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Fake ! In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians. A And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
Well partly, it's because this is a political topic. It's one that's used to justify a certain sense of "Italian" identity that doesn't exist and to justify Italian nationalism. See this excerpt from the Financial Times: There’s a dark side to Italy’s often ludicrous attitude towards culinary purity. In 2019, the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggested adding some pork-free “welcome tortellini” to the menu at the city’s San Petronio feast. It was intended as a gesture of inclusion, inviting Muslim citizens to participate in the celebrations of the city’s patron saint. Far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini wasn’t on board. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said. When Grandi intervened to clarify that, until the late 19th century, tortellini filling didn’t contain pork, the president of Bologna’s tortellini consortium (a real job title) confirmed that Grandi was right. In the oldest recipes, tortellini filling is made from poultry. “This is the reason why I do what I do,” Grandi says. “To show that what we hail as tradition isn’t, in fact, tradition.” Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for right-wing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. As part of her election campaign in 2022, prime minister Giorgia Meloni posted a TikTok video in which an old lady taught her how to seal tortellini parcels by hand. This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)
This doesn't just apply to Italy. Vast majority of dishes associated with various countries only took their modern form in the last hundred or so years.
That's the lesson of the video. It's pointless to argue over if a dish is traditional or not, because every dish has its roots somewhere, and every dish evolves with time. Nothing that you eat today was eaten exactly the same way 200 years ago, and nothing will be eaten the same 200 years in the future.
Some of the most iconic "Chinese" ingredients were introduced in the Columbian Exchange, just like Italy. The staple crop of Northern Chinese peasants (sweet potato) is from South America.
thanks to the Indigenous Americans and their insane variety of foods that could have only been developed in a place without europeans for millennia : D
"Nation" doesn't exist, Luca exists for a limited time, Friedrich too. Traditional is a quality not a quantity. If you change definitions woman can be man but Luca is still Luca, and Friedrich too Italy has a lot of good food, enjoy and be grateful for their effort to bring you the best recipe they experienced defining as well as they can recipes that changes in every way possible from door to door, from hands to hands 🤌
Fake ! In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians. G And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
It's actually quite common for traditions to simply have been invented not that long ago. In the 19th century, the "traditions" of Bavaria were invented by royals because there were none before, Bavaria wasn't as unified as was always and still is constantly said. They needed something to bind Bavaria together, and it worked maybe too well, so well that now many Bavarians see themselves as fully separate from Germany culturally.
@@David_Grangeractually there was more Bavarian language and culture compared to anything "german". Many of these cultures and languages were suppressed in Germany, France and Italy.
Not being everyday food does not imply they didn't exist. Many foods we now have the luxury to enjoy whenever we want have existed for centuries as recipes for special occasions, to be consumed once a year.
Even if the story about pizza margherita was fake it still was an aricle by a magazine in Rome (not naples) in 1880 and that means two things: 1)Pizza was known outside of naples 2)Pizza had cheese on it before the mass immigration of italians in the us( that came later)
I heard that the story about pizza without cheese came from an American GI who, during the liberation of Italy in WWII, expected to find the same sort of pizza as back in the US. At the time, though, food was scarse so people ate just whatever they could get their hands on and had to do without a lot of ingredients.
@@anta3612 that is false. The story of pizza margherita from 1880 is probably fake. There was a description of pizza from 1760. There are description of pizza without tomatoes from Roman era.
I never put much stock in so-called "authenticity". I'm from a region in Malaysia famed for its cuisine and a lot of what foodfluencers might claim is "traditional" is really just a couple of generations old at most. One person innovated something with local ingredients in the 1970s, people loved it and then it caught on with other hawkers through word of mouth, and now people who grew up with this version of a particular dish call it traditional because it's how they, individually, have always had it.
In fact, a lot of the "traditional" foods in many cultures aren't really that old. Several Thai dishes familiar to many people are less than 100 years old! That's what makes the various forms of Mexican cuisine so amazing--the idea of tacos, burritos and enchiladas actually date back several _hundred_ years.
@@SacredDaturaa Ah, Penang. Land of the legions of street hawker food, and a more discerning (or rather, picky) palate among its inhabitants, present company included. Which dish are you talking about?
Fake ! In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians. U And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
Also you don't probably know but the colosseum and the tower of Pisa were built in the USA and then brought to Italy. Venice looks as it is today thanks to an engineer from Illinois that worked in Chicago, he was able to dig the city's channels after the knowledge he collected when chicago was built. Leonardo da Vinci? He was born in New York's little Italy and then moved to toscany. Finally, really few people know, Sardinia is now in Italy because it was brought there from the US soldiers after WWII but geologically speaking is coming from California and it is now there only artificially
The funny aspect about this video lays in the fact that it seems to identify the whole Italian cuisine with carbonara, pizza and parmesan cheese. First of all, I support a work of historical food "debunking", but done in a more accurate way: carbonara is generally thought to be a relatively modern (already existing before the war? Invented by American troops? By local people after the war? Who knows) variant of older and simpler "pastoral" pasta dishes, such as gricia (a sort of white carbonara with only guanciale, a sort of bacon, pecorino and black pepper). Pizza, although fried and/or baked in oven but only garnished with cheese, is documented since the XVI century in the area of Naples. Parmesan cheese changed many times through the centuries, depending on the shape preference and the feeding of the cows that influenced the taste and the way of milk fermentation ("old" parmesan cheese was more similar to a cheese called Granone Lodigiano), but is well known since the XIII-XIV centuries: Boccaccio mentions in the Decameron "Parmigiano grattugiato" (grated parmesan). Second, if you extend your range of investigation to the great rest of the Italian cuisine, you'll see a long line of continuity, in term of regional dishes, that gave finally birth to a unified Italian cuisine during the XIX century: the "Bible" of Italian cuisine, "La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene" published in 1891 by Pellegrino Artusi, collected a great number of regional recipes creating a sort of encyclopedia of Italian cuisine; so, there we can observe both continuity and innovation, in introducing new personal variants, foreign influences and in extending the range of local dishes (which in this way were not lost) to the whole recently unified Peninsula. And, for most of its recipes, the book by Artusi is still well present in modern and contemporary Italian cuisine.
Funny aspect about this video is; how to make a video that is moderetly factual (some unverified things are presented as facts), but very appealing to Americans xD Yes, foods change, yes Italians are overprotective about their ways that might, or might not be that old... But watching this video, it appears that everything that Italians claim as their tradition came from US xD
I'm a food historian and this almost creates a few NEW myths even though it claims to dispel some. 1. Pizzas and similar pies were found all around Italy traditionally. Neapolitan pizza is only one variety of traditional pizza, before it took over there were many regional varieties of pizza. Very often these had anchovies, onions / or tomatoes, such as the Ligurian Piscialandrea, Pizza Pugliese or Sfincione and Pizzolu from Sicily. Focaccia and pizza could sometimes be used synonymously and many focaccias are similar to pizza. Neapolitan pizza however became the most famous one and took over because of the establishment of pizzerie. Just outside of Italy you also had similar pies such as the Niçoise Pissaladière or Croatian Komiška Pogača. The situation is similar to pesto were Genovese Pesto sauce now dominates, historically there were many other pesto sauces. You also had a huge regional variety of "stuffed pizzas" (such as Tiella di Gaeta) were only Calzone remains the one that's world famous today Modern day industrialized food systems gives us more standardised food and less regional diversity, even in Italy! 2. Cheese and/or meat pizzas are found in Italy before "Americanized Pizza". Such as the Pizzolu from Catania or Murseddu from Calabria. Pies that are similar to cheese-and-meat-pizza can be found as far back as the Medieval era in many countries of western Europe (without tomatoes!) So meat and cheese pizza has probably been around a very long time, very probably in Italy too. Why wouldn't they? These pies probably spread from the Middle East into Christian Europe as many of them have names related to the Muslim world. like "Pagan cakes" (Germany) or "The Turks head" from Medieval England. In the Middle East today you have traditional cheese and/or meat pies like Pide (Turkey), Manakish (Lebanon) and Kachapuri (Georgia) which are definitely relatives of pizza. German and Alsatian Flammekuche is a survivor of this Medieval "pizza" tradition. 2. What they are cooking in that Goodfellas scenes (besides the steaks) is the American version of Ragù alla napoletana - it's an Italian dish with alot of meat in it. So the meat in this dish is NOT an American addition even though the recipe has been changed a bit. However Ragù is definitely influenced by French cuisine - it's called a "ragout" after all. Italian cuisine has alot of foreign influences such as French, Austrian, Turkish, Swiss, Spanish, Mexican, Greek, Medieval Arabic-Persian or even Slavic. Medieval Italian aristocracy ate dishes with very exotic ingredients such as coconuts from India. Also huge amounts of meats wasn't traditionally that widely available to many Italians in the past, mostly to the richer ones. If you watch the Fellini classic "La Strada" (1954) you can see the main characters (which are all poor working class) munching on huge pieces of lamb alongside their maccheroni - very much breaking another "rule" of Italian cuisine - of never serving big pieces of meat with pasta This "rule" was invented by the bourgeoise in the 19th century following European fashion of strict separate courses in their new "Service á la Russe" way of serving formal dinners. Most of Europe left this kind of meal service for simpler three course dinners but not Italians. 3. Grandi dismisses the "Caci e uova" theory of Carbonara's origin but actually the older Neapolitan dish "Pasta cacio e uova" is sometimes very similar to carbonara. It can contain many more ingredients for example garlic, pancetta and peas. "Pasta alla pappana "from Rome is basically similar to the "British" carbonara - containing fettucini, peas, ham and cheese and cream, but is still considered "traditional" by Italians. So it's mainly a name-issue. Carbonara developed out of a living tradition of a variety of pasta dishes. Recipes were not standardized but varied in the past. 4. Tiramisu is probably older than the 1980s. It's origin is unknown of course. I think some people love the "counter-intuitive" narratives a bit too much sometimes. This can lead you on a false path too.
Thanks for this interesting additional information. Just to say, I don't think anyone is claiming Italian cuisine was invented wholesale in the US, based on nothing but myths and bacon. It's the supposed one and only "traditional" way of doing things that is a new invention. Like you said, there were many dishes similar to carbonara back in the day but these days people get defensive about changing but the tiniest ingredient. It's a bit of a shame really that we might lose these varied traditional recipes for one homogenised monomyth of "proper" Italian cuisine. I mean, I love Flammkuchen. Would've been a shame if it all became pizza.
@@unvergebeneid a lot of people in Italy are obsessed with authenticity but in reality there are a good amount of other people that does not care what you put in your plate . The problem is when people try to make a new recipe based on the original , they don't give a new name to dish and that can create confusion if said dish becomes famous
@@hope7237 I think those people exist in every country. Nowhere have I seen so much convenience food as in France but that doesn't mean _haute cuisine_ isn't a thing or that there aren't a lot of French who feel some kind of national pride in their food.
The "tortellini... recipe .. only after the late 1800" is a joke. In a huge area of Emilia Romagna, tortellini are just filled with ricotta and spinach or other vegetables, while cappelletti are filled with meat. Nowadays many people confuse one with the other. The oldest recipe for cappelletti in broth dates back to 1584, and is found in the cookbook Il trinciante by Bartolomeo Scappi and it used pork, plus the use of flour, eggs, grated cheese, and veal, and meat broth. Meat pork has been staple food in the area for centuries and it was used to cook in a huge amount of dishes also as lard oil. It doesn't make sense to deny such a simple fact. Here are the ingredients for Scappi's recipe: 1 pound of flour 12 eggs 1 pound of grated cheese 1 pound of pork 1 pound of veal 1 gallon of meat broth This recipe is still the basis for the preparation of cappelletti in broth today.
Taking salvini as the standard italian says a lot about the simplistic approach of this video. Like yes, Pizza is not an italian tradition but a Neapolitan tradition. True. So? For it to be italian does it have to be a standardized thing in the country? And when you say Italy you don't necesseraly always mean the relatively modern country but also the geografical area.
It was more that Salvini was having a dig at southerners. He belongs to the Lega Nord political party which believes that the region of Padania (the northern area of Italy situated around the Po river) should be independent from the rest of Italy.
One thing to keep in mind is that, when talking about peasant topics like most italian food was before the ww2, relying on just written accounts can be mileading. Italy wasn't really alphabetized until the '60 and the TV, and any tradition before that would be lost in word. As an example Pizza, we know it existed in the late 1800, but how much written documents we have of it? is it possible that they were already putting cheese on it way before the americans, but we just don't have any document left talking about it? Italians were poor and lacked food, i wouldn't expect them to have time to document every little detail. Also, as any american that has spent a sufficient amount of time in Italy can tell, today's Italian food is way different than american italian.
that's a good point. To it i would add that most recipes that were written down were from wealthy families. There has always been a huge divide between the large mass of poor peasants and the small minority of wealthy people, who were largely segregated from one another. The food the wealthy were eating was not the food the poor were eating.
What gets me is the hypocrisy of modern Italian-Americans. Their ancestors emigrated due to poverty. They took what recipes (handed down orally as like you point out few people were literate at that time especially not the poor and it was mostly these that emigrated to the US). When they arrived in America they suddenly had access to an abundance of food and therefore modified their recipes not only because original ingredients weren't available but also because the ingredients they did have access to were rich and therefore supplemented what otherwise would have been a poor diet. There's no shame in this and I have no problem with it as we all would have done the same thing if in their shoes. What annoys me is that now they claim to have preserved the original traditions whereas in Italy they've been changed. The average person in Italy is now not only able to access more and better quality food, than in the past, but also better than what's available in the US. However, Italian-Americans have an attitude that they are the real Italians (they see themselves as preserving tradition which isn't true because they added and changed ingredients) while they view Italians from Italy as no longer Italian because our society has evolved and not stayed stuck in the late 1800s/early 1900s (the time when their ancestors emigrated to the US). In other words: they are allowed to evolve out of poverty (yet claim to have stayed true to their roots) but if we do the same thing in Italy we're no longer real Italians according to them. The hypocrisy is astounding. And don't get me started on their arrogance.
Yea you are right. Americans don’t claim “ownership” of anything to do with food. We assume it & pretty much everything else came from another country by immigrants. The only thing that I can think of that we do take ownership in is developing medicines because that’s how we tolerate/justify being robbed by the medical industry - that the money went towards research & development.
You raised a general good point, but for the specific we are lucky. We DO have written accounts of cheese on Neapolitan pizza in the XIX century. We even have pizza mentioned in newspapers in the XIX century mentioning tomato sauce, basil and Mozzarella cheese on pizza.
At 10:00 it sounds like you are implying that the italian language was born in America through the interaction between italian immigrants from different regions, but that's just... wrong. Standard italian is based on the dialect spoken in Florence, and more specifically on the literary works of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. Because of this literary prestige, it started to be used as a lingua franca in Italy even before the unification, at least by wealthy and intellectuals - Pietro Bembo for instance, who came from Venice, started using it in the 1500s. The general population adopted it around the 1960s with the spread of radio and TV, and also thanks to internal migration towards the new industrial centers (Milan, Turin,...). Meanwhile in the US, italian americans developed their own lingua franca based on southern italian dialects, because that's where most of the immigrants there came from - northern italians mainly migrated to Brazil and Argentina instead. This explains why "gabagool" and "capocollo" are spelled and pronounced differently in the US and in Italy respectively. I also think you overstated the importance of "italian cuisine" in forming a national identity. Despite the fact that standard italian is today spoken by everybody in the country, regional dialects, traditions, and cuisines are still very much alive. Where I'm from (Veneto) nobody would claim neapolitan pizza or roman carbonara as part of their identity, even if we eat them frequently. People might rather be proud of the general quality and variety of italian gastronomy. And rather than football, I think people would talk (often obnoxiously) about roman and renaissaince history and art, or about the natural beauty of the country (in italian media Italy is often referred to as "il bel paese" - the beautiful country). Salvini will of course use any opportunity to complain about immigration, including "violated" food recipes, but this does not mean that it is a major focus of his political platform. And yeah, like many italians I already knew that carbonara and tiramisù are recent inventions, I mean, you need a fridge to make the latter!
Thank you for writing this. He has GROSSLY oversimplified things in this video. To the point of being offensive. Deliberately skipping info and overemphasizing spurious claims. It’s a well edited and put together video piece but I only believe about 10% of it.
@@cmedeir That is exactly what he has done. He is deliberately trying to offend and frankly he made a good job at that. The most annoying thing is that he frames his bold and largely unfounded claims as historical facts.
In essence: modern Italian (based on medieval Tuscan) was invented in the 19th century by italian emigrants to America (largely from Campania and Sicily) who then imported it into Italy. For those wondering how it is possible that this guy is an University Professor, the only possible explanation is that he studied (read played football, basketball and baseball) in some American college where they teach that France is the capital of Paris which is located in South America not far from the islands of Madagascar and... Madagascar 2 (!!!!) 🤣🤣🤣😢
Fake ! In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians. Ab And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
Fake ! In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians. Lo And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
You mentioned that most of the regions in Italy before they were unified didn't even know about dished that other regions had, and it's true, and sometimes dishes had the same name but were very different, like pizza. You quote something, and you say that pizza came from that one region, and it was a poor people dish, but... The word "pizza" existed since the roman era, and the first actual mention of the word "pizza" was in a text over 500 years ago, about food that was served the pope and others of high standing a few hundred yeas ago. Well it was very different, It was a fluffy Bread dish, round few cm high, almost cake-like, spread with rose water & Sugar. And in other places the word "pizza" meant something different, similar to what you quote, similar to the dish we know today. But still quite different, we don't have a text as old or neutral as the rose pizza recipe. But not very long ago, the maybe first illustration of the very first pizza was found on the colorful walls of Pompeii. We don't know a lot about it, but it might not have been the poor people dish, like it was said by the one person 200 years ago. We don't know, but it is definitely very different from the dish we know today.
