I don’t mean to be a snob, but when I see pasta with grilled chicken, pesto and sun-dried tomatoes on the menu of an Italian restaurant in the US or England, I have to chuckle a little. It may taste great, but you’d NEVER find anything like that in Italy.
People living outside Italy have some pretty interesting ideas about what is Italian food. Many Americans are surprised when they learn that Caesar salad is not served in Italy. Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana, Mexico; most Italians have never heard of it. The only spaghetti with meatballs I have eaten in Italy came out of my own kitchen. Meatballs, polpette or polpettone, are usually served as a separate meat course without pasta in restaurants here. And pizza in Italy compared to what I ate growing up in the US is a world apart.
Many tourists I have talked with actually don’t like pizza in Italy because it doesn’t have all the toppings they are used to. One family from Chicago I was cooking for in Tuscany was so relieved that as an American I could make them “real†pizza. I made them what they wanted, but we had very different definitions of real. The best pizza I have ever eaten was served in a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria near Paestum. All it had on it was tomato sauce, mozzarella di bufala and fresh basil on a perfectly crisp crust (with the slight smoky flavor of a traditional wood oven).
That’s not to say that Italy always does things better. My family’s favorite Italian restaurant in California serves a beautiful salad called “crudo†that has julienne matchsticks of raw zucchini, yellow squash, carrot, jicama, and radish with chopped arugula, basil, parsley, tomatoes, roasted beets, balsamic vinegar and crumbled creamy goat’s cheese on top. It’s heavenly, and totally Californian. A salad in your average restaurant in Italy will have lettuce, tomato wedges, grated carrot, and if you’re lucky a little bit of arugula or radicchio. Often it will have only lettuce.
On the other hand, that same Italian restaurant with the pathetic green salad will make the best plate of pasta you’ve ever had. Whereas Italian restaurants outside Italy often get the pasta course all wrong. They tend to drown the pasta under a sea of sauce. Pumpkin tortelli with marscarpone, gorgonzola, cream and walnuts? Sounds a bit heavy to me. All it needs is some pancetta to be renamed “heart attack on a plate.†In Ferrara and Modena, pumpkin tortelli are served in a simple butter and sage sauce with a grating of Parmigiano-reggiano on top, basta. The intricate flavor or the squash shines through instead of being lost under a blanket of cheese.
But each to his or her own taste. I don’t think there is so much right and wrong with Italian cooking as there are different frames of reference.
Californian cook and cookbook author Rachel Lee has been living in Italy since 2001. She divides her time between Tuscany and Sicily.
