Marianna Giusti reports at Financial Times on a guy who is engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, attacking purist myths:
The man I’m dining with is Alberto Grandi, Marxist academic, reluctant podcast celebrity and judge at this year’s Tiramisu World Cup in Treviso. (“I wouldn’t miss it, even if I had dinner plans with the Pope”.) Grandi has dedicated his career to debunking the myths around Italian food […] Grandi’s speciality is making bold claims about national staples: that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe. Many Italian “classics”, from panettone to tiramisu, are relatively recent inventions, he argues. Some of DOI’s claims [“DOI” is Grandi’s 2018 book Denominazione di origine inventata (Invented Designation of Origin) — LH] might be familiar to industry insiders, but most are based on Grandi’s own findings, partly developed from existing academic literature. His skill is in taking academic research and making it digestible. And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture — a food scene where cappuccini must not be had after midday and tagliatelle must have a width of exactly 7mm. […]
“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says. […]
For Grandi, the story of carbonara perfectly encapsulates Hobsbawm’s idea of the “invention of tradition”. To shed some light on this national favourite, I call Bernardino Moroni, the 97-year-old grandfather of a Roman friend. “We only had pasta on Sundays,” he says on a video call from his home in Morlupo, in the province of Rome. His childhood meals were mainly minestra, beans and vegetables from the family’s kitchen garden, he explains. When I ask him about carbonara, a supposed staple of Roman cooking, he looks away from the camera. “Maybe once a year we ate amatriciana [a tomato-based recipe with bacon], when we could afford to kill a pig. But I’d never heard of carbonara before the war.”
That is because, as the food historian Luca Cesari, author of A Brief History of Pasta, puts it, carbonara is “an American dish born in Italy” and it wasn’t born until the second world war. The story that most experts agree on is that an Italian chef, Renato Gualandi, first made it in 1944 at a dinner in Riccione for the US army with guests including Harold Macmillan. “The Americans had fabulous bacon, very good cream, some cheese and powdered egg yolks,” Gualandi later recalled. Cesari dismisses myths that carbonara was the food of 18th-century Italian charcoal workers as “ahistorical”.
For Italians born after boom years, carbonara has an unalterable set of ingredients: pork jowl, Roman pecorino cheese, eggs and pepper. But early recipes are surprisingly varied. The oldest was printed in Chicago in 1952 and featured Italian bacon, not pork jowl. Italian recipes from around the same time include everything from gruyère (1954, in the magazine La Cucina Italiana) to “prosciutto, and thinly sliced sautéd mushrooms” (1958, Rome’s Tre Scalini restaurant). Pork jowl didn’t come to replace bacon until as recently as the 1990s.
But it is carbonara that provokes some of the most extreme culinary dogmatism. Many Italians today learn to cook it at home according to a set of rules that places it in the context of its “Roman pasta family”, alongside cacio e pepe, gricia and amatriciana. The idea is that the addition or subtraction of specific ingredients transforms one classic pasta dish into another, and any deviation from the rules is a matter of national interest. In 2015, the town of Amatrice issued an official statement to correct the Michelin-starred chef Carlo Cracco after he revealed he liked to put garlic in his amatriciana. “We are confident that this was a slip of the tongue by the celebrity chef,” the statement read. “We are certain he meant well.”
After a discussion of rightwing politicians who use Italian food as a nationalist talking point (“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”), Giusti continues:
These politicians understand the power of what Grandi terms “gastronationalism”. Who cares if the traditional food culture they promote is partly based on lies, recipes dreamt up by conglomerates or food imported from America? Few things are more reassuring and agreeable than an old lady making tortellini.
It wasn’t always like this. “The grandparents knew it was a lie,” Grandi tells me, finishing the last of his prosecco. “The philologic concern with ingredient provenance is a very recent phenomenon.” Indeed it’s hard to imagine that people who survived the second world war eating chestnuts, as my grandfather did, would be concerned about using pork jowl instead of pork belly in a pasta recipe. Or as Grandi puts it, “Their ‘tradition’ was trying not to starve.” […]
Yet it can be comforting to believe in long-held traditions, both your own country’s and others’. Global consumers applaud the celebrity experts of Italian food who churn out books, podcasts and TV shows in an often obsessive pursuit of “authenticity”. When the Italian chef Gino D’Acampo told off the British TV presenter Holly Willoughby in 2010 for suggesting that carbonara could be made with ham, saying “if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike”, the clip went viral. We both love and hate the caricature of the obsessively purist Italian chef.