Thank you, I was able to avoid writing all of this. The only difference in what I knew is I knew pizza was called mensa in ancient Rome and was a dish where you could "eat the plate too". But that's what has been taught to me, I never researched it
I mean, in some sense, Pizza dates back to the Aeneid, the Roman founding myth that was documented by Virgil, but on the other hand, flatbread-with-topping is something that exists in every culture at any time.
Thats kinda like similar but not the same kind of deal. Perhaps they have the same name, but that doesn't mean the same thing. Slings are slings forever, but there are lots of things we called today as slings.
I noticed that the presenter chose to highlight only 4-6 types of Italian foods, and while it's a valid choice, one might wonder about the vast diversity in Italian cuisine, especially when referencing an "identity crisis". Given that Italy boasts over 800 protected recipes, the chosen representation might appear a bit limited. It's worth acknowledging that Italian food is incredibly diverse, with dishes less internationally known like Frico with potatoes from Friuli being as cherished as Pizza from Napoli. My Italian grandfather, for instance, had his own culinary preferences, which didn't necessarily include dishes like pizza. It's key to remember that specific dishes, be it Pizza or tortellini, might not be representative of the entire national identity for many Italians.
I think he is specifically talking about the cuisine/food items that is specifically recognised internationally as Italian. Unfortunately the majority of the huge variety of Italian food isn't internationally recognised - although that doesn't make it less delicious.
The one being chosen is the most recognizable, more stereotyped food to be Italian in both in and out of the country. It a way, your comment only serves a question why these dishes became the representation of what is "traditional" in said country considering its history, even when there are more appropriate version out there.
@@SunnyMorningPancakes Aka by Italo-Americans. However, why should Italians care? This is a colonial perspective and we Italians are seen as "fake" or even as if we were lying about our thousand-year-long nation-building and identity. No Italian says that more than 500 years ago Italy had tomatoes or that it produced coffee beans.
The whole premise of the video is false. Pizzerie become popular in the rest of Italy in the 30s. The first pizzeria in Milan opened in 1929, the first in Rome in 1888. Americans have nothing to do with that, it was simply due to internal migration. And of course one of the reference is that fraudster Grandi.
I am Italian, I appreciate your videos and I also enjoyed your study on such a complex topic, which is also part of my PhD study. However, if it is sometimes nice to question certain issues, and some 'lies' are sometimes revealed, I think it is a bit more complex here and I try to make my contribution. Many of the things said by the professor and on which the video is based are deliberately pushed, daring, said to make people talk. Not that there are no funds of truth: it is true, for example, that from the USA and their culture of industrialization comes a certain standardization of products that has also had an effect on the availability of certain products throughout the country. Even on the Italian side, it is certainly not a mystery that the Italian one, despite the undoubtedly common bases (see the pasta on all the territory in its myriad of variations) has been somewhat uniform and still is strongly on a regional basis. But get to say that certain products or even language come from abroad or that there is some 'lie' behind centuries of cooking (which obviously has evolved and continues to do so) It is like saying that Italy did not exist before 1861 because it was the year of political unification (if we do not want to go back to the Romans we speak of Italy and Italians at least from the Middle Ages). Well, it is an oversimplification, maybe 'sexy', but that does not make the reality of the facts. That said, the kitchen is beautiful all over the world, vehicle of culture and it is good that this continues to live and evolve without unnecessary rigidities, which rightly enjoy online. P.S. Italian-american cuisine is a completely different branch of italian one that descend from Italian immigration and It's interesting to try and study, but we cannot overlap it with european one.
I get the regional variation in Italian food - my lodger was from northern Italy and his diet mainly consisted of spaghetti with grated parmesan on top, rarely any meat. Pizza? "That's not my culture!" What surprised me was the figure of only 2% of Italians speaking Italian at unification. Surely they mostly spoke a variation of Italian with regional dialects?
@@rogink of course they did. There just wasn’t a standard just as in England before the establishment of the school system. Everybody spoke their regional varieties.
@@roginkMost people spoke their own language (Sicilian, Lombard, Romagnolo etc.), which aren't variants of Italian, they're languages that have developed before or parallel. Now they're wrongly called dialects of Italian.
@@luca_salerno Hmm. I'm not convinced. You call them languages, but that suggests different grammar and syntax. Up to 1850 only around 80% of French people spoke French - so they couldn't speak to and understand each other. My guess is that most Italians could understand each other.
So true , I lived in Italy for a short time as a child in 63/64 .The only pizza that was available in 63/64 was white pizza and not a lot of it , was available .When we visited Italy in 73 ,pizza was available but not as much .My mother was making pizza with sauce for all of our family and for some of the neighbours , in Italy and it was such a novelty for my family in central Italy .
Fake ! In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians. Z And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
@@Dibipable Tomatoes -- the very foundation of most modern pizza -- are a food from the Americas that didn't even touch Italian lands until the mid-16th century.
Gonna be honest, I'm not sure what to believe. My Nonna came from Italy to the UK after WWII and one of her famous recipes in my family that she used to make was Tiramisu, but in the past when I previously looked it up the oldest date for Tiramisu I found is often in the 60's. On the other hand that old negative description of Pizza you found reminds of an early European description of potatoes where the guy basically talks about how disgusting and flavourless they are in similar language. I feel uneasy about taking the information in this video at face value without doing some of my own research on it.
FWIW this whole video is basically built on the back of one guy and can be spun different ways. For example, it is possibly true that pizzerias are American, but that’s mostly because pizza was just a thing that was sold alongside other dishes in restaurants in Naples, which is largely how it still is today in Italy as well as most other European countries. Restaurants that serve exclusively pizza are not really a common thing. But that’s why I find this researcher very disingenuous, there is documentation of hundreds of restaurants serving pizza around Naples in the 19th century. The fact that they sold other things, that it was a regional dish, or that the first “pizzeria” could have been American is irrelevant as to who invented pizza. A flat bread with stuff on it has been a staple of Mediterranean cuisine for thousands of years, and the Italians who opened the pizzerias in America didn’t get the idea from nowhere. The fact that carbonara was supposedly first served to American soldiers is also irrelevant, the dish was just another variation of a dish that was already common at the time. Even if carbonara was the name that stuck, the tradition is undoubtedly Italian. This guy’s schtick is, depending on how you view it, either needless pedantry to make bold claims that will get him attention or claiming outright falsehoods, also to get attention. Americans are very good at commercializing things though, that much is clearly true. Italians should thank them for that, because it’s probably helped their economy a lot.
Well this is true for most countries food culture tbh. Potatoes and chocolate are from south america, Pepper and corn from Mexico, Squash and beans from north america yet most countries Ireland, India, and Italy etc, these food are a cornerstone of the cuisine but have only been 'recently' introduce in the grand scheme of things.
Esos alimentos se han introducido hace cientos de años, es decir, llevan siglos siendo usados en Europa, adaptados a su gastronomía, ya son parte de su identidad.
@@gabriel_024_callese a la berga . Aprende Leer no Dijo nada de eso Dijo que sin nuestros alimentos el mundo no tubiera comida buena y seria menos sabrosa
"italians have an inferiority complex" "it is only food and football that gives italians the oportunity to keep their head high" what a silly stereotype. what about the architecture, the artworks, the literature, the music, the teathers, the cinema,the fashion. I can keep going.
the problem with buying Grandi's claims wholesale is that it ignores a fact of Italian history: it's exactly BECAUSE they were poor that similar recipes were developed from similar ingredients. there are mentions of pasta with eggs, cheese and bacon since 1831 at least. My own family has been making it since 1891. It's not because the marketing of Italian food recipe names is owned by Italian americans that Italian food lacks tradition and authenticity.
@@1969ES175 how is that? he never claimed that we invented pizza or parmesan. Those came from Italy, but have evolved since their current form into something different due to cultural exchange. not that hard to understand
@@joel29585 Well from the comments I've been reading (also under other videos) that's precisely what many of them seem to have taken from Grandi's comments: that THEY invented everything.
you should change the title of this video from "Italian food is a lie" to "Don't forget that cultures and food change over time", it would be a more honest albeit less clickbait
One thing that Grandi seems to misunderstand about the history of a country (our country in this instance) even tho he's an historian, is that you do not start counting it from when it becomes its final iteration. Italy as a unified nation is very young and modern, but that doesn't erase the millennia of history of all of its parts. Also, perfecting a recipe and making it into the canonical one, is not saying the recipe was always that way (the only ones stating that are the ignorants...Like Salvini ahahah), but rather is a way to say "This is the best way to do it, the perfected one, so do not ruin it by erasing the years of improvements done", and in fact plenty of chefs keep improving traditional recipes even today. One last thing, traditions do not require thousands of years to be established as such, even just something like 30 years is enough to determine a tradition. Overall I agree that Italian tradition are not a real thing, if we refer to Italy as a nation, but they are if we refer to Italy as a geographical location and all of the population that inhabits it...or if you prefer and want to be more cultured, you can refer to local tradition instead of calling them Italian. Just go with a Region or ,even better, a City and you are gucci, probably even receive hugs of appreciation ahahah. PS: The "unappealing" Pizza you red the description for is the still very present today, Marinara, not my favorite, but the description also didn't o it any justice. Pizza remains a Neapolitan dish, not an Italian one (nor American ;3)
Exactly, I don't see why Italy's recent unification has anything to do with the validity of the history of its food traditions. Unification and industrialisation, migration and globalisation have only let regional foods be spread and evolve. They don't make regional foods any less Italian or any less traditional.
I mean there are a ton of Italian food history channels. Everyone understands this except professional historians. He also fails to understand that the name of a dish in Italy IS the recipe. It’s not an exotic marketing tactic. So you can eat cream with cheese on your pasta, just don’t call it all’Alfreddo.
La pizza es una comida napolitana y también italiana desde el momento que Nápoles es parte de Italia, incluso si su origen es anterior a la unificación
Also food has changed over the centuries. Farming techniques, environmental changes, and production methods have all had an impact on our food. There have also been changes to the type and variety of foods available (we have access to more food now than ever before in history). It's just common sense to make adjustments to dishes, according to these changes, in order to perfect them.
So.... Italian people moved abroad, took their culinary traditions with them, expanded on them in America where they weren't so impoverished and re-imported this back into their homeland? That sounds like evolution of the cuisine not a lie... This concept could be argued for many food cultures around the world - especially notable the one of the main reference points here is WW2 - America (and the rise of global tourism post WW2) most defiantly had an effect on the food cultures of the territories where they had troops stationed. I can see this guys perspective but I think the conversation is FAR more nuanced than what is presented.
The issue is the poor advertising regulations in American food. For example, take Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's very easy in America for a cheese company to make a fake parmesan that was made in wisconsin, and sell it at a premium price as if it came from Italy. This is because the regulations here are extremely lax, and what they are doing is technically not illegal. The only way to know if it is the real deal is to look for a PDO sticker, which many do not know about.
Except that's not what happened. After WWII an expansion in industrialisation and economic growth is what got Italians out of poverty. The mass production of food brought food prices down and an increase in jobs meant that the average Italian could now afford to buy more food. An increase in distribution also meant that Italians were also able to access items that previously could not be found in their region (therefore local dishes evolved). It had nothing to do with Italian-Americans re-importing food (although some exchanges were made) or the presence of troops or American tourists. This may be a popular narrative in America but it's not accurate.
This video ignores something very important: Italy (I mean geographically, the boot) was the richest, most powerful and most decadent region in the world for 2500 years. Starting with the great power of Rome, up to the richest cities of the Middle Ages, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan... These rich people all ate and feasted well. Of course, that's why there is a traditional Italian cuisine that can compete with and surpass any other cuisine in the world.
this is a trend that has come out recently. in your opinion does an ancient country like Italy have a cuisine from 50 years ago? 25% of Italian dishes are of Greek-Roman origin. the other half is medieval and Renaissance. Pasta was already eaten in the Middle Ages and it is widely documented. the first pizzeria was born in Naples and is certified by UNESCO. and in any case pizza is a dish from classical antiquity revisited after 1492 with the introduction of the tomato. drink less, it's good for your liver.
Exactly. This is merely about US people being proud about 1) thinking Italians are jealous about (?) and 2) boasting that somehow their nation is older than Italy (also ?). Overall, a giant exaggeration without even understanding Italy and Italians.
50 years ago is when Americans realised that there was a wider world and they decided they needed to be at the centre of it and take credit for everything that happened before and after they discovered it.
Quite controversial -- If Italian cuisine is so rudimentary and overrated, - Why does Wisconsin try to brand their cheese as Parmesaan or Mozarella? Why don't they try going to the drawing board and develop something with better texture or taste? - Shouldn't we appreciate their logic of combining tastes, e.g. tomato+cheese+basil? At least no pineapples around? They may not have tomatoes in Roman times but the Mediterranean basin has some culture of taste, and have some strong combinations compared to hawaiian pizza.
To the average American consumer who thinks of Italian cuisine as exotic and tastier than American cuisine mozzarella cheese sounds better than Wisconsin cheese Essentially: Italian thing👍 American thing👎
I’m afraid Grandi is right. In my northern town decades ago there was just one pizzeria that I think opened in the 50s but it wasn’t that popular until the 70s and 80s when it became much more popular
Whether you think it's a lie or not, or take Grandi at face value or not, what should be clear is that the prescriptivist "carbonara must have guancale -- no bacon" attitude is extremely modern and has no legitimate historical basis. As mentioned in the video, it makes sense for a new state to try to invent these founding myths. I don't think the point is that Italian cuisine is a lie, per se. It's that the prescriptivist authenticity is a lie. How about instead we try to enjoy ever-evolving culinary traditions and try to use what ingredients are local, sustainable and most importantly, just taste good?
absolutely, and the weird thing is that these founding myths have been exported and now people from elsewhere believe it just as well. Don’t get me wrong, i think guanciale is better than bacon, but any fatty cured piece of pork was gonna do if you were a poor farmer back in the day and I don’t see how the logic of that has changed. My mom’s family were poor farmers in Portugal and they had nice cured meat maybe a handful of times per year. Being so picky is a luxury of the modern world
Although Neapolitan style pizza was made only in Naples and surroundings, originally, you can find pizza variations all over the country with origins dating back to the Etruscans or even older (like the Roman Pinsa or the Ligurian focaccia and pizzata)
Without getting into the details of each product, Italy did always have a rich food history. Just not necessarily what's mainstream today. And that's because the average Italian was never "dirt poor", but actually enjoyed some of the highest living standards in the world for most of history. You can get a glimpse of such culinary culture on TH-cam channels like TastingHistory, or by asking Italian grandmas what they ate as a pre-WWII child. That being said, i do find random culinary "rules" cringy and obnoxious.
Politicians and many others often use this economic mythology. No doubt, Italy was not poor for most of its existence (even if it was not unified). For example, the GDP per capita estimate for 1700 is $1,100, the UK had $1,250, France - $910, and Japan - $ 570 (source: Maddison (2007): "Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD. Essays in Macro-Economic History"), the same goes for almost 2000 years, yet here WW2 was chosen as a starting point (which was arguably a low point for Italian history). Considering Italy's amazing climate and access to trade, it is hard to imagine that people in that region were struggling to find ingredients for many of their local traditional meals. Similar mythology is often applied to Norway, where I live, to simplify and dehumanize it as a "gas and oil" state.
@@salganik Exactly. In fact, the newer estimates of the study you mentioned put Italy still ahead of the UK by the year 1700 ($3009 VS $2365, expressed in 2011 USD). Countries like Germany, France or Spain were doing about half as well as Italy, and world average was around $1000. On top of that, Italy being politically fragmented (as well as geographically spanning in latitude) meant great food variety, culinary wealth.
@@salganik "WW2 was chosen as a starting point (which was arguably a low point for Italian history)". Americans have a habit of barging in at the last possible moment and then taking all the credit for themselves.
There are lots of interesting "pizza effect" examples in Ireland too. Halloween and st patrick's day are both irish, but their current boistrosness and commercial scale are a result of Irish-Americans, and this has been re-imported to Ireland
I want to leave you a testimony. I am Italian and I live in Italy, in Piedmont (a region next to France). My mother is Piedmontese and my father comes from the north of Puglia, in the south of the peninsula. I was born in 1960. Here, no one knew about pizza when I was little. That is: everyone had heard of it, but almost no one had eaten it. When some Neapolitans opened the first pizzeria in the area, in 1967, we went to eat it. We were in several families of friends. It was something new for everyone. Including for my father, because in his town the word pizza exists, but it refers to a completely different dish. A focaccia with ricotta mixed with sugar.
It was southern Italians (among them Neapolitans), who migrated to the north of Italy in search of jobs after WWII, who introduced southern style pizza (what we think of when we hear the word "pizza" today) to the north and from there it expanded to become popular in other areas of Italy too. Americans are always ready to take credit for everything.
