu to be a culinary coup as great as Marco’s. But upon presenting his discovery he was widely rebuffed. This was perhaps to be expected, since Italians traditionally demand that their food consist of food, not mere tessitura.
However, even so bland a hoax as tofu did not long stump Italy’s master chefs. They simply eliminated the bean curd element and substituted ice cream ingredients, froze it, and presto!—an exciting new dessert item was born—tofutti. But the practical Italiani didn’t waste the rejected tofu. Instead of eating it, they used it as shoulder padding for designer jackets, covering for open wounds and soundproofing for Roman recording studios.
So great is the influence of la cucina italiana that it is safe to say that most, if not all, of the famous specialties of other cultures are really just Italian dishes—original or improved—in disguise!
One example is sashimi, the elegantly simple raw fish dish which the uninformed believe to be a Japanese invention. What – is one so dense as to believe that fish appear raw only in the seas and rivers of Japan? Do they perhaps come already broiled or poached in other nations’ waters? Further, does one not sense an Italian name lurking behind the purported Japanese word? Our research shows that sashimi was introduced to 16th Century shoguns by Ramone “Raw Man” Saccimi. “Sashimi” is simply the Japanese pronunciation of “Saccimi.” Sashimi is the seaside equivalent of an earlier creation by “Fast Bob” Carpaccio, the notorious “Lazy Chef of Firenze,” who refused to roast meat because it delayed dinner. This led to the breakthrough recipe that now bears his surname, carpaccio, paper-thin slices of raw beef. It was child’s play for “Raw Man” Saccimi to apply Carpaccio’s idea to sea food, thus immortalizing his own name as well.
[Editor's Note: Carpaccio's great patron, Edgardo, the dreaded “Frothing Duke of Palermo,” insisted upon well done carpaccio. This presented a dilemma until Carpaccio hit upon the notion of sun-dried carpaccio, thereby saving his skin as well as his reputation. He later applied sun-drying to tomatoes.]
Similarly, kreplach, that indispensable staple of Jewish fressery, was introduced into the Holy Land during the infamous Low Sodium Crusade of the 14th Century. This event is widely attributed to Dick “Dumpling” Crepalacchi, the warrior-chef of Abruzzi, whose surname the locals pronounced “Kreplach.” Origin of the delicacy: Crepalacchi’s rawboned missus, Big Giulia, was a militant vegetarian. A woman of fierce ways, she was unrelenting in her persecution of meat-eaters. This prompted Dick to leave Italy so he could plunder other countries and eat meat on a regular basis. It also spurred him to invent ways to conceal his favorite food—clumps of seasoned ground beef—when at home. Fortunately, the signora was allergic to dumplings, so that’s where Dick cunningly hid the naughty ingredient! Kreplach was born. Apparently Big Giulia never discovered his trick, because Crepalacchi lived to advanced age and, according to legend, was buried in a large dumpling of his own creation.
Examples are as numerous as basil leaves at a Calabrian greengrocer. But there are space considerations, and your time is limited. It is easier to list the few dishes that were not discovered, invented, or improved upon by the Italians; treats like hot dogs, corned beef and cabbage, pralines and burritos. But then, any of those would be greatly enhanced by a little white clam sauce; some escarole with roasted garlic cloves; or maybe some farfalle arrabiata washed down with a litre of mature Barolo. Viva Italia!