Whole businesses have grown up around the myth of an ancient culinary tradition untouched by modern food fads. Like the tour companies that arrange cooking lessons with real Italian nonnas in their own homes. (“I got my own personal Italian granny!” a British friend told me of her holiday in Tuscany.) But this kind of fixation on tradition is inherently restrictive. As Grandi points out, a tradition is nothing but an innovation that was once successful.
I don’t know why so many people feel the need to create rigid rules and boundaries instead of welcoming everyone to enjoy things in whatever way they like, but I deprecate it and cheer on the people who, like Grandi, do the valuable work of calling out the lies.
This invention of age-old traditions has always interested me. I would nominate the British and Japanese as World Champions, but they have plenty of rivals. After all, both my champions did their best work in this field in the nineteenth century, so they may be slipping down the ratings now.
I find it fairly easy to understand why a country like Italy, which often feels like it is literally being suffocated by hordes of tourists, would adopt ridiculously rigid rules around food preparation and consumption as a kind of protection mechanism. Cappuccino as shibboleth.
As another example, consider the age-old tradition of Swiss Cheese fondue, invented almost out of whole cloth in the 1950s. People may have melted surplus cheese before that, but it was a marketing campaign by the Swiss Cheese Union in the post-WWII boom years that turned it into a staple.
cite
Ciabatta was invented in 1982 to compete with baguettes.
Speaking of British traditions, France has nothing to rival Lymeswold cheese, a rare delicacy whose origins are lost in the mists of time.
Ha, that’s a great story!
It’s not strange that food traditions are often relatively recent — cuisine is always in flux. But when Grandi says most Italians hadn’t heard about pizza until the 1950s, he must of course be speaking about pizza margherita. The word pizza (pinza, pitta, etc.) is ancient and widespread throughout Italy as the name for a flatbread, generally with some topping. I remember seeing a variety of local versions for sale in a Roman train station in 1963.
The (divinely inspired) invention of the pizza is clearly described in the seventh book of the Aeneid:
Aeneas primique duces et pulcher Iulus
corpora sub ramis deponunt arboris altae,
instituuntque dapes et adorea liba per herbam
subiciunt epulis (sic Iuppiter ipse monebat)
et Cereale solum pomis agrestibus augent.
consumptis hic forte aliis, ut uertere morsus
exiguam in Cererem penuria adegit edendi,
et uiolare manu malisque audacibus orbem
fatalis crusti patulis nec parcere quadris:
‘heus, etiam mensas consumimus?’ inquit Iulus.
Can’t get more age-old-traditional than that. (Of course, Virgil was himself an early master of the noble art of inventing age-old traditions.)
But when Grandi says most Italians hadn’t heard about pizza until the 1950s, he must of course be speaking about pizza margherita. The word pizza (pinza, pitta, etc.) is ancient and widespread throughout Italy as the name for a flatbread, generally with some topping. I remember seeing a variety of local versions for sale in a Roman train station in 1963.
Yes, he covers this:
“Some of DOI’s claims…”
What’s DOI?
Sorry, I should have made that clear in the post — it’s Grandi’s 2018 book Denominazione di origine inventata. I’ll add a bracketed explanation after the abbreviation.
Isn’t the real Urheimat of Italian cuisine in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_Boyardee
@languagehat
Thanks.
For the export market, the cheese was branded Westminster Blue, because some non-English speakers had difficulty pronouncing the name Lymeswold.
<Forehead-slap emoji.>
I liked the story of Pad Thai created as an epitome of Thai national traditions to make the population eat less rice which was an important export crop
Never name your cheese an anagram for slime mold.
What’s really been lost is this:
>His childhood meals were mainly minestra, beans and vegetables from the family’s kitchen garden
I believe that’s true of most of the world. Of my grandmother’s house in rural Michigan (mom was her county’s navy bean queen runner-up!), of African American cuisine (I remember getting bean salad at black church luncheons) before it was determined that sweet barbecue sauce and fried fish were the height of soul food. Baked beans were the Boston dish before chowder.
Beans as the bulk of the human diet were sacrificed to prosperity, meat, bleached grain and inaccurate flatulence jokes. I’d take a good minestra or curried dal over almost anything, myself.
if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike
Is this a traditional Italian saying?
For my father in the 1970s, pizza was just as exotic as sushi is for us today
That was about when I read an article in the New York Times Magazine featuring an interview with a southern Italian chef, somewhat as follows:
Etc. etc.