The reality of Italian food is a lot more nuanced that our government (and this video) might lead you to believe. Is it true that many of our most famous meals didn't exist until very recently? Yes. Is it true that many of those famous meals were invented (by italians) abroad? also Yes. But that leaves out the reality of the Italian cultural heritage, which is for the most part confined to this hyper-local origin. The fact that Italy has been divided for centuries led to a patchwork of customs and traditions which affect us to this day. Depending on which region of Italy you go to you'll find different customs and traditions which might be seen as sacrilegious in others. The most famous dishes, those you'd find at any Italian restaurant abroad are really only the tip of the iceberg, they're just the lucky few dishes that happened to catch on (and in many cases were altered to fit the taste or the availability of ingredients of the host region). And to that point, i should say that because Italian cuisine adapted to the place and people it found itself in, unless you're from Italy, your "version" of Italian cuisine is tailored to fit your taste or local ingredients (like how spaghetti with meatballs became a thing in America) Also, to claim that "Italian food is a lie" just because the most famous dishes evolved recently and often abroad is prepostreous. All cuisines evolve and not necessarily in the country of origin. No one will doubt the American-ness of Cheeseburgers even if they only came about recently, no one will claim "Uramaki sushi is Canadian" just as no one will claim "Carbonara is American". To say that Italian food is a lie because it evolved recently and outside of Italy is to deny basically every other national cuisine. To claim that because we used ingredients that didn't originally exist on our land as a basis of criticism is also just as prepostreous. Is Swiss chocolate any less Swiss because cacao doesn't grow in the Alps....? And moreso, how much time does it have to pass for a food, custom or ingredient to be considered "traditional" by your standards? Decades? Centuries? Millennia? Also, just because the modern version of a dish only happened recently, it doesn't mean that that dish isn't preceded by centuries of evolution. Lagane are a Roman (as in Ancient Roman) invention which not only persisted to this day, but eventually evolved into the modern Lasagne (whose first recorded recipe is "only" from 1935). I also didn't appreciate the belittleing of my country in general, about how we can "only boast about football (and not even always) or food", firstly because most Italians aren't as gung-ho about neiter food nor football and secondly, because we have far more to offer than just those things. That was very out of left field and uncalled for. And finally, i should point out that mr. Grandi is famous for making loud, obnoxious and outlandish (albeit true in some cases) claims. He's the most extremist voice you could've picked to explain your argument. His entire shtick is offering this fringe, contrarian and controversial take, more for the sake of chaos than to elevate what our "real" traditions are.
Food insecurity was rife in the past and thank God that we have access to more and better quality food these days. In the video they didn't touch on the fact that the most frequent reason why Italians emigrated en masse was because of widespread poverty. Then, in their new surroundings, they suddenly had access to an abundance of food. They made good use of those new ingredients and altered their family recipes and there's no shame in that (after years of having little to eat it must have been a relief and any of us would have done the same). However, what annoys me is that, from what I hear them say on the matter, they were allowed to evolve but if in Italy we do the same, we're not being authentic. So what were the majority of those who stayed in Italy supposed to do? Starve even when we began to be able to access better food and more ingredients? It's absurd as well as hypocritical.
The one thing that i know from all that countries you mentioned are, Japanese didn't eat raw salmon until the Norwegian sell it to them. After Japanese immigrant used it in US. CMIIW
@@tenchotenchev5606 That may be so but the USA didn't introduce it around Italy. It was southern Italians, who migrated to the north of Italy in search of jobs after WWII, who introduced pizza to the north and from there it became popular in other areas of Italy too.
The pizza show also points out that American square pizza can be derived from traditional sfincione, so not just the Neapolitan pizza influence but a mix of these different southern Italian cultures
The issue that I see with this hypothesis, is that it is never discussed what Italians actually ate 200 or so years ago. So therefore what was Italian cuisine like back then, and how does it compare? Is it really so that no one thought of mixing lard, bacon and some egg in pasta before WWII? Ingredients that would have been accessible to farmers. One of the most popular pasta dishes is alio e oglio which is literally just pasta and oil and garlic. Is such a simple dish a fabrication?
While Italy is a country forcefully smashed together and had to create it's identity from different pieces, I am from Poland, which was very old country, but forcefully broken apart and with attempts of the occupiers to erase the culture (and yes, the communist years are also very culture erasing). So yeah, I know that Polish culture was broken and partially erased but for me it is fascinating what it really looked like pre-1795. And when we look on Italy as on a very recent creation and accept the fact the modern Italian cuisine may be way to deal with national insecurities it would be still fascinating for me how Italian cuisine looked like pre-1848. And yes, most of Italians where poor at that time, but nobility and clergy existed and it could be interesting to compare the cuisine of this two Italians worlds. While Poland and Italy are on the opposite sides of the spectrum, but even in Polish cuisine you see similar trends (but for different reasons). There are many dishes deemed as traditional but their are often inventions of communist regimes that just stayed e.g. eurasian carp on Christmas Eve which was totally communist invention (during the post-WW2 poverty communist government wanted appear as if it is caring for ordinary people and they came up with idea of a carp on each table during Christmas, because it was probably the only meat that could be provided so easily, because carp can be breed in any puddle of mud and just sold alive)
The past is a different country. You can't go backwards in thought process because you have a bias in your time o era, intuitive for you might not be for them. Why did the romans did not make hamburgers? Why did they did not invented gunpowder when its pretty much has 3 ingredients, are they dumb?
@@Hadar1991Italy is a state which unified late, but its culture wasn't just forcefully "smashed together". It wasn't, and funnily enough that was also because 2000 years ago the Romans unified it and since then Latin culture has been prevalent.
@@gs7828 And somehow Slavic languages ranging from Germany to Kamchatka and from Kola Peninsula to Peloponnese Peninsula were more mutually intelligible than Italian regional languages in 1848. :D
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There is literally a 2000 years old fresco of Pizza in Pompeii, nothing more to add to that.
i love that while this is purely american perspective and the creator simply acts like an angry sassy child that hurts himself for no reason then deny it, the comments of italian people have depth and high awareness. thanks to these people for not catching the bait lol the best response is simply that adults shouldn't take children seriously
Tomatoes may have come to Europe 500 years ago but, unlike Spaniards, Italians didn't start eating them until about 300 years ago. They were mostly used as ornamental plants.
Disclaimer: I'm Italian too. I love Alberto Grandi and Daniele Soffiati's podcast. I was shocked when I started listening to their episodes. Despite being a curious and generally aware person, I felt like I'd been trapped in this lie about Italian food. After a while, I started reflecting on my personal experiences and those of my grandmothers, who I still have. We're from Sicily, which, in fact, makes a difference. I mean, you can tell it's an island. My grandma, along with her mother and sister, used to make pasta nearly every day or every week. They continued to do so until the children got married and moved to the town. Pasta has been in Sicily for thousands of years. It's still unclear how pasta got to Italy and how it evolved. However, there are records suggesting that Sicily played a pivotal role in the production and distribution of pasta throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. But, as you and many people in this comment section (which I have to say I really appreciated) pointed out, cultures change, and so do culinary habits. So pasta probably disappeared from many places where it was once consumed but continued to exist in the south of Italy. Southern Italy also has many profound differences within itself. If you look at the geography of southern Italy, you can easily draw some conclusions, or at least hypotheses. I'm also quite annoyed by my fellow Italians. Every time I come back, I hear everyone telling each other that our things are the best and such. But we're not the only ones. I had a roommate from the Basque country, and he wouldn't stop saying how they had the best cuisine and everything in the world. I guess it can happen anywhere. I hear that here in Sweden too (please note that other Scandinavians do actually say that Swedes are arrogant). What I'm trying to say is that the world is complex and can't be explained in a 20-minute TH-cam video, or even in a comment. I just wish that all the things about Italians were more chill. It was fun in the beginning, but now that I live in another country and get the same stereotypes every day, I'm so tired of it.
Pizza used to be a highly local dish in Italy, that spread in the USA more widely and that then made pizza popular as a cultural reimport everywhere else in Italy. But that DOES NOT mean, that the USA invented pizza, as an increasing amount of americans seem to believe. Italians invented pizza, but only in the region in and around Naples, america turned from a local specialty into a national dish. But america in doing so had no part in the creative process of inventing pizza. America did the marketing, that's it.
Internal migration (southern Italians migrating to the north after WWII in search of jobs) was the reason pizza became widely popular elsewhere in Italy. Americans had nothing to do with it.
saying that the Italian language was invented in America and reintroduced to Italy sounds like a massive bullshit... true that all regions spoke their dialects, but it was taugh to italians in school and later on tv, but it was certainly not invented in America.. italians in America were immediately assimilated and after one generation spoke english only
As a teen we had an Italian student in my class (90ties). His Italian mother gave me her recipe for Carbonara. And that's how I do it to this day. She certainly used cream in it and for the next 10 years that was good. I even cooked them for Italian friends at the start of the 00ties and they all were happy, nobody complained. Then all those purist Carbonara stuff popped up.
Carbonara is a dish from Rome. Out of Rome people make it in different ways. Most Italian dishes are not Italian in general, they're from one city and imitated elsewhere. However I agree that not long ago people were putting onion or milk in carbonara even in Rome.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏YES! I've said this (though far less succinctly) in several comments. That's exactly how Neapolitan pizza spread throughout the rest of Italy. Americans had nothing to do with it.
i don't know, because real neapolitan pizza start to spread in the north like 20 years ago, when i was a child here you were able to find only "north italy pizza style" that was (and is in the place that still make it) very different
@@valmarsiglia incorrect, we had pizza in Tuscany in the 20's, it was certainly different from the Neapolitan style but that came as well around after world war 2. Before the war we used no cheese or maaaybe pecorino, no mozzarella. If you go to Pisa you can probably still find traditional pizzeria's putting pecorino on top. Source: I actually live here.
I'm Canadian, so when it comes to food nobody on earth thinks of us. What do we got? Poutine? Which is amazing, what's not to love about fries, gravy, and cheese, and I guess normal foods being given maple to kick it up a notch. Beyond that, our food is "American" as our nations blur together and the US is more who would be thought of for anything that we consider local cuisine.
IDK about the rest of Canada, but Quebec has some classic food such as Pâté chinois and Tourtière (although Poutine still is the culinary pride here). But I feel like the best part about food here is just the diversity coming from immigrants from all over the world
@@raphaelbosco8333 the diversity of food coming from immigrants is what I would consider the best food feature, from Filipino to Indian to Jamaican and more.
@@non7top haha, fair point and a good example of somewhere existing for a long time, but the nation of current itself is a far younger concept or identity.
There is a mistake in this video. Tomatoes are not from South America but from Mexico - which I hope everyone knows is not South America. Mexico is not even close to the Equator. The word tomato derives from Nahuatl, the Aztec / Mexica language. The first Europeans to encounter it were not Columbus and crew, as shown on this video, but Cortes and his conquistadors. And they were the first ones to bring it to Europe within the Columbian exchange. Other Mexican ingredients include chocolate, maize, beans, chillies, vanilla, avocado, various types of squash, amongst others.
My dad was born in 1946 (he had me at more than 50) and I just found out last year that when he was a child no one knew what a Pizza was in our home town Florence. I was shocked because for me Pizza has always been a given but actually it came only in the late 50ies and I guess for its generation it was like what Kebab or Sushi was for my generation: a popular new dish brought in from the exterior.
Because your dad was Florentine not Napolitan, Americans stereotypes Italy like they are the same and has the same food, ask him if he was eating pane sciocco or schiacciata.
W video, especially the conclusion part "the dark side of food purity". I apreciate your consistency, and how you find supporting evidence to make any sort of claim instead of making presumptions.
That food historian ignores the kind of pizza that were used in other regions. As pizza al tegamino was in use in Turin (region Piedmont) and documented around 1930, his American soldiers craving pizza should have visited that city. Or Liguria for pizza all’Andrea, known since the XV century.
I think it was more an issue that during/just after the war food was scarse so there were shortages everywhere and American soldiers may not have had any more luck finding a pizza al tegamino in Turin than they did finding a pizza Napoletana in Naples. Even if they had found a pizza al tegamino they still probably would have complained that it wasn't "real" pizza (like what they were used to in the US).
He referred to taking hot food 'out of the wall', which is popular in Amsterdam and seems to be a tourist attraction. I think their caramel waffles are more popular around the world. Their best food is served in their so called Chinese restaurants. They serve a blend of Chinese and Indonesian cuisine. I much enjoyed the fresh herring with onion, mussels and fried fish (Kibbeling). Simple food but o so nice. A shame there are no dutch food chains that spread these dishes over the world.
Many many, years ago, I met a young man by the name "Santo" Sorry, I went blank; I can't remember his last name right now.Anyway, he informed me that it was "he" that introduced "Pizza" (as we know it here in the States) to "Russia" they never heard of it. He also said he's in "The World's Record Book" for giving him credit for having the first Pizza in Russia.
Italy 🇮🇹 is a very unique country. Via culture & geography. It's a peninsula that just juts out from the Southern part of Europe. They have towering mountains in the North to fiery volcanoes to the South. Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Turin, Palermo, etc.
As an italian, one that is always curious, I already discovered how both carbonara and tiramisù are fairely new, and also how some things were imported from abroad, but this video is only half of the story, there are a lot of regional wines, cheses and foods that dates back to centuries, sure though like any food they change at a steady pace. (speaking of italians leaving for america, developing new recepes than bringing them back in Italy, I doubt it happened often, italians never really returned, not only that but the recipes too stayed in america for the most part, which is why no italian has ever heard of like 75% of italian dishes foreigners mention, like anything that has ceasar or alfredo in the name)
@@egan5384 really? I guess mostly in the south, I know no one who did (like none of my friends' greatgrandparents) my mother kinda did, but given that her family stayde in Brazil for more than a century and at least 4 generations that doesn't really count as her returning and more like 2 different migrations across generations
Fettuccine Alfredo are 100% made in Italy and were exported in the US. But since they were promoting the dish we labeled Fettuccine Alfredo as American, and so we snubbed it
if it wasn't for native americans cultivating the tomato, the modern pizza wouldn't exist. The food migration spread corn, tomato, potato, chocolate and chili peppers around the world. Every time any one eats pizza, they should thank native american farmers. The claim that france is the inventor of gastronomy is complete BS. lots of cultures had made amazing foods. Did France invent masala spice? Before french cuisine made excessive buttery dishes, china had begars chicken. Why did Europe spend so much money to get spices from asia?
What a load of Baloney! True: most so-called Italian dishes were made famous in the Americas, because that's where most people emigrated to, and were later exported to the rest of the world, but saying that the food was then reimported back to Italy is just a false claim. No Italian in their right mind would ever call pizza Italian, we call it Neapolitan (i.e. napoletana), because, guess what, that's where it's originally from.... And the first ever pizza to be made was a marinara (the one you described as unappealing and unappetising) and guess what we still love it and eat it to this very day ;) There are several different varieties of pizza-like dishes which existed in the country long before WW2 and those were made in the simplest of ways... I still remember my grandma telling me how they would bake bread once every 15 days (when they had enough flour) and make bread with homegrown cherry tomatoes and oregano on top, and it wasn't a culinary delicacy back then or something only the wealthy could enjoy, that's actually how the poor used to live, they would have to live off of their own produce and what the land would give them and would then cook most things in wood-fired ovens. I also loved your claim about Italian being invented in the US and then being brought back to Italy ... So I'm guessing the Italian I've spoken my entire life was invented in the States... thank you so much for debunking Dante's nonsense. How dare they attribute one of the most beautiful pieces of literature to an Italian from Florence! Can't wait for you to debunk the history of the "three crowns"... Most Italians, myself included, couldn't care less about sports and certainly do not call our country "Il bel paese" because of its rich culinary history, we call it so because of its history full-stop. I'm proud to call myself Italian and to be living in a country with the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage sites. Oh how I used to despise it when I was younger because everywhere I would travel everything would be brand new and shiny, only now do I see the wisdom my forefathers had in preserving what was and reminding ourselves of where we come from.
I went to Italy in the 1970s. Pizza was not available in northern Italy. In Venice we found something called Pizza that was actually more like pizza crust/bread brushed with olive oil and garlic. American tourists demanded Naples style pizza and now Italians don't even know that we Americans were responsible for the pizza they enjoy.
Nonsense. Neapolitan style pizza was introduced in the north when many southern migrants migrated to big northern cities in search of work after WWII. Pizzerias sprung up originally to cater to southern factory workers but then it became popular with locals too. American tourism had little to do with the spread of Neapolitan pizza throughout the whole of Italy also because tourists (especially at that time) tended to stick to a handful of touristy destinations. So while those places may have catered to Americans there were many more places that did not.
@@josephsermarini4632 Well I grew up there in the 70s so you're the one who's bullshitting. Venice isn't the whole of N. Italy and Venice is one of those touristy places I mentioned (which eventually catered to American tourists). It was southern migrants relocating for work in INDUSTRIAL areas of the north (not tourist destinations) that made pizza popular. Of course this was a gradual process that didn't happen over night and in some areas Neapolitan style pizza was easier to find than others. Therefore, even if you did visit a couple of touristy places and didn't find pizza (boo hoo) it doesn't mean you can speak for the entire North of Italy and claim to know more than someone who grew up in there. Anyway, many of the pizzerie you find in touristy places in the north (and probably elsewhere as well) don't tend to make genuine Neapolitan pizza. They cater to what tourists expect to find (that's what you get for DEMANDING things and it serves you right). Then again I wouldn't expect an American to know the difference so the joke is on you. Here's a tip, though, if a pizzeria is mostly filled with tourists (no Italians) it means the food isn't authentic. Have a good one.
@@josephsermarini4632 My friends and family had a chuckle over this comment. So you think you're the only boomer here? I was raised in N. Italy in the 70s and in our little village we had two pizzerias. We are located in the industrial area of N. Italy (which Venice is not) and, as I said, it was southern Italian migrants who opened the first pizzerie in the industrial areas in northern Italy (areas which in the past were less visited by tourists). Venice is not the whole of N. Italy neither is it in an industrial region. Yes, I'm sure the more touristy areas ended up catering to tourists but to suggest that Americans influenced the spread of pizza across the entire north of Italy is simply not true and Americans are not responsible for the pizza we enjoy today across the peninsula.
@@anta3612 Venice was not the only place I went. And sure there were things they called pizza but they were terrible. There was no good pizza in Rome, Florence, or Milan either. Oh, and this is not my theory. Watch the video. Duh.
I am sure this will be drowned out, but I wanted to point out that you really missed the mark on some essentials. 1. It was Italian cooking techniques brought to French court that heavily changed/influenced what we know as French Cuisines. 2. "cucina povera" is what Italians are so "proud" of or at least strongly recognise as their cooking tradition and influence. 3. It cannot be understated about how regional, that is community to community, pride and culture played and still plays a heavy role in the adoption and spread of dishes and recipes. Also remember, if you have spent any time in Italy at all, that there is a great divide between the north and south. One last thing as there is much debate on pasta. I have my own thoughts on the co-development of pasta like processes. However, there is no doubt that pasta as we know it (in sheets) existed with the Romans. Not to say that they or the Etruscans created it... but that saying it came from Arabs I think can possibly be flawed unless you think the Chinese imported pasta from the Assyrians. But who am I to say anything to be honest. I have not Italian and have only spent a few years living in Italy. I.e. I am just another Bloke whinging on YT
Dry pasta as we know it today was originally brought to Sicily by the Arabs. Originally dry pasta was mostly consumed in Sicily but eventually spread to other areas in the south where it was widely produced thanks to their soil which was suitable for growing the variety of wheat needed to make this type of pasta. It was a convenient staple food that could be stored for long periods of time without refrigeration. Dry pasta was not widely consumed in the north since the soil isn't suitable for durum wheat and therefore fresh pasta is what was more common. Staple foods in the north, therefore, consisted of rice and polenta. Then, with economic growth after WWII which followed an expansion in industrialisation which allowed for mass production of products, and their nationwide distribution, dry pasta became more accessible in other areas of Italy too. After WWII Italians also had television which influenced consumer choice one of which was dry pasta. With their newfound prosperity Italians were, for the first time, able to afford such products which previously (in the north where production was limited and raw materials had to be transported from the south making it an expensive product to purchase) had been consumed only by the rich. Obviously mass production brought prices down which also made it more affordable for the average Italian.
With regards to cucina povera: it's true that in Italy we're proud of our humble roots even though we are thankful that we now have access to more food. Italian-Americans are critical that some of our recipes are different today than they were in the past (some of theirs have remained the same) but this is because we have now access to more ingredients. They forget that the reason their ancestors emigrated in the first place was because of wide spread poverty and when they were able to access more food in their new homeland they didn't hesitate and used them in their recipes thus altering them as a result. In other words: they are allowed to evolve out of poverty but we're not. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Quit a bit of scandalization and nonsense here.... That 1800 something description is actually just a pizza marinara. Neapolitan pizza cooks for 60-90 seconds, so yes the tomatoes are almost raw and due to the high heat the dough is charred ("burned"). So no, the claim that pizza didn´t develop in Italy is frankly pure BS. The video itself shows that it clearly originated in Naples and yes became popularized(!) (but not developed/invented) by American tourists who knew it from Italian immigrants in the US. And I´m not even Italian.
A cookbook from 1881 in which a recipe of carbonara is found is Il principe dei cuochi, written by the Neapolitan Francesco Palma. The recipe is called "Maccheroni alla gricia" and calls for pancetta, eggs, pecorino romano, and black pepper. Here is the recipe: Ingredients: 500 g maccheroni 200 g pancetta 4 eggs 100 g grated pecorino romano Black pepper to taste In Rome, pancetta was replaced by guanciale. Both, unlike bacon, are not smoked. That's a huge difference in taste compared to bacon. It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck... We strongly doubt that it was invented by american soldiers.
thanks for this comment. the video makes a very strange impression that before WW2 in all European cities, people didn't know how to use all their ingredients. Of course, certain things (meet, spices) were relatively expensive and were only eaten during holidays and festivals, yet there are also some simple ingredients that should be cooked in some way to be eatable =)
1. If it tastes good to you, then it isn't wrong for you. 2. I've cooked dry pasta without salting the water. That didn't taste as good as pasta cooked in salted water. Also, given that 'traditional" Italian recipes have you reserve the pasta water and add some to the final dish, not having salt in that water means you'll have to add salt to get the seasoning to the right level. And salty water is easier to integrate into a dish with a sauce. 3. The pineapple is easier to have with every bite if it is cut into chunks instead of rings. Also, fresh pineapple tastes better than canned ones, and that taste improves if they get some grilling in the oven. 4. We went through something similar with Chinese food in America. I totally support the thesis that American Chinese food is its own culinary category, clearly descended from Chinese cooking traditions from a couple of specific, and seafaring, regions of China. It also has elements that are clearly derived from the palate of the mid-20th century American family, including ingredients and spice levels. There's also a major bifurcation of Chinese dishes into those from the mainland, and those from enclaves of "overseas" Chinese immigrants throughout Asia and the west. When I visited Delhi, I ate at in Indian-Chinese restaurant. It was like some bizarro world of Chinese cuisine, with Indian spices and cooking methods mapped onto Chinese dishes. I've encountered one restaurant in California doing that style of food. It's arguably the same with lots of other Asian cuisines: Singaporean Chinese, Thai Chinese, Malaysian Chinese, et cetera.
"It's pizza place on top of pizza place" That's not unique to Italy. In Stockton on Tees, England, there used to be a street with I think 7 pizza places in a row. Well, I'm not talking about proper pizzarias though. I'm talking about grungy take-away places that also sell kebabs, burgers, and the local specialty, parmos. In fact that street was colloquially known as "parmo alley".
Of all aspects of nationalism, food nationalism is the most ridiculous. Food is about providing the nutrients our body needs and giving us sheer pleasure. It's not about conforming to imaginary 'traditions'.
The original pizza he describes sounds just like Rhode Island pizza! We're the only place I know of that still eats red pizza with no chesse on top. It's almost always eaten cold or room temp, and it is staple party food. Always served at family gatherings and kids' birthday parties. You buy it from the Italian bakery (not the pizza shop)!
"Marinara" or simply called "Pizza al pomodoro" is also common in southern Italy but it's not among the people's favourites. We consume it for birthdays and other celebrations as well, very cool, maybe because it's the cheapest. the last point is accurate.
By the way, it's been a while, and it's incredibly amazing to see this channel reach 180k subscribers. Congratulations! I would love to see more of your content, and I would also greatly appreciate it if you could share some tutorials on how you make your videos.
I'm an American of Italian descent and I'm also a big a fan of Italian culture and products. Knowing a bit more history though I knew that many Italian dishes didn't exist in their modern form until relatively recently. I look at it more like the region has had strong agricultural and textile traditions going back to Roman times, and those traditions have been slowly built upon over thousands of years, vs thinking that all Italian products must have been around since time immemorial.
I love this video. I'm Thai and OTR Food & History has done amazing video on the complicated origin of Sriracha..... a product which I often see people (including thai) argue about on its "authenticity" the internet.
italian food culture is not about the food, its about the respect for the raw materials and it's a great way to plan your day. You go to work, you sit around a table for lunch, you have a little pause for reflecting and let your tensikns go away and then you have a fresh brain for the afternoon. It is a culture and can be found everywhere in the italian boot. Even on the alps. And it really has always been like that.
Yes, food is related to identity, one thing few people know is that regional identity is probaly stronger than national identity in italy: pizza is neapolitan, carbonara is from rome etc. I would not personally take pride from these dishes since i'm not from central italy. One thing i advise tourists to do is try to find the identity of the place they visit, instead of asking what is considered italian abroad, try asking what is from that place, many times the history of these dishes, while still being mixed with legends and foreign influences, is fascinating and sometimes contested between different towns, you find historic rivalries, different ways of making the same dish, you really delve into italian history and thought process of making food more than the most famous dishes. I also want to note that the rules, while being ridicolous on the surface, give a sense of meaning and unity for the broader italian population more than the food itself, and all this pride is a compensation of the ridicule italians feel from foreigners that is given by absurd politics and the hard economic situation, same goes for historical figures, an italian will always tell you that marconi invented telephone and Fermi the nuclear reactor, it can be felt as bragging but it really is a way to show that italians are not just bunga bunga.
I went to Rome in 1978 and saw a pizza place at the bottom of the Spanish steps. It was crowded. I went in and ordered a slice. He asked me what I wanted on it. "Why--tomato sauce and cheese, of course." He squirted some tomato sauce on the cold pizza and sprinkled some powdered cheese on top. It was terrible. It was only then that I noticed that everyone else was having powdered sugar on theirs.
I was introduced to Carbonara in Örebro, Sweden in 1998. Hitchikking all over Sweden on the run from Humana school. Living in a churchkeepers home for a two weeks with two polish friends. Our swedish host was cooking it everny night with his best friend. With cream. It has changed my life. I was cooking carbonara everywhere since that time, even for italian friends here in Bratislava. Until someone told me about the eggs. That was the second change :)
In Bratislava? Lol! Let’s meet and cook a carbonara for each other 🤭 I’m born in Poland, lived most of my life in Italy, now in Bratislava ☺️ and love for carbonara! 😂😂😂
When in Italy, it's interesting to try out the regional cuisine, i.e. the one that really has a long tradition. Historic Tuscan or Sicilian dishes can be surprisingly different from "all-Italian cuisine" P.S. No cream but always guanciale and no bacon for carbonara. Never spaghetti with (ragù) bolognese. And never dump half a liter of "sauce" on pasta but mix it before you serve it. ... fortunately, I have no strong opinions ;-)
To say that before 1861 Italy didn't exist is denying the existence of Italians and their culture. It's the wrong approach to cultures and nations with thousands of years. Next, all cultures change over time and Italians have never said that tomatoes were grown in Italy more than 500 years ago, or that coffee beans originally come from Italy. However, if you think that the US, a non-nation by your definition of what a culture is and with an inexistent history, has shaped what Italy, Italians and their food to be what it is today you would be, again, mistaken - and a victim of US-centrism too!
I only lived in Italy for 2 years and that carbonara preparation while cancelling yourself caused me to cry out in pain. That being said, I'm American and grew up eating pineapple on the pizza we had available to us. I don't go around asking for it in Italy, but I do still enjoy it at home. I loved my time in Italy, surrounded by Italians, so it doesn't bother me one bit that many of the things that I was told are "founding myths." If that's not how carbonara started, who better to tell me what carbonara is today than Italy. I'm fine with it. Edit: I'm not 100% sure why I want to add this, but I don't regret at all learning Italian. It will probably never be as useful to me as learning Spanish or Chinese could be, but it's a beautiful launguage that allows me to communicate directly with wonderful people in their own language. If I let myself slow down enough to think about it, I always miss Italy and wonder what it's like now after 20 years being away.
Ok i agree with the pizza but i feel the cabonara is miss leading since a similar dish call pasta alla gricha existed way before which is simmilar to "correct" cabinara just with out the egg
yes, but you see the addition of the egg is a very complex development that took hundreds of years to come up with. No one every thought to do that before. Only Americans had this technology.
though italy was only relatively recently made into a nation state and made up of various independent countries, before that they were united as one people as the romans, that's why when they came back together Rome was made their capital as it's what culturally and historically united them. Though the romans expanded into much of Europe, there was always more ties with those within the boot of Italy, hence why national unification came after being divided against each other by various other powers like the Spanish, French, Austrians, etc
This reminds me of something I saw on the TV here in the UK, about Wensleydale cheese. And basically, yes there is a long history of cheese being made in Wensleydale, but the type of cheese varied and changed drastically over the years. What we know today as Wensleydale cheese is a pretty modern invention.
Can we stop calling USA AMERICA??? It's really annoying. They don't own the name. I'm just as American as them. America is not USA. America is the continent. Stop this nonsense. May be make a video about this. About how in Latin America we don't want to call them American.
When you were showing off "Italian" products, I thought they looked too familiar and then when you started cooking my suspicion was confirmed, you were in Slovenia.
I'm from the north of Italy. Our cousin culture is the "butter culture", not the "oil culture". We never ate pasta and pizza before 1970. And now we have more sushi restaurants than pizza shops
"The most authentic Parmesan comes from Wisconsin" No Parmesan at all comes from Wisconsin. The ONLY authentic Parmesan comes from Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna and Mantua. Parmesan has been made there for more than 800 years. And Wisconsin came into existence when?
Things like tomatoes and corn and peppers were probably introduced to Italy when the Kingdom of Sicily was a Spanish viceroyalty in the south and Spain held territories in the north as well under the HRE during the 1500s-1700s period. Things like tomatoes, corn (polenta), vanilla, zucchini/squashes, peppers, and certain beans came from what is today Mexico. Cacao too, although its origins are likely in South America. Potatoes also came from South America making them front and center of cuisines from Ireland (Irish potato famine), to Germany to Russia. The name vanilla, is actually of Spanish origin--the name for bean pod in Spanish is "vaina", its diminutive is "vainilla" which is actually the Spanish name for vanilla--the word was then most likely anglicized in the English speaking world. The name for tomato is actually of nahuatl Aztec origin, know by them as "tomatl". The word for chocolate is also of nahuatl Aztec origin, known to them as xocola-tl or chocola-tl. Fun fact, the native cactus known as nopales in Mexico, now also grow in the wild in Italy. The Kingdom of Sicily had a commonality with the viceroyalties Spain established in the Americas during the same period--particularly modern day Mexico that was then known as the viceroyalty of New Spain. In fact while New Spain had mostly Spanish viceroys as in Sicily, it occasionally had French and Italian viceroys--namely from Sicily. And sometimes viceroys were transferred across viceroyalties between the Americas and Europe. And when the Spanish king expelled and exiled the Jesuits from Mexico/New Spain, they were resettled in Italy. Understand that many Jesuits, whatever country they were in, like other monastic and convent orders, usually came from the aristocracy. Usually an older daughter or a child that stood to inherit nothing. So these were Jesuits born in Mexico and brought up in the Catholic monastic life there.
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man his comment has 1 like and no comments
Your heritage is a lie
Fake !
In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians.
A And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
@@Dibipable Arabs do not exist pasta in their diet
In Italy everyone writes books also dogs ... a book that must be thrown into the undifferentiated
Expect this to be more controversial than most political topics
i am ready to be cancelled
@@ThePresentPast_😂
@@ThePresentPast_and I'm ready to watch the show.
Well partly, it's because this is a political topic. It's one that's used to justify a certain sense of "Italian" identity that doesn't exist and to justify Italian nationalism. See this excerpt from the Financial Times:
There’s a dark side to Italy’s often ludicrous attitude towards culinary purity. In 2019, the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggested adding some pork-free “welcome tortellini” to the menu at the city’s San Petronio feast. It was intended as a gesture of inclusion, inviting Muslim citizens to participate in the celebrations of the city’s patron saint. Far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini wasn’t on board. “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture,” he said.
When Grandi intervened to clarify that, until the late 19th century, tortellini filling didn’t contain pork, the president of Bologna’s tortellini consortium (a real job title) confirmed that Grandi was right. In the oldest recipes, tortellini filling is made from poultry. “This is the reason why I do what I do,” Grandi says. “To show that what we hail as tradition isn’t, in fact, tradition.”
Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for right-wing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. As part of her election campaign in 2022, prime minister Giorgia Meloni posted a TikTok video in which an old lady taught her how to seal tortellini parcels by hand. This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)
Food in Italy is a political topic, y know
This doesn't just apply to Italy. Vast majority of dishes associated with various countries only took their modern form in the last hundred or so years.
That's the lesson of the video. It's pointless to argue over if a dish is traditional or not, because every dish has its roots somewhere, and every dish evolves with time. Nothing that you eat today was eaten exactly the same way 200 years ago, and nothing will be eaten the same 200 years in the future.
Some of the most iconic "Chinese" ingredients were introduced in the Columbian Exchange, just like Italy. The staple crop of Northern Chinese peasants (sweet potato) is from South America.
thanks to the Indigenous Americans and their insane variety of foods that could have only been developed in a place without europeans for millennia : D
There are very few “traditional” Indian dishes that would even have been possible to make more than a hundred years ago.
"Nation" doesn't exist, Luca exists for a limited time, Friedrich too. Traditional is a quality not a quantity.
If you change definitions woman can be man but Luca is still Luca, and Friedrich too
Italy has a lot of good food, enjoy and be grateful for their effort to bring you the best recipe they experienced defining as well as they can recipes that changes in every way possible from door to door, from hands to hands 🤌
"Leave the gun, take the cannoli" and "my grandmother is a bicycle" are the greatest references ever.
Fake !
In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians.
G And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
It's actually quite common for traditions to simply have been invented not that long ago. In the 19th century, the "traditions" of Bavaria were invented by royals because there were none before, Bavaria wasn't as unified as was always and still is constantly said. They needed something to bind Bavaria together, and it worked maybe too well, so well that now many Bavarians see themselves as fully separate from Germany culturally.
i wouldnt say fully but to a major degree for sure lmfao they even get a bit of hate sometimes lol
@@awellculturedmanofanime1246 there was no unified Bavarian culture before the 19th century. It was just local.
@@David_Granger Well that's the case for everything. There is no unified culture anywhere, it's all local.
@@David_Grangeractually there was more Bavarian language and culture compared to anything "german". Many of these cultures and languages were suppressed in Germany, France and Italy.
@@SafavidAfsharid3197 nope, because Bavaria as we know it today didn't even exist back when we're talking.
This can be claimed to most foods we consider nowadays traditional, any food with meats in it were not really common everyday food throughout history
Yeah and not only in Italian food, he thought he had a great opinion because it’s obvious there was less meat - but his opinion is flawed and wrong.
@@iv4nGGwho is "he"?
Porridge is
Good thing most traditional food from my tribe doesnt have meat
Not being everyday food does not imply they didn't exist. Many foods we now have the luxury to enjoy whenever we want have existed for centuries as recipes for special occasions, to be consumed once a year.
Even if the story about pizza margherita was fake it still was an aricle by a magazine in Rome (not naples) in 1880 and that means two things:
1)Pizza was known outside of naples
2)Pizza had cheese on it before the mass immigration of italians in the us( that came later)
I heard that the story about pizza without cheese came from an American GI who, during the liberation of Italy in WWII, expected to find the same sort of pizza as back in the US. At the time, though, food was scarse so people ate just whatever they could get their hands on and had to do without a lot of ingredients.
The oldest written proof of pizza is from ancient Roman era… obviously it was know in Italy…
Modern pizza with tomatoes was born in Naples.
Who cares.1880 is not that old
Source: 😂
@@anta3612 that is false.
The story of pizza margherita from 1880 is probably fake.
There was a description of pizza from 1760.
There are description of pizza without tomatoes from Roman era.
I never put much stock in so-called "authenticity".
I'm from a region in Malaysia famed for its cuisine and a lot of what foodfluencers might claim is "traditional" is really just a couple of generations old at most. One person innovated something with local ingredients in the 1970s, people loved it and then it caught on with other hawkers through word of mouth, and now people who grew up with this version of a particular dish call it traditional because it's how they, individually, have always had it.
In fact, a lot of the "traditional" foods in many cultures aren't really that old. Several Thai dishes familiar to many people are less than 100 years old! That's what makes the various forms of Mexican cuisine so amazing--the idea of tacos, burritos and enchiladas actually date back several _hundred_ years.
What region are you talking about?
@@Kamado4949 Penang island :)
@@SacredDaturaa oh what cuesine were you talking about? I only know about nasi goreng and nasi lamak when it comes to Malay foods 😅
@@SacredDaturaa Ah, Penang. Land of the legions of street hawker food, and a more discerning (or rather, picky) palate among its inhabitants, present company included. Which dish are you talking about?
Just judging by the title... I guess you didn't get enough hate mail?
spice up your life!
Fake !
In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians.
U And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
@@Dibipable 🤣🤣🤣
Also you don't probably know but the colosseum and the tower of Pisa were built in the USA and then brought to Italy. Venice looks as it is today thanks to an engineer from Illinois that worked in Chicago, he was able to dig the city's channels after the knowledge he collected when chicago was built.
Leonardo da Vinci? He was born in New York's little Italy and then moved to toscany. Finally, really few people know, Sardinia is now in Italy because it was brought there from the US soldiers after WWII but geologically speaking is coming from California and it is now there only artificially
Lol
The funny aspect about this video lays in the fact that it seems to identify the whole Italian cuisine with carbonara, pizza and parmesan cheese. First of all, I support a work of historical food "debunking", but done in a more accurate way: carbonara is generally thought to be a relatively modern (already existing before the war? Invented by American troops? By local people after the war? Who knows) variant of older and simpler "pastoral" pasta dishes, such as gricia (a sort of white carbonara with only guanciale, a sort of bacon, pecorino and black pepper). Pizza, although fried and/or baked in oven but only garnished with cheese, is documented since the XVI century in the area of Naples. Parmesan cheese changed many times through the centuries, depending on the shape preference and the feeding of the cows that influenced the taste and the way of milk fermentation ("old" parmesan cheese was more similar to a cheese called Granone Lodigiano), but is well known since the XIII-XIV centuries: Boccaccio mentions in the Decameron "Parmigiano grattugiato" (grated parmesan).
Second, if you extend your range of investigation to the great rest of the Italian cuisine, you'll see a long line of continuity, in term of regional dishes, that gave finally birth to a unified Italian cuisine during the XIX century: the "Bible" of Italian cuisine, "La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene" published in 1891 by Pellegrino Artusi, collected a great number of regional recipes creating a sort of encyclopedia of Italian cuisine; so, there we can observe both continuity and innovation, in introducing new personal variants, foreign influences and in extending the range of local dishes (which in this way were not lost) to the whole recently unified Peninsula. And, for most of its recipes, the book by Artusi is still well present in modern and contemporary Italian cuisine.
Funny aspect about this video is; how to make a video that is moderetly factual (some unverified things are presented as facts), but very appealing to Americans xD
Yes, foods change, yes Italians are overprotective about their ways that might, or might not be that old... But watching this video, it appears that everything that Italians claim as their tradition came from US xD
bravo veramente un video fatto bene ma con delle premesse del cazzo
love u
There's no unified italian cuisine, every region has is own different cuisine even today.
I completely agree with luca.platti and DankoPetrovic
I'm a food historian and this almost creates a few NEW myths even though it claims to dispel some.
1. Pizzas and similar pies were found all around Italy traditionally. Neapolitan pizza is only one variety of traditional pizza, before it took over there were many regional varieties of pizza. Very often these had anchovies, onions / or tomatoes, such as the Ligurian Piscialandrea, Pizza Pugliese or Sfincione and Pizzolu from Sicily. Focaccia and pizza could sometimes be used synonymously and many focaccias are similar to pizza. Neapolitan pizza however became the most famous one and took over because of the establishment of pizzerie. Just outside of Italy you also had similar pies such as the Niçoise Pissaladière or Croatian Komiška Pogača.
The situation is similar to pesto were Genovese Pesto sauce now dominates, historically there were many other pesto sauces. You also had a huge regional variety of "stuffed pizzas" (such as Tiella di Gaeta) were only Calzone remains the one that's world famous today
Modern day industrialized food systems gives us more standardised food and less regional diversity, even in Italy!
2. Cheese and/or meat pizzas are found in Italy before "Americanized Pizza". Such as the Pizzolu from Catania or Murseddu from Calabria. Pies that are similar to cheese-and-meat-pizza can be found as far back as the Medieval era in many countries of western Europe (without tomatoes!) So meat and cheese pizza has probably been around a very long time, very probably in Italy too. Why wouldn't they?
These pies probably spread from the Middle East into Christian Europe as many of them have names related to the Muslim world. like "Pagan cakes" (Germany) or "The Turks head" from Medieval England. In the Middle East today you have traditional cheese and/or meat pies like Pide (Turkey), Manakish (Lebanon) and Kachapuri (Georgia) which are definitely relatives of pizza. German and Alsatian Flammekuche is a survivor of this Medieval "pizza" tradition.
2. What they are cooking in that Goodfellas scenes (besides the steaks) is the American version of Ragù alla napoletana - it's an Italian dish with alot of meat in it. So the meat in this dish is NOT an American addition even though the recipe has been changed a bit. However Ragù is definitely influenced by French cuisine - it's called a "ragout" after all.
Italian cuisine has alot of foreign influences such as French, Austrian, Turkish, Swiss, Spanish, Mexican, Greek, Medieval Arabic-Persian or even Slavic. Medieval Italian aristocracy ate dishes with very exotic ingredients such as coconuts from India.
Also huge amounts of meats wasn't traditionally that widely available to many Italians in the past, mostly to the richer ones.
If you watch the Fellini classic "La Strada" (1954) you can see the main characters (which are all poor working class) munching on huge pieces of lamb alongside their maccheroni - very much breaking another "rule" of Italian cuisine - of never serving big pieces of meat with pasta This "rule" was invented by the bourgeoise in the 19th century following European fashion of strict separate courses in their new "Service á la Russe" way of serving formal dinners. Most of Europe left this kind of meal service for simpler three course dinners but not Italians.
3. Grandi dismisses the "Caci e uova" theory of Carbonara's origin but actually the older Neapolitan dish "Pasta cacio e uova" is sometimes very similar to carbonara. It can contain many more ingredients for example garlic, pancetta and peas.
"Pasta alla pappana "from Rome is basically similar to the "British" carbonara - containing fettucini, peas, ham and cheese and cream, but is still considered "traditional" by Italians. So it's mainly a name-issue. Carbonara developed out of a living tradition of a variety of pasta dishes. Recipes were not standardized but varied in the past.
4. Tiramisu is probably older than the 1980s. It's origin is unknown of course.
I think some people love the "counter-intuitive" narratives a bit too much sometimes. This can lead you on a false path too.
Thanks for this interesting additional information. Just to say, I don't think anyone is claiming Italian cuisine was invented wholesale in the US, based on nothing but myths and bacon. It's the supposed one and only "traditional" way of doing things that is a new invention. Like you said, there were many dishes similar to carbonara back in the day but these days people get defensive about changing but the tiniest ingredient. It's a bit of a shame really that we might lose these varied traditional recipes for one homogenised monomyth of "proper" Italian cuisine. I mean, I love Flammkuchen. Would've been a shame if it all became pizza.
Did you not actually watch the video? Nothing you said contradicts any claims made.
@@unvergebeneid a lot of people in Italy are obsessed with authenticity but in reality there are a good amount of other people that does not care what you put in your plate . The problem is when people try to make a new recipe based on the original , they don't give a new name to dish and that can create confusion if said dish becomes famous
@@hope7237 I think those people exist in every country. Nowhere have I seen so much convenience food as in France but that doesn't mean _haute cuisine_ isn't a thing or that there aren't a lot of French who feel some kind of national pride in their food.
@@unvergebeneid The monomyth of "proper" Italian cuisine is american. In Italy, we have: 1) regional cuisines 2) cuisine for tourists
The "tortellini... recipe .. only after the late 1800" is a joke. In a huge area of Emilia Romagna, tortellini are just filled with ricotta and spinach or other vegetables, while cappelletti are filled with meat. Nowadays many people confuse one with the other.
The oldest recipe for cappelletti in broth dates back to 1584, and is found in the cookbook Il trinciante by Bartolomeo Scappi and it used pork, plus the use of flour, eggs, grated cheese, and veal, and meat broth.
Meat pork has been staple food in the area for centuries and it was used to cook in a huge amount of dishes also as lard oil. It doesn't make sense to deny such a simple fact.
Here are the ingredients for Scappi's recipe:
1 pound of flour
12 eggs
1 pound of grated cheese
1 pound of pork
1 pound of veal
1 gallon of meat broth
This recipe is still the basis for the preparation of cappelletti in broth today.
As Italian, 4:54 is the death of your channel 😅
Plus we never eat pizza and pasta together, you have to choose between one of the two for your dinner.
having pasta as a side was one of the food crimes ;)
@@ThePresentPast_ Poor you to think that pasta and pizza are good together🙂
@@francescofilippi2824.... depends if it was good to him to each there own but he did it on purpose as “food crimes”
In Italy there is not only pasta and pizza there are billions of dishes
@@ThePresentPast_America a country without culinary culture that appropriates the dishes of other countries
Taking salvini as the standard italian says a lot about the simplistic approach of this video. Like yes, Pizza is not an italian tradition but a Neapolitan tradition. True. So? For it to be italian does it have to be a standardized thing in the country? And when you say Italy you don't necesseraly always mean the relatively modern country but also the geografical area.
It was more that Salvini was having a dig at southerners. He belongs to the Lega Nord political party which believes that the region of Padania (the northern area of Italy situated around the Po river) should be independent from the rest of Italy.
One thing to keep in mind is that, when talking about peasant topics like most italian food was before the ww2, relying on just written accounts can be mileading. Italy wasn't really alphabetized until the '60 and the TV, and any tradition before that would be lost in word. As an example Pizza, we know it existed in the late 1800, but how much written documents we have of it? is it possible that they were already putting cheese on it way before the americans, but we just don't have any document left talking about it? Italians were poor and lacked food, i wouldn't expect them to have time to document every little detail. Also, as any american that has spent a sufficient amount of time in Italy can tell, today's Italian food is way different than american italian.
that's a good point. To it i would add that most recipes that were written down were from wealthy families. There has always been a huge divide between the large mass of poor peasants and the small minority of wealthy people, who were largely segregated from one another. The food the wealthy were eating was not the food the poor were eating.
What gets me is the hypocrisy of modern Italian-Americans. Their ancestors emigrated due to poverty. They took what recipes (handed down orally as like you point out few people were literate at that time especially not the poor and it was mostly these that emigrated to the US). When they arrived in America they suddenly had access to an abundance of food and therefore modified their recipes not only because original ingredients weren't available but also because the ingredients they did have access to were rich and therefore supplemented what otherwise would have been a poor diet. There's no shame in this and I have no problem with it as we all would have done the same thing if in their shoes. What annoys me is that now they claim to have preserved the original traditions whereas in Italy they've been changed. The average person in Italy is now not only able to access more and better quality food, than in the past, but also better than what's available in the US. However, Italian-Americans have an attitude that they are the real Italians (they see themselves as preserving tradition which isn't true because they added and changed ingredients) while they view Italians from Italy as no longer Italian because our society has evolved and not stayed stuck in the late 1800s/early 1900s (the time when their ancestors emigrated to the US). In other words: they are allowed to evolve out of poverty (yet claim to have stayed true to their roots) but if we do the same thing in Italy we're no longer real Italians according to them. The hypocrisy is astounding. And don't get me started on their arrogance.
Yea you are right. Americans don’t claim “ownership” of anything to do with food. We assume it & pretty much everything else came from another country by immigrants. The only thing that I can think of that we do take ownership in is developing medicines because that’s how we tolerate/justify being robbed by the medical industry - that the money went towards research & development.
You raised a general good point, but for the specific we are lucky. We DO have written accounts of cheese on Neapolitan pizza in the XIX century. We even have pizza mentioned in newspapers in the XIX century mentioning tomato sauce, basil and Mozzarella cheese on pizza.
At 10:00 it sounds like you are implying that the italian language was born in America through the interaction between italian immigrants from different regions, but that's just... wrong. Standard italian is based on the dialect spoken in Florence, and more specifically on the literary works of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. Because of this literary prestige, it started to be used as a lingua franca in Italy even before the unification, at least by wealthy and intellectuals - Pietro Bembo for instance, who came from Venice, started using it in the 1500s. The general population adopted it around the 1960s with the spread of radio and TV, and also thanks to internal migration towards the new industrial centers (Milan, Turin,...). Meanwhile in the US, italian americans developed their own lingua franca based on southern italian dialects, because that's where most of the immigrants there came from - northern italians mainly migrated to Brazil and Argentina instead. This explains why "gabagool" and "capocollo" are spelled and pronounced differently in the US and in Italy respectively.
I also think you overstated the importance of "italian cuisine" in forming a national identity. Despite the fact that standard italian is today spoken by everybody in the country, regional dialects, traditions, and cuisines are still very much alive. Where I'm from (Veneto) nobody would claim neapolitan pizza or roman carbonara as part of their identity, even if we eat them frequently. People might rather be proud of the general quality and variety of italian gastronomy. And rather than football, I think people would talk (often obnoxiously) about roman and renaissaince history and art, or about the natural beauty of the country (in italian media Italy is often referred to as "il bel paese" - the beautiful country). Salvini will of course use any opportunity to complain about immigration, including "violated" food recipes, but this does not mean that it is a major focus of his political platform. And yeah, like many italians I already knew that carbonara and tiramisù are recent inventions, I mean, you need a fridge to make the latter!
Thank you for writing this. He has GROSSLY oversimplified things in this video. To the point of being offensive. Deliberately skipping info and overemphasizing spurious claims.
It’s a well edited and put together video piece but I only believe about 10% of it.
You are inferring incorrectly 🤦♂
@@cmedeir That is exactly what he has done. He is deliberately trying to offend and frankly he made a good job at that. The most annoying thing is that he frames his bold and largely unfounded claims as historical facts.
In essence: modern Italian (based on medieval Tuscan) was invented in the 19th century by italian emigrants to America (largely from Campania and Sicily) who then imported it into Italy.
For those wondering how it is possible that this guy is an University Professor, the only possible explanation is that he studied (read played football, basketball and baseball) in some American college where they teach that France is the capital of Paris which is located in South America not far from the islands of Madagascar and... Madagascar 2 (!!!!) 🤣🤣🤣😢
Fake !
In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians.
Ab And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
You talking about the Italiamo packaging: "It screams quality, right?"
No, it screams "LIDL". Because that's where that is from.
Fake !
In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians.
Lo And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
You mentioned that most of the regions in Italy before they were unified didn't even know about dished that other regions had, and it's true, and sometimes dishes had the same name but were very different, like pizza. You quote something, and you say that pizza came from that one region, and it was a poor people dish, but...
The word "pizza" existed since the roman era, and the first actual mention of the word "pizza" was in a text over 500 years ago, about food that was served the pope and others of high standing a few hundred yeas ago. Well it was very different, It was a fluffy Bread dish, round few cm high, almost cake-like, spread with rose water & Sugar.
And in other places the word "pizza" meant something different, similar to what you quote, similar to the dish we know today. But still quite different, we don't have a text as old or neutral as the rose pizza recipe. But not very long ago, the maybe first illustration of the very first pizza was found on the colorful walls of Pompeii. We don't know a lot about it, but it might not have been the poor people dish, like it was said by the one person 200 years ago. We don't know, but it is definitely very different from the dish we know today.
Tasting History with Max Miller made this pizza on his channel :D
Thank you, I was able to avoid writing all of this. The only difference in what I knew is I knew pizza was called mensa in ancient Rome and was a dish where you could "eat the plate too". But that's what has been taught to me, I never researched it
I mean, in some sense, Pizza dates back to the Aeneid, the Roman founding myth that was documented by Virgil, but on the other hand, flatbread-with-topping is something that exists in every culture at any time.
Yet that pizza was flavoured with sugar and rose-water, and was much closer to a sponge cake than a flat tomato disc.
Thats kinda like similar but not the same kind of deal. Perhaps they have the same name, but that doesn't mean the same thing.
Slings are slings forever, but there are lots of things we called today as slings.
I noticed that the presenter chose to highlight only 4-6 types of Italian foods, and while it's a valid choice, one might wonder about the vast diversity in Italian cuisine, especially when referencing an "identity crisis". Given that Italy boasts over 800 protected recipes, the chosen representation might appear a bit limited. It's worth acknowledging that Italian food is incredibly diverse, with dishes less internationally known like Frico with potatoes from Friuli being as cherished as Pizza from Napoli. My Italian grandfather, for instance, had his own culinary preferences, which didn't necessarily include dishes like pizza. It's key to remember that specific dishes, be it Pizza or tortellini, might not be representative of the entire national identity for many Italians.
I think he is specifically talking about the cuisine/food items that is specifically recognised internationally as Italian.
Unfortunately the majority of the huge variety of Italian food isn't internationally recognised - although that doesn't make it less delicious.
The one being chosen is the most recognizable, more stereotyped food to be Italian in both in and out of the country. It a way, your comment only serves a question why these dishes became the representation of what is "traditional" in said country considering its history, even when there are more appropriate version out there.
would need a channel dedicated to showing the origins of all italian dishes
@@SunnyMorningPancakes Aka by Italo-Americans. However, why should Italians care? This is a colonial perspective and we Italians are seen as "fake" or even as if we were lying about our thousand-year-long nation-building and identity. No Italian says that more than 500 years ago Italy had tomatoes or that it produced coffee beans.
Also the seafood in the south!
The whole premise of the video is false. Pizzerie become popular in the rest of Italy in the 30s. The first pizzeria in Milan opened in 1929, the first in Rome in 1888. Americans have nothing to do with that, it was simply due to internal migration. And of course one of the reference is that fraudster Grandi.
I am Italian, I appreciate your videos and I also enjoyed your study on such a complex topic, which is also part of my PhD study. However, if it is sometimes nice to question certain issues, and some 'lies' are sometimes revealed, I think it is a bit more complex here and I try to make my contribution. Many of the things said by the professor and on which the video is based are deliberately pushed, daring, said to make people talk. Not that there are no funds of truth: it is true, for example, that from the USA and their culture of industrialization comes a certain standardization of products that has also had an effect on the availability of certain products throughout the country. Even on the Italian side, it is certainly not a mystery that the Italian one, despite the undoubtedly common bases (see the pasta on all the territory in its myriad of variations) has been somewhat uniform and still is strongly on a regional basis. But get to say that certain products or even language come from abroad or that there is some 'lie' behind centuries of cooking (which obviously has evolved and continues to do so) It is like saying that Italy did not exist before 1861 because it was the year of political unification (if we do not want to go back to the Romans we speak of Italy and Italians at least from the Middle Ages). Well, it is an oversimplification, maybe 'sexy', but that does not make the reality of the facts. That said, the kitchen is beautiful all over the world, vehicle of culture and it is good that this continues to live and evolve without unnecessary rigidities, which rightly enjoy online.
P.S. Italian-american cuisine is a completely different branch of italian one that descend from Italian immigration and It's interesting to try and study, but we cannot overlap it with european one.
Like Grandi, he doesn’t care about the truth. He is just seeking notoriety by going against the accepted wisdom.
I get the regional variation in Italian food - my lodger was from northern Italy and his diet mainly consisted of spaghetti with grated parmesan on top, rarely any meat. Pizza? "That's not my culture!"
What surprised me was the figure of only 2% of Italians speaking Italian at unification. Surely they mostly spoke a variation of Italian with regional dialects?
@@rogink of course they did. There just wasn’t a standard just as in England before the establishment of the school system. Everybody spoke their regional varieties.
@@roginkMost people spoke their own language (Sicilian, Lombard, Romagnolo etc.), which aren't variants of Italian, they're languages that have developed before or parallel. Now they're wrongly called dialects of Italian.
@@luca_salerno Hmm. I'm not convinced. You call them languages, but that suggests different grammar and syntax. Up to 1850 only around 80% of French people spoke French - so they couldn't speak to and understand each other. My guess is that most Italians could understand each other.
My dad was from the North of Italy. He was 27 when he emigrated to Argentina and up to that age he tasted pizza for the 1st time in his life.
So true , I lived in Italy for a short time as a child in 63/64 .The only pizza that was available in 63/64 was white pizza and not a lot of it , was available .When we visited Italy in 73 ,pizza was available but not as much .My mother was making pizza with sauce for all of our family and for some of the neighbours , in Italy and it was such a novelty for my family in central Italy .
Fake !
In Antiquity the romans, the etruscans, the greeks made pasta, the arabs have just introduced to Sicily the technique of drying pasta that they held from the mesopotamians.
Z And it was only southern Italy that was in poverty.
@@Dibipable Tomatoes -- the very foundation of most modern pizza -- are a food from the Americas that didn't even touch Italian lands until the mid-16th century.
Still now in north italy they don’t know what pizza is! This whole controversy it s absolutely bullshit. We have pizzerie in napoli from 1800 lol
@@sugasheezedude, not all pizzas are with tomatoes…
Even then it was born in Naples using tomatoes. US didn’t do anything
Gonna be honest, I'm not sure what to believe. My Nonna came from Italy to the UK after WWII and one of her famous recipes in my family that she used to make was Tiramisu, but in the past when I previously looked it up the oldest date for Tiramisu I found is often in the 60's. On the other hand that old negative description of Pizza you found reminds of an early European description of potatoes where the guy basically talks about how disgusting and flavourless they are in similar language. I feel uneasy about taking the information in this video at face value without doing some of my own research on it.
FWIW this whole video is basically built on the back of one guy and can be spun different ways. For example, it is possibly true that pizzerias are American, but that’s mostly because pizza was just a thing that was sold alongside other dishes in restaurants in Naples, which is largely how it still is today in Italy as well as most other European countries. Restaurants that serve exclusively pizza are not really a common thing.
But that’s why I find this researcher very disingenuous, there is documentation of hundreds of restaurants serving pizza around Naples in the 19th century. The fact that they sold other things, that it was a regional dish, or that the first “pizzeria” could have been American is irrelevant as to who invented pizza. A flat bread with stuff on it has been a staple of Mediterranean cuisine for thousands of years, and the Italians who opened the pizzerias in America didn’t get the idea from nowhere.
The fact that carbonara was supposedly first served to American soldiers is also irrelevant, the dish was just another variation of a dish that was already common at the time. Even if carbonara was the name that stuck, the tradition is undoubtedly Italian.
This guy’s schtick is, depending on how you view it, either needless pedantry to make bold claims that will get him attention or claiming outright falsehoods, also to get attention.
Americans are very good at commercializing things though, that much is clearly true. Italians should thank them for that, because it’s probably helped their economy a lot.
Dude, this video is so bad and such a mess that i don't even know where to start the counter argument
@@isawrooka4 This is really grasping at a lot of straws. The Carbonara part is especially coping.
@@isawrooka4I mean he literally said that it was not found outside naples
@@isawrooka4did you not watch the whole video?
Well this is true for most countries food culture tbh. Potatoes and chocolate are from south america, Pepper and corn from Mexico, Squash and beans from north america yet most countries Ireland, India, and Italy etc, these food are a cornerstone of the cuisine but have only been 'recently' introduce in the grand scheme of things.
Esos alimentos se han introducido hace cientos de años, es decir, llevan siglos siendo usados en Europa, adaptados a su gastronomía, ya son parte de su identidad.
@@gabriel_024_callese a la berga . Aprende Leer no Dijo nada de eso Dijo que sin nuestros alimentos el mundo no tubiera comida buena y seria menos sabrosa
"italians have an inferiority complex"
"it is only food and football that gives italians the oportunity to keep their head high"
what a silly stereotype. what about the architecture, the artworks, the literature, the music, the teathers, the cinema,the fashion. I can keep going.
the problem with buying Grandi's claims wholesale is that it ignores a fact of Italian history: it's exactly BECAUSE they were poor that similar recipes were developed from similar ingredients. there are mentions of pasta with eggs, cheese and bacon since 1831 at least. My own family has been making it since 1891. It's not because the marketing of Italian food recipe names is owned by Italian americans that Italian food lacks tradition and authenticity.
Exactly
Grandi told Americans what they wanted to hear, i.e. that THEY invented everything, which was obviously music to their ears 😂
@@1969ES175 how is that? he never claimed that we invented pizza or parmesan. Those came from Italy, but have evolved since their current form into something different due to cultural exchange. not that hard to understand
@@joel29585 Well from the comments I've been reading (also under other videos) that's precisely what many of them seem to have taken from Grandi's comments: that THEY invented everything.
you should change the title of this video from "Italian food is a lie" to "Don't forget that cultures and food change over time", it would be a more honest albeit less clickbait
Clickbait brought me to this video. :D it's not always a bad thing. try it sometimes (with ketchup)
He's right, though. It IS a lie, perpetuated by actual politicians now
He changed the title😂 but the video is still hateful inflammatory nonsense
well at least the title was changed 😅
if you see that as hateful and inflammatory you really do seem to have quite a soft skin.
@@1969ES175
One thing that Grandi seems to misunderstand about the history of a country (our country in this instance) even tho he's an historian, is that you do not start counting it from when it becomes its final iteration. Italy as a unified nation is very young and modern, but that doesn't erase the millennia of history of all of its parts. Also, perfecting a recipe and making it into the canonical one, is not saying the recipe was always that way (the only ones stating that are the ignorants...Like Salvini ahahah), but rather is a way to say "This is the best way to do it, the perfected one, so do not ruin it by erasing the years of improvements done", and in fact plenty of chefs keep improving traditional recipes even today. One last thing, traditions do not require thousands of years to be established as such, even just something like 30 years is enough to determine a tradition.
Overall I agree that Italian tradition are not a real thing, if we refer to Italy as a nation, but they are if we refer to Italy as a geographical location and all of the population that inhabits it...or if you prefer and want to be more cultured, you can refer to local tradition instead of calling them Italian. Just go with a Region or ,even better, a City and you are gucci, probably even receive hugs of appreciation ahahah.
PS: The "unappealing" Pizza you red the description for is the still very present today, Marinara, not my favorite, but the description also didn't o it any justice. Pizza remains a Neapolitan dish, not an Italian one (nor American ;3)
Exactly, I don't see why Italy's recent unification has anything to do with the validity of the history of its food traditions.
Unification and industrialisation, migration and globalisation have only let regional foods be spread and evolve. They don't make regional foods any less Italian or any less traditional.
I mean there are a ton of Italian food history channels. Everyone understands this except professional historians.
He also fails to understand that the name of a dish in Italy IS the recipe. It’s not an exotic marketing tactic. So you can eat cream with cheese on your pasta, just don’t call it all’Alfreddo.
La pizza es una comida napolitana y también italiana desde el momento que Nápoles es parte de Italia, incluso si su origen es anterior a la unificación
Also food has changed over the centuries. Farming techniques, environmental changes, and production methods have all had an impact on our food. There have also been changes to the type and variety of foods available (we have access to more food now than ever before in history). It's just common sense to make adjustments to dishes, according to these changes, in order to perfect them.
So.... Italian people moved abroad, took their culinary traditions with them, expanded on them in America where they weren't so impoverished and re-imported this back into their homeland? That sounds like evolution of the cuisine not a lie... This concept could be argued for many food cultures around the world - especially notable the one of the main reference points here is WW2 - America (and the rise of global tourism post WW2) most defiantly had an effect on the food cultures of the territories where they had troops stationed. I can see this guys perspective but I think the conversation is FAR more nuanced than what is presented.
The issue is the poor advertising regulations in American food. For example, take Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's very easy in America for a cheese company to make a fake parmesan that was made in wisconsin, and sell it at a premium price as if it came from Italy. This is because the regulations here are extremely lax, and what they are doing is technically not illegal. The only way to know if it is the real deal is to look for a PDO sticker, which many do not know about.
Except that's not what happened. After WWII an expansion in industrialisation and economic growth is what got Italians out of poverty. The mass production of food brought food prices down and an increase in jobs meant that the average Italian could now afford to buy more food. An increase in distribution also meant that Italians were also able to access items that previously could not be found in their region (therefore local dishes evolved). It had nothing to do with Italian-Americans re-importing food (although some exchanges were made) or the presence of troops or American tourists. This may be a popular narrative in America but it's not accurate.
This video ignores something very important: Italy (I mean geographically, the boot) was the richest, most powerful and most decadent region in the world for 2500 years. Starting with the great power of Rome, up to the richest cities of the Middle Ages, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan... These rich people all ate and feasted well. Of course, that's why there is a traditional Italian cuisine that can compete with and surpass any other cuisine in the world.
this is a trend that has come out recently. in your opinion does an ancient country like Italy have a cuisine from 50 years ago?
25% of Italian dishes are of Greek-Roman origin. the other half is medieval and Renaissance. Pasta was already eaten in the Middle Ages and it is widely documented. the first pizzeria was born in Naples and is certified by UNESCO. and in any case pizza is a dish from classical antiquity revisited after 1492 with the introduction of the tomato. drink less, it's good for your liver.
Exactly. This is merely about US people being proud about 1) thinking Italians are jealous about (?) and 2) boasting that somehow their nation is older than Italy (also ?). Overall, a giant exaggeration without even understanding Italy and Italians.
Yeah, it sounds like before WW2 people all over the World were just eating bread with cabbages, no traditional recipes were possible.
50 years ago is when Americans realised that there was a wider world and they decided they needed to be at the centre of it and take credit for everything that happened before and after they discovered it.
Quite controversial -- If Italian cuisine is so rudimentary and overrated,
- Why does Wisconsin try to brand their cheese as Parmesaan or Mozarella? Why don't they try going to the drawing board and develop something with better texture or taste?
- Shouldn't we appreciate their logic of combining tastes, e.g. tomato+cheese+basil? At least no pineapples around?
They may not have tomatoes in Roman times but the Mediterranean basin has some culture of taste, and have some strong combinations compared to hawaiian pizza.
To the average American consumer who thinks of Italian cuisine as exotic and tastier than American cuisine mozzarella cheese sounds better than Wisconsin cheese
Essentially: Italian thing👍 American thing👎
I’m afraid Grandi is right. In my northern town decades ago there was just one pizzeria that I think opened in the 50s but it wasn’t that popular until the 70s and 80s when it became much more popular
Whether you think it's a lie or not, or take Grandi at face value or not, what should be clear is that the prescriptivist "carbonara must have guancale -- no bacon" attitude is extremely modern and has no legitimate historical basis. As mentioned in the video, it makes sense for a new state to try to invent these founding myths.
I don't think the point is that Italian cuisine is a lie, per se. It's that the prescriptivist authenticity is a lie.
How about instead we try to enjoy ever-evolving culinary traditions and try to use what ingredients are local, sustainable and most importantly, just taste good?
absolutely, and the weird thing is that these founding myths have been exported and now people from elsewhere believe it just as well. Don’t get me wrong, i think guanciale is better than bacon, but any fatty cured piece of pork was gonna do if you were a poor farmer back in the day and I don’t see how the logic of that has changed. My mom’s family were poor farmers in Portugal and they had nice cured meat maybe a handful of times per year. Being so picky is a luxury of the modern world
Although Neapolitan style pizza was made only in Naples and surroundings, originally, you can find pizza variations all over the country with origins dating back to the Etruscans or even older (like the Roman Pinsa or the Ligurian focaccia and pizzata)
Without getting into the details of each product, Italy did always have a rich food history. Just not necessarily what's mainstream today.
And that's because the average Italian was never "dirt poor", but actually enjoyed some of the highest living standards in the world for most of history.
You can get a glimpse of such culinary culture on TH-cam channels like TastingHistory, or by asking Italian grandmas what they ate as a pre-WWII child.
That being said, i do find random culinary "rules" cringy and obnoxious.
Politicians and many others often use this economic mythology. No doubt, Italy was not poor for most of its existence (even if it was not unified). For example, the GDP per capita estimate for 1700 is $1,100, the UK had $1,250, France - $910, and Japan - $ 570 (source: Maddison (2007): "Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD. Essays in Macro-Economic History"), the same goes for almost 2000 years, yet here WW2 was chosen as a starting point (which was arguably a low point for Italian history). Considering Italy's amazing climate and access to trade, it is hard to imagine that people in that region were struggling to find ingredients for many of their local traditional meals.
Similar mythology is often applied to Norway, where I live, to simplify and dehumanize it as a "gas and oil" state.
@@salganik Exactly. In fact, the newer estimates of the study you mentioned put Italy still ahead of the UK by the year 1700 ($3009 VS $2365, expressed in 2011 USD). Countries like Germany, France or Spain were doing about half as well as Italy, and world average was around $1000.
On top of that, Italy being politically fragmented (as well as geographically spanning in latitude) meant great food variety, culinary wealth.
@@salganik "WW2 was chosen as a starting point (which was arguably a low point for Italian history)". Americans have a habit of barging in at the last possible moment and then taking all the credit for themselves.
There are lots of interesting "pizza effect" examples in Ireland too. Halloween and st patrick's day are both irish, but their current boistrosness and commercial scale are a result of Irish-Americans, and this has been re-imported to Ireland
I want to leave you a testimony. I am Italian and I live in Italy, in Piedmont (a region next to France). My mother is Piedmontese and my father comes from the north of Puglia, in the south of the peninsula. I was born in 1960. Here, no one knew about pizza when I was little. That is: everyone had heard of it, but almost no one had eaten it. When some Neapolitans opened the first pizzeria in the area, in 1967, we went to eat it. We were in several families of friends. It was something new for everyone. Including for my father, because in his town the word pizza exists, but it refers to a completely different dish. A focaccia with ricotta mixed with sugar.
It was southern Italians (among them Neapolitans), who migrated to the north of Italy in search of jobs after WWII, who introduced southern style pizza (what we think of when we hear the word "pizza" today) to the north and from there it expanded to become popular in other areas of Italy too. Americans are always ready to take credit for everything.
@@anta3612 Very after WWII and the pizza that we know nowadays was only neapolitan.
Forgot to mention about the Pompeii wall painting revealed this year, showing something someone claims is ancient pizza!
Probably they used some dried vegs than tomato sauce, probably capsicum species.
Alberto Grandi, in Italy, is considered the type of guy who says one thing right and nine wrong.
Depends. Are those nine things also denied with zero evidence?
So basically he's like a broken clock?
@@seanrawlinsoni thought that the brokej clock was an italiano manner
@@MrNeosantana Grandi claims things with no evidence. Is the one who claims that should provide evidences, not the one denying.
A simple search on Google Books finds pizzeria in Italy out of Naples in late 1800s. Grandi is wrong.
The reality of Italian food is a lot more nuanced that our government (and this video) might lead you to believe.
Is it true that many of our most famous meals didn't exist until very recently? Yes.
Is it true that many of those famous meals were invented (by italians) abroad? also Yes.
But that leaves out the reality of the Italian cultural heritage, which is for the most part confined to this hyper-local origin. The fact that Italy has been divided for centuries led to a patchwork of customs and traditions which affect us to this day. Depending on which region of Italy you go to you'll find different customs and traditions which might be seen as sacrilegious in others.
The most famous dishes, those you'd find at any Italian restaurant abroad are really only the tip of the iceberg, they're just the lucky few dishes that happened to catch on (and in many cases were altered to fit the taste or the availability of ingredients of the host region). And to that point, i should say that because Italian cuisine adapted to the place and people it found itself in, unless you're from Italy, your "version" of Italian cuisine is tailored to fit your taste or local ingredients (like how spaghetti with meatballs became a thing in America)
Also, to claim that "Italian food is a lie" just because the most famous dishes evolved recently and often abroad is prepostreous. All cuisines evolve and not necessarily in the country of origin. No one will doubt the American-ness of Cheeseburgers even if they only came about recently, no one will claim "Uramaki sushi is Canadian" just as no one will claim "Carbonara is American". To say that Italian food is a lie because it evolved recently and outside of Italy is to deny basically every other national cuisine.
To claim that because we used ingredients that didn't originally exist on our land as a basis of criticism is also just as prepostreous. Is Swiss chocolate any less Swiss because cacao doesn't grow in the Alps....? And moreso, how much time does it have to pass for a food, custom or ingredient to be considered "traditional" by your standards? Decades? Centuries? Millennia?
Also, just because the modern version of a dish only happened recently, it doesn't mean that that dish isn't preceded by centuries of evolution. Lagane are a Roman (as in Ancient Roman) invention which not only persisted to this day, but eventually evolved into the modern Lasagne (whose first recorded recipe is "only" from 1935).
I also didn't appreciate the belittleing of my country in general, about how we can "only boast about football (and not even always) or food", firstly because most Italians aren't as gung-ho about neiter food nor football and secondly, because we have far more to offer than just those things. That was very out of left field and uncalled for.
And finally, i should point out that mr. Grandi is famous for making loud, obnoxious and outlandish (albeit true in some cases) claims. He's the most extremist voice you could've picked to explain your argument. His entire shtick is offering this fringe, contrarian and controversial take, more for the sake of chaos than to elevate what our "real" traditions are.
Food insecurity was rife in the past and thank God that we have access to more and better quality food these days. In the video they didn't touch on the fact that the most frequent reason why Italians emigrated en masse was because of widespread poverty. Then, in their new surroundings, they suddenly had access to an abundance of food. They made good use of those new ingredients and altered their family recipes and there's no shame in that (after years of having little to eat it must have been a relief and any of us would have done the same). However, what annoys me is that, from what I hear them say on the matter, they were allowed to evolve but if in Italy we do the same, we're not being authentic. So what were the majority of those who stayed in Italy supposed to do? Starve even when we began to be able to access better food and more ingredients? It's absurd as well as hypocritical.
Please do this for french, japanese, mexican and spanish food!!
they all come from USA.
xDDD@@Asturev
@@Asturevno
And Thai
The one thing that i know from all that countries you mentioned are, Japanese didn't eat raw salmon until the Norwegian sell it to them. After Japanese immigrant used it in US. CMIIW
Alberto Grandi : Culinary Historian = Myself : Chris Hemsworth
I really didn't expect this to be such a clickbait.
@@tenchotenchev5606it s not about usa, its about globalization, usa are probably the most globalized capitalistic country thats why
@@tenchotenchev5606 That may be so but the USA didn't introduce it around Italy. It was southern Italians, who migrated to the north of Italy in search of jobs after WWII, who introduced pizza to the north and from there it became popular in other areas of Italy too.
The pizza show also points out that American square pizza can be derived from traditional sfincione, so not just the Neapolitan pizza influence but a mix of these different southern Italian cultures
you mean southern Italians migrated out of Italy
The issue that I see with this hypothesis, is that it is never discussed what Italians actually ate 200 or so years ago. So therefore what was Italian cuisine like back then, and how does it compare? Is it really so that no one thought of mixing lard, bacon and some egg in pasta before WWII? Ingredients that would have been accessible to farmers. One of the most popular pasta dishes is alio e oglio which is literally just pasta and oil and garlic. Is such a simple dish a fabrication?
While Italy is a country forcefully smashed together and had to create it's identity from different pieces, I am from Poland, which was very old country, but forcefully broken apart and with attempts of the occupiers to erase the culture (and yes, the communist years are also very culture erasing). So yeah, I know that Polish culture was broken and partially erased but for me it is fascinating what it really looked like pre-1795. And when we look on Italy as on a very recent creation and accept the fact the modern Italian cuisine may be way to deal with national insecurities it would be still fascinating for me how Italian cuisine looked like pre-1848. And yes, most of Italians where poor at that time, but nobility and clergy existed and it could be interesting to compare the cuisine of this two Italians worlds.
While Poland and Italy are on the opposite sides of the spectrum, but even in Polish cuisine you see similar trends (but for different reasons). There are many dishes deemed as traditional but their are often inventions of communist regimes that just stayed e.g. eurasian carp on Christmas Eve which was totally communist invention (during the post-WW2 poverty communist government wanted appear as if it is caring for ordinary people and they came up with idea of a carp on each table during Christmas, because it was probably the only meat that could be provided so easily, because carp can be breed in any puddle of mud and just sold alive)
Italian (as in coming from the peninsula) food wasn't hardy unknown. Some dishes in France like the onion soup comes with the queen Maria de' Medici.
The past is a different country.
You can't go backwards in thought process because you have a bias in your time o era, intuitive for you might not be for them. Why did the romans did not make hamburgers? Why did they did not invented gunpowder when its pretty much has 3 ingredients, are they dumb?
@@Hadar1991Italy is a state which unified late, but its culture wasn't just forcefully "smashed together". It wasn't, and funnily enough that was also because 2000 years ago the Romans unified it and since then Latin culture has been prevalent.
@@gs7828 And somehow Slavic languages ranging from Germany to Kamchatka and from Kola Peninsula to Peloponnese Peninsula were more mutually intelligible than Italian regional languages in 1848. :D
There is literally a 2000 years old fresco of Pizza in Pompeii, nothing more to add to that.
i love that while this is purely american perspective and the creator simply acts like an angry sassy child that hurts himself for no reason then deny it, the comments of italian people have depth and high awareness. thanks to these people for not catching the bait lol the best response is simply that adults shouldn't take children seriously
Tomatoes may have come to Europe 500 years ago but, unlike Spaniards, Italians didn't start eating them until about 300 years ago. They were mostly used as ornamental plants.
Disclaimer: I'm Italian too.
I love Alberto Grandi and Daniele Soffiati's podcast. I was shocked when I started listening to their episodes. Despite being a curious and generally aware person, I felt like I'd been trapped in this lie about Italian food.
After a while, I started reflecting on my personal experiences and those of my grandmothers, who I still have. We're from Sicily, which, in fact, makes a difference. I mean, you can tell it's an island. My grandma, along with her mother and sister, used to make pasta nearly every day or every week. They continued to do so until the children got married and moved to the town. Pasta has been in Sicily for thousands of years. It's still unclear how pasta got to Italy and how it evolved. However, there are records suggesting that Sicily played a pivotal role in the production and distribution of pasta throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. But, as you and many people in this comment section (which I have to say I really appreciated) pointed out, cultures change, and so do culinary habits. So pasta probably disappeared from many places where it was once consumed but continued to exist in the south of Italy. Southern Italy also has many profound differences within itself. If you look at the geography of southern Italy, you can easily draw some conclusions, or at least hypotheses.
I'm also quite annoyed by my fellow Italians. Every time I come back, I hear everyone telling each other that our things are the best and such. But we're not the only ones. I had a roommate from the Basque country, and he wouldn't stop saying how they had the best cuisine and everything in the world. I guess it can happen anywhere. I hear that here in Sweden too (please note that other Scandinavians do actually say that Swedes are arrogant). What I'm trying to say is that the world is complex and can't be explained in a 20-minute TH-cam video, or even in a comment.
I just wish that all the things about Italians were more chill. It was fun in the beginning, but now that I live in another country and get the same stereotypes every day, I'm so tired of it.
Pizza used to be a highly local dish in Italy, that spread in the USA more widely and that then made pizza popular as a cultural reimport everywhere else in Italy. But that DOES NOT mean, that the USA invented pizza, as an increasing amount of americans seem to believe. Italians invented pizza, but only in the region in and around Naples, america turned from a local specialty into a national dish. But america in doing so had no part in the creative process of inventing pizza. America did the marketing, that's it.
Internal migration (southern Italians migrating to the north after WWII in search of jobs) was the reason pizza became widely popular elsewhere in Italy. Americans had nothing to do with it.
saying that the Italian language was invented in America and reintroduced to Italy sounds like a massive bullshit... true that all regions spoke their dialects, but it was taugh to italians in school and later on tv, but it was certainly not invented in America.. italians in America were immediately assimilated and after one generation spoke english only
3:42 "I am officialy a vegeterian but let's go for it" I love you on the spot :D - Ciao from Italy
As a teen we had an Italian student in my class (90ties). His Italian mother gave me her recipe for Carbonara. And that's how I do it to this day. She certainly used cream in it and for the next 10 years that was good. I even cooked them for Italian friends at the start of the 00ties and they all were happy, nobody complained. Then all those purist Carbonara stuff popped up.
Maybe this lady had learned to make carbonara abroad. In Italy, carbonara is a regional dish and was spread exclusively in the cream-free form.
@@giorgiodifrancesco4590può essere solo na polentona, visto che mettono la panna dappertutto 🤣
@@Mr_Thunderbird Ma no, al Nord non si mette la panna ovunque come credi. E' qualcuna che ha visto fare così all'estero e le è piaciuto.
Carbonara is a dish from Rome. Out of Rome people make it in different ways. Most Italian dishes are not Italian in general, they're from one city and imitated elsewhere. However I agree that not long ago people were putting onion or milk in carbonara even in Rome.
Neapolitans and southerners moved to the north for work and exported their pizza there, no americans were involved.
Nice bait bro
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏YES! I've said this (though far less succinctly) in several comments. That's exactly how Neapolitan pizza spread throughout the rest of Italy. Americans had nothing to do with it.
i don't know, because real neapolitan pizza start to spread in the north like 20 years ago, when i was a child here you were able to find only "north italy pizza style" that was (and is in the place that still make it) very different
And yet pizza wasn't popular all over Italy till the 1970s.
@@valmarsiglia incorrect, we had pizza in Tuscany in the 20's, it was certainly different from the Neapolitan style but that came as well around after world war 2.
Before the war we used no cheese or maaaybe pecorino, no mozzarella.
If you go to Pisa you can probably still find traditional pizzeria's putting pecorino on top.
Source: I actually live here.
@@Madeguydo You were around in the 1920s?
I'm Canadian, so when it comes to food nobody on earth thinks of us. What do we got? Poutine? Which is amazing, what's not to love about fries, gravy, and cheese, and I guess normal foods being given maple to kick it up a notch. Beyond that, our food is "American" as our nations blur together and the US is more who would be thought of for anything that we consider local cuisine.
IDK about the rest of Canada, but Quebec has some classic food such as Pâté chinois and Tourtière (although Poutine still is the culinary pride here). But I feel like the best part about food here is just the diversity coming from immigrants from all over the world
What is canada??
@@raphaelbosco8333 the diversity of food coming from immigrants is what I would consider the best food feature, from Filipino to Indian to Jamaican and more.
Ironically Canada is about as old as Italy.
@@non7top haha, fair point and a good example of somewhere existing for a long time, but the nation of current itself is a far younger concept or identity.
There is a mistake in this video. Tomatoes are not from South America but from Mexico - which I hope everyone knows is not South America. Mexico is not even close to the Equator. The word tomato derives from Nahuatl, the Aztec / Mexica language. The first Europeans to encounter it were not Columbus and crew, as shown on this video, but Cortes and his conquistadors. And they were the first ones to bring it to Europe within the Columbian exchange. Other Mexican ingredients include chocolate, maize, beans, chillies, vanilla, avocado, various types of squash, amongst others.
My dad was born in 1946 (he had me at more than 50) and I just found out last year that when he was a child no one knew what a Pizza was in our home town Florence. I was shocked because for me Pizza has always been a given but actually it came only in the late 50ies and I guess for its generation it was like what Kebab or Sushi was for my generation: a popular new dish brought in from the exterior.
Because your dad was Florentine not Napolitan, Americans stereotypes Italy like they are the same and has the same food, ask him if he was eating pane sciocco or schiacciata.
W video, especially the conclusion part "the dark side of food purity". I apreciate your consistency, and how you find supporting evidence to make any sort of claim instead of making presumptions.
That food historian ignores the kind of pizza that were used in other regions. As pizza al tegamino was in use in Turin (region Piedmont) and documented around 1930, his American soldiers craving pizza should have visited that city. Or Liguria for pizza all’Andrea, known since the XV century.
I think it was more an issue that during/just after the war food was scarse so there were shortages everywhere and American soldiers may not have had any more luck finding a pizza al tegamino in Turin than they did finding a pizza Napoletana in Naples. Even if they had found a pizza al tegamino they still probably would have complained that it wasn't "real" pizza (like what they were used to in the US).
He is not an historian
Dutch guy: We are known worldwide for the Frikandel and Balmihap.
Me: The what?
He referred to taking hot food 'out of the wall', which is popular in Amsterdam and seems to be a tourist attraction. I think their caramel waffles are more popular around the world. Their best food is served in their so called Chinese restaurants. They serve a blend of Chinese and Indonesian cuisine. I much enjoyed the fresh herring with onion, mussels and fried fish (Kibbeling). Simple food but o so nice. A shame there are no dutch food chains that spread these dishes over the world.
OK, I'm French, but even I cringed at some of your antics
Many many, years ago, I met a young man by the name "Santo" Sorry, I went blank; I can't remember his last name right now.Anyway, he informed me that it was "he" that introduced "Pizza" (as we know it here in the States) to "Russia" they never heard of it. He also said he's in "The World's Record Book" for giving him credit for having the first Pizza in Russia.
It's like American cowboy culture today being influenced by Italian "spaghetti Western" movies.
Italy 🇮🇹 is a very unique country. Via culture & geography. It's a peninsula that just juts out from the Southern part of Europe. They have towering mountains in the North to fiery volcanoes to the South. Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Turin, Palermo, etc.
As an italian, one that is always curious, I already discovered how both carbonara and tiramisù are fairely new, and also how some things were imported from abroad, but this video is only half of the story, there are a lot of regional wines, cheses and foods that dates back to centuries, sure though like any food they change at a steady pace.
(speaking of italians leaving for america, developing new recepes than bringing them back in Italy, I doubt it happened often, italians never really returned, not only that but the recipes too stayed in america for the most part, which is why no italian has ever heard of like 75% of italian dishes foreigners mention, like anything that has ceasar or alfredo in the name)
Around 30% of Italian immigrants returned to Italy
@@egan5384 really? I guess mostly in the south, I know no one who did (like none of my friends' greatgrandparents) my mother kinda did, but given that her family stayde in Brazil for more than a century and at least 4 generations that doesn't really count as her returning and more like 2 different migrations across generations
Fettuccine Alfredo are 100% made in Italy and were exported in the US. But since they were promoting the dish we labeled Fettuccine Alfredo as American, and so we snubbed it
@@GuidoRavagli I guess? I never ever heard of any italian ever making that dish or growing up knowing what it is.
It's not uncommon knowledge that "Ceaser salad" is Mexican. Maybe half of the people who eat it know it's a Mexican invention.
if it wasn't for native americans cultivating the tomato, the modern pizza wouldn't exist. The food migration spread corn, tomato, potato, chocolate and chili peppers around the world. Every time any one eats pizza, they should thank native american farmers.
The claim that france is the inventor of gastronomy is complete BS. lots of cultures had made amazing foods. Did France invent masala spice? Before french cuisine made excessive buttery dishes, china had begars chicken. Why did Europe spend so much money to get spices from asia?
What a load of Baloney!
True: most so-called Italian dishes were made famous in the Americas, because that's where most people emigrated to, and were later exported to the rest of the world, but saying that the food was then reimported back to Italy is just a false claim. No Italian in their right mind would ever call pizza Italian, we call it Neapolitan (i.e. napoletana), because, guess what, that's where it's originally from.... And the first ever pizza to be made was a marinara (the one you described as unappealing and unappetising) and guess what we still love it and eat it to this very day ;) There are several different varieties of pizza-like dishes which existed in the country long before WW2 and those were made in the simplest of ways... I still remember my grandma telling me how they would bake bread once every 15 days (when they had enough flour) and make bread with homegrown cherry tomatoes and oregano on top, and it wasn't a culinary delicacy back then or something only the wealthy could enjoy, that's actually how the poor used to live, they would have to live off of their own produce and what the land would give them and would then cook most things in wood-fired ovens.
I also loved your claim about Italian being invented in the US and then being brought back to Italy ... So I'm guessing the Italian I've spoken my entire life was invented in the States... thank you so much for debunking Dante's nonsense. How dare they attribute one of the most beautiful pieces of literature to an Italian from Florence! Can't wait for you to debunk the history of the "three crowns"...
Most Italians, myself included, couldn't care less about sports and certainly do not call our country "Il bel paese" because of its rich culinary history, we call it so because of its history full-stop.
I'm proud to call myself Italian and to be living in a country with the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage sites. Oh how I used to despise it when I was younger because everywhere I would travel everything would be brand new and shiny, only now do I see the wisdom my forefathers had in preserving what was and reminding ourselves of where we come from.
I went to Italy in the 1970s. Pizza was not available in northern Italy. In Venice we found something called Pizza that was actually more like pizza crust/bread brushed with olive oil and garlic. American tourists demanded Naples style pizza and now Italians don't even know that we Americans were responsible for the pizza they enjoy.
Nonsense. Neapolitan style pizza was introduced in the north when many southern migrants migrated to big northern cities in search of work after WWII. Pizzerias sprung up originally to cater to southern factory workers but then it became popular with locals too. American tourism had little to do with the spread of Neapolitan pizza throughout the whole of Italy also because tourists (especially at that time) tended to stick to a handful of touristy destinations. So while those places may have catered to Americans there were many more places that did not.
@12 I was there in the 70s. No pizza. So, bullshit. You probably were not even alive then.
@@josephsermarini4632 Well I grew up there in the 70s so you're the one who's bullshitting. Venice isn't the whole of N. Italy and Venice is one of those touristy places I mentioned (which eventually catered to American tourists). It was southern migrants relocating for work in INDUSTRIAL areas of the north (not tourist destinations) that made pizza popular. Of course this was a gradual process that didn't happen over night and in some areas Neapolitan style pizza was easier to find than others. Therefore, even if you did visit a couple of touristy places and didn't find pizza (boo hoo) it doesn't mean you can speak for the entire North of Italy and claim to know more than someone who grew up in there. Anyway, many of the pizzerie you find in touristy places in the north (and probably elsewhere as well) don't tend to make genuine Neapolitan pizza. They cater to what tourists expect to find (that's what you get for DEMANDING things and it serves you right). Then again I wouldn't expect an American to know the difference so the joke is on you. Here's a tip, though, if a pizzeria is mostly filled with tourists (no Italians) it means the food isn't authentic. Have a good one.
@@josephsermarini4632 My friends and family had a chuckle over this comment. So you think you're the only boomer here? I was raised in N. Italy in the 70s and in our little village we had two pizzerias. We are located in the industrial area of N. Italy (which Venice is not) and, as I said, it was southern Italian migrants who opened the first pizzerie in the industrial areas in northern Italy (areas which in the past were less visited by tourists). Venice is not the whole of N. Italy neither is it in an industrial region. Yes, I'm sure the more touristy areas ended up catering to tourists but to suggest that Americans influenced the spread of pizza across the entire north of Italy is simply not true and Americans are not responsible for the pizza we enjoy today across the peninsula.
@@anta3612 Venice was not the only place I went. And sure there were things they called pizza but they were terrible. There was no good pizza in Rome, Florence, or Milan either. Oh, and this is not my theory. Watch the video. Duh.
I am sure this will be drowned out, but I wanted to point out that you really missed the mark on some essentials. 1. It was Italian cooking techniques brought to French court that heavily changed/influenced what we know as French Cuisines. 2. "cucina povera" is what Italians are so "proud" of or at least strongly recognise as their cooking tradition and influence. 3. It cannot be understated about how regional, that is community to community, pride and culture played and still plays a heavy role in the adoption and spread of dishes and recipes. Also remember, if you have spent any time in Italy at all, that there is a great divide between the north and south. One last thing as there is much debate on pasta. I have my own thoughts on the co-development of pasta like processes. However, there is no doubt that pasta as we know it (in sheets) existed with the Romans. Not to say that they or the Etruscans created it... but that saying it came from Arabs I think can possibly be flawed unless you think the Chinese imported pasta from the Assyrians. But who am I to say anything to be honest. I have not Italian and have only spent a few years living in Italy. I.e. I am just another Bloke whinging on YT
French, Spanish, Portuguese culture, even Britain and the rest of Europe/Americas ALL influenced, taken from Italy.
Dry pasta as we know it today was originally brought to Sicily by the Arabs. Originally dry pasta was mostly consumed in Sicily but eventually spread to other areas in the south where it was widely produced thanks to their soil which was suitable for growing the variety of wheat needed to make this type of pasta. It was a convenient staple food that could be stored for long periods of time without refrigeration. Dry pasta was not widely consumed in the north since the soil isn't suitable for durum wheat and therefore fresh pasta is what was more common. Staple foods in the north, therefore, consisted of rice and polenta. Then, with economic growth after WWII which followed an expansion in industrialisation which allowed for mass production of products, and their nationwide distribution, dry pasta became more accessible in other areas of Italy too. After WWII Italians also had television which influenced consumer choice one of which was dry pasta. With their newfound prosperity Italians were, for the first time, able to afford such products which previously (in the north where production was limited and raw materials had to be transported from the south making it an expensive product to purchase) had been consumed only by the rich. Obviously mass production brought prices down which also made it more affordable for the average Italian.
With regards to cucina povera: it's true that in Italy we're proud of our humble roots even though we are thankful that we now have access to more food. Italian-Americans are critical that some of our recipes are different today than they were in the past (some of theirs have remained the same) but this is because we have now access to more ingredients. They forget that the reason their ancestors emigrated in the first place was because of wide spread poverty and when they were able to access more food in their new homeland they didn't hesitate and used them in their recipes thus altering them as a result. In other words: they are allowed to evolve out of poverty but we're not. The hypocrisy is astounding.
Quit a bit of scandalization and nonsense here....
That 1800 something description is actually just a pizza marinara. Neapolitan pizza cooks for 60-90 seconds, so yes the tomatoes are almost raw and due to the high heat the dough is charred ("burned").
So no, the claim that pizza didn´t develop in Italy is frankly pure BS. The video itself shows that it clearly originated in Naples and yes became popularized(!) (but not developed/invented) by American tourists who knew it from Italian immigrants in the US.
And I´m not even Italian.
A cookbook from 1881 in which a recipe of carbonara is found is Il principe dei cuochi, written by the Neapolitan Francesco Palma. The recipe is called "Maccheroni alla gricia" and calls for pancetta, eggs, pecorino romano, and black pepper.
Here is the recipe:
Ingredients:
500 g maccheroni
200 g pancetta
4 eggs
100 g grated pecorino romano
Black pepper to taste
In Rome, pancetta was replaced by guanciale. Both, unlike bacon, are not smoked. That's a huge difference in taste compared to bacon.
It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck...
We strongly doubt that it was invented by american soldiers.
thanks for this comment. the video makes a very strange impression that before WW2 in all European cities, people didn't know how to use all their ingredients. Of course, certain things (meet, spices) were relatively expensive and were only eaten during holidays and festivals, yet there are also some simple ingredients that should be cooked in some way to be eatable =)
@@salganik It's a common American narrative that they saved us during WWII then proceeded to teach us everything we know today.
1. If it tastes good to you, then it isn't wrong for you.
2. I've cooked dry pasta without salting the water. That didn't taste as good as pasta cooked in salted water. Also, given that 'traditional" Italian recipes have you reserve the pasta water and add some to the final dish, not having salt in that water means you'll have to add salt to get the seasoning to the right level. And salty water is easier to integrate into a dish with a sauce.
3. The pineapple is easier to have with every bite if it is cut into chunks instead of rings. Also, fresh pineapple tastes better than canned ones, and that taste improves if they get some grilling in the oven.
4. We went through something similar with Chinese food in America. I totally support the thesis that American Chinese food is its own culinary category, clearly descended from Chinese cooking traditions from a couple of specific, and seafaring, regions of China. It also has elements that are clearly derived from the palate of the mid-20th century American family, including ingredients and spice levels.
There's also a major bifurcation of Chinese dishes into those from the mainland, and those from enclaves of "overseas" Chinese immigrants throughout Asia and the west. When I visited Delhi, I ate at in Indian-Chinese restaurant. It was like some bizarro world of Chinese cuisine, with Indian spices and cooking methods mapped onto Chinese dishes. I've encountered one restaurant in California doing that style of food. It's arguably the same with lots of other Asian cuisines: Singaporean Chinese, Thai Chinese, Malaysian Chinese, et cetera.
"It's pizza place on top of pizza place"
That's not unique to Italy. In Stockton on Tees, England, there used to be a street with I think 7 pizza places in a row. Well, I'm not talking about proper pizzarias though. I'm talking about grungy take-away places that also sell kebabs, burgers, and the local specialty, parmos. In fact that street was colloquially known as "parmo alley".
Of all aspects of nationalism, food nationalism is the most ridiculous. Food is about providing the nutrients our body needs and giving us sheer pleasure. It's not about conforming to imaginary 'traditions'.
The original pizza he describes sounds just like Rhode Island pizza! We're the only place I know of that still eats red pizza with no chesse on top. It's almost always eaten cold or room temp, and it is staple party food. Always served at family gatherings and kids' birthday parties. You buy it from the Italian bakery (not the pizza shop)!
"Marinara" or simply called "Pizza al pomodoro" is also common in southern Italy but it's not among the people's favourites. We consume it for birthdays and other celebrations as well, very cool, maybe because it's the cheapest. the last point is accurate.
By the way, it's been a while, and it's incredibly amazing to see this channel reach 180k subscribers. Congratulations! I would love to see more of your content, and I would also greatly appreciate it if you could share some tutorials on how you make your videos.
this man is just spreading lies
video that marks your transition from historian to history-is-what-you-make-it TH-camr. Promptly unsubscribed.
I'm an American of Italian descent and I'm also a big a fan of Italian culture and products. Knowing a bit more history though I knew that many Italian dishes didn't exist in their modern form until relatively recently. I look at it more like the region has had strong agricultural and textile traditions going back to Roman times, and those traditions have been slowly built upon over thousands of years, vs thinking that all Italian products must have been around since time immemorial.
I love this video. I'm Thai and OTR Food & History has done amazing video on the complicated origin of Sriracha..... a product which I often see people (including thai) argue about on its "authenticity" the internet.
You love this video because you don't know Italy.
italian food culture is not about the food, its about the respect for the raw materials and it's a great way to plan your day. You go to work, you sit around a table for lunch, you have a little pause for reflecting and let your tensikns go away and then you have a fresh brain for the afternoon. It is a culture and can be found everywhere in the italian boot. Even on the alps. And it really has always been like that.
Yes, food is related to identity, one thing few people know is that regional identity is probaly stronger than national identity in italy: pizza is neapolitan, carbonara is from rome etc. I would not personally take pride from these dishes since i'm not from central italy. One thing i advise tourists to do is try to find the identity of the place they visit, instead of asking what is considered italian abroad, try asking what is from that place, many times the history of these dishes, while still being mixed with legends and foreign influences, is fascinating and sometimes contested between different towns, you find historic rivalries, different ways of making the same dish, you really delve into italian history and thought process of making food more than the most famous dishes.
I also want to note that the rules, while being ridicolous on the surface, give a sense of meaning and unity for the broader italian population more than the food itself, and all this pride is a compensation of the ridicule italians feel from foreigners that is given by absurd politics and the hard economic situation, same goes for historical figures, an italian will always tell you that marconi invented telephone and Fermi the nuclear reactor, it can be felt as bragging but it really is a way to show that italians are not just bunga bunga.
I went to Rome in 1978 and saw a pizza place at the bottom of the Spanish steps. It was crowded. I went in and ordered a slice. He asked me what I wanted on it. "Why--tomato sauce and cheese, of course." He squirted some tomato sauce on the cold pizza and sprinkled some powdered cheese on top. It was terrible. It was only then that I noticed that everyone else was having powdered sugar on theirs.
I was introduced to Carbonara in Örebro, Sweden in 1998. Hitchikking all over Sweden on the run from Humana school. Living in a churchkeepers home for a two weeks with two polish friends. Our swedish host was cooking it everny night with his best friend. With cream. It has changed my life. I was cooking carbonara everywhere since that time, even for italian friends here in Bratislava. Until someone told me about the eggs. That was the second change :)
In Bratislava? Lol! Let’s meet and cook a carbonara for each other 🤭 I’m born in Poland, lived most of my life in Italy, now in Bratislava ☺️ and love for carbonara! 😂😂😂
oczywiscie :) @@wdzienkowski
When in Italy, it's interesting to try out the regional cuisine, i.e. the one that really has a long tradition. Historic Tuscan or Sicilian dishes can be surprisingly different from "all-Italian cuisine"
P.S. No cream but always guanciale and no bacon for carbonara. Never spaghetti with (ragù) bolognese. And never dump half a liter of "sauce" on pasta but mix it before you serve it. ... fortunately, I have no strong opinions ;-)
I wish you made more videos about this topic, about more countries that reinvent their culture. This is a sociological gold mine.
To say that before 1861 Italy didn't exist is denying the existence of Italians and their culture. It's the wrong approach to cultures and nations with thousands of years.
Next, all cultures change over time and Italians have never said that tomatoes were grown in Italy more than 500 years ago, or that coffee beans originally come from Italy. However, if you think that the US, a non-nation by your definition of what a culture is and with an inexistent history, has shaped what Italy, Italians and their food to be what it is today you would be, again, mistaken - and a victim of US-centrism too!
I only lived in Italy for 2 years and that carbonara preparation while cancelling yourself caused me to cry out in pain. That being said, I'm American and grew up eating pineapple on the pizza we had available to us. I don't go around asking for it in Italy, but I do still enjoy it at home. I loved my time in Italy, surrounded by Italians, so it doesn't bother me one bit that many of the things that I was told are "founding myths." If that's not how carbonara started, who better to tell me what carbonara is today than Italy. I'm fine with it.
Edit: I'm not 100% sure why I want to add this, but I don't regret at all learning Italian. It will probably never be as useful to me as learning Spanish or Chinese could be, but it's a beautiful launguage that allows me to communicate directly with wonderful people in their own language. If I let myself slow down enough to think about it, I always miss Italy and wonder what it's like now after 20 years being away.
Ok i agree with the pizza but i feel the cabonara is miss leading since a similar dish call pasta alla gricha existed way before which is simmilar to "correct" cabinara just with out the egg
yes, but you see the addition of the egg is a very complex development that took hundreds of years to come up with. No one every thought to do that before. Only Americans had this technology.
@@pcac0004 But it was made in Rome by a Chef of a popular restaurant?
@@andriandrason1318 I think @andriandrasan1318 was being sarcastic.
@@pcac0004 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
though italy was only relatively recently made into a nation state and made up of various independent countries, before that they were united as one people as the romans, that's why when they came back together Rome was made their capital as it's what culturally and historically united them. Though the romans expanded into much of Europe, there was always more ties with those within the boot of Italy, hence why national unification came after being divided against each other by various other powers like the Spanish, French, Austrians, etc
This reminds me of something I saw on the TV here in the UK, about Wensleydale cheese. And basically, yes there is a long history of cheese being made in Wensleydale, but the type of cheese varied and changed drastically over the years. What we know today as Wensleydale cheese is a pretty modern invention.
Honestly taking Grandi's drivel at face value level deserves a thumbs down on its own right
They want to believe Grandi because in this way they can feel important.
Can we stop calling USA AMERICA??? It's really annoying. They don't own the name. I'm just as American as them. America is not USA. America is the continent. Stop this nonsense. May be make a video about this. About how in Latin America we don't want to call them American.
When you were showing off "Italian" products, I thought they looked too familiar and then when you started cooking my suspicion was confirmed, you were in Slovenia.
Hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to Slovenia!
I'm from the north of Italy. Our cousin culture is the "butter culture", not the "oil culture". We never ate pasta and pizza before 1970. And now we have more sushi restaurants than pizza shops
"The most authentic Parmesan comes from Wisconsin"
No Parmesan at all comes from Wisconsin. The ONLY authentic Parmesan comes from Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna and Mantua. Parmesan has been made there for more than 800 years. And Wisconsin came into existence when?
Things like tomatoes and corn and peppers were probably introduced to Italy when the Kingdom of Sicily was a Spanish viceroyalty in the south and Spain held territories in the north as well under the HRE during the 1500s-1700s period.
Things like tomatoes, corn (polenta), vanilla, zucchini/squashes, peppers, and certain beans came from what is today Mexico. Cacao too, although its origins are likely in South America. Potatoes also came from South America making them front and center of cuisines from Ireland (Irish potato famine), to Germany to Russia. The name vanilla, is actually of Spanish origin--the name for bean pod in Spanish is "vaina", its diminutive is "vainilla" which is actually the Spanish name for vanilla--the word was then most likely anglicized in the English speaking world. The name for tomato is actually of nahuatl Aztec origin, know by them as "tomatl". The word for chocolate is also of nahuatl Aztec origin, known to them as xocola-tl or chocola-tl.
Fun fact, the native cactus known as nopales in Mexico, now also grow in the wild in Italy.
The Kingdom of Sicily had a commonality with the viceroyalties Spain established in the Americas during the same period--particularly modern day Mexico that was then known as the viceroyalty of New Spain. In fact while New Spain had mostly Spanish viceroys as in Sicily, it occasionally had French and Italian viceroys--namely from Sicily. And sometimes viceroys were transferred across viceroyalties between the Americas and Europe. And when the Spanish king expelled and exiled the Jesuits from Mexico/New Spain, they were resettled in Italy. Understand that many Jesuits, whatever country they were in, like other monastic and convent orders, usually came from the aristocracy. Usually an older daughter or a child that stood to inherit nothing. So these were Jesuits born in Mexico and brought up in the Catholic monastic life there.