Chef Boy-ar-dee
Ettore Boiardi was following the now-almost-forgotten tradition of changing the spelling of your name to preserve the pronunciation of it, more or less. My Mac Eoghain ancestors also followed this tradition.
The village of Lymeswold was created as part of the brand idea.
When I read this, I thought, “Building a whole village as a marketing exercise for cheese is pretty spectacular: it certainly out-Potemkins Potemkin.” But it turns out the village was fictional. The various Levittowns (there are four, one since renamed) were a marketing exercise, but at least what they were marketing was houses which could actually be bought.
Apparently Michigan’s bean-queenery tradition extended into the new millennium (and there’s some suggestion of parallel folkloric customs in Indiana). https://www.mlive.com/freshfood/2011/08/post_86.html
ETA: I don’t know if the 2019-20 Bean Queen served a second term because the pandemic interrupted an orderly succession or she was just too good to be dethroned. https://www.michiganbeanfestival.org/news
Don’t know about traditional, but this 1940 letter to the editor mocking Churchill seems to treat it as a well-known phrase.
It certainly does: “se la sua nobile nonna avesse avuto le ruote, eccetera.”
And here I thought the cross-cultural form of that proverb was more like “And if my aunt had a [local vulgar synonym for membrum virile], she’d be my uncle.”
Scotty uses a version of the”wheels” expression in Star Trek III. This blog post references both Scotty and D’Acampo and traces a version back to 1908, where it seems to be identified as Yiddish. That may or may not be significant, since it shows up in a lot of different languages.
I once had a supposedly very traditional gamberi alla Toscana, which consisted of four medium-sized shrimp, in the center of an entire plate of white beans. The shrimp seemed more like a garnish than the main focus of the dish; it was really much more about the beans. Looking for recipes for something similar now, I see a bunch described as “gamberi e cannellini alla Toscana,” foregrounding the beans that might once have been taken for granted (subsumed under “alla Toscana”).
The version I use is very close to JWB’s: “If my aunt had balls” etc. Wikt actually lists this as the translation of the Italian! It’s also amusing that the newspaper article that Hat links refers to Churchill as “il signore W. C.”, i.e. “Mr. Water Closet”.
Actually, it was Alon who linked it; I just admired it.
The only version I know in Spanish is close to the Italian: si mi (tía|abuela) tuviese ruedas, sería (una) bicicleta.
Not an inapt judgement of his character, though the fascist POS authoring the letter was probably no better.
Speaking of Italian foods that are a lot newer than you might think: portobello.
I always thought it was strictly Yiddish, with wagon.
A pun on the EU’s Protected Designations of Origin (e.g. you can’t sell sparkling wine as champagne unless it’s from Champagne).
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. My uncle was taught how to make it by an Italian colleague – with just egg and pepper. Bacon and parmesan are at best optional. Cream is German. The trick is to take the pasta when it’s still hot and pass it through the raw egg so the egg cooks on the noodles.
(German-style “carbonara”, swimming in cream sauce with ham, doesn’t always turn out abominable… but it’s never good.)
I couldn’t get this to scan till I reached the last line: Iulus has three syllables, as expected from contemporary Greek.
No, beans were never that important in that many places, and the flatulence jokes are accurate for most people. The most common staple in agricultural times & places appears to have been porridge from shredded cereals.
Nonono, it’s not supposed to make (questionable) sense, it’s supposed to reduce the opposing side’s logic ad absurdum!
It’s not even extinct in Germany. (Or at least wasn’t 50 years ago in writing.)
“If my grandma had wheels …” is. It’s traditional enough to retain a tendency to conjugate the verb not in the grammatically correct subjunctive (“Se mia nonna avesse le ruote”) but in an incorrect indicative (“Se mia nonna aveva le ruote”). On a personal level, it’s one of a tiny number of expressions I don’t say in Italian but rather in Piedmontese, a language I don’t speak: “Se mia nòna a l’avìa le roe a sarìa ‘n tranvaj.”
Which brings me to the absence of a consensus on what exactly wheeled grandmas would be. The options seem to be a cart, a wheelbarrow, a tram (my own case), or a bicycle. Noticeably not a car, which I take to be a sign the saying predates the wide diffusion of cars in Italy.
I’m skeptical. When I was a child in the 1980s, pizza was a perfectly ordinary child-pleasing food in Turin, which is almost as far away from Naples as you can get in peninsular Italy. Come to think of it, the farthest you can get from Naples in peninsular Italy is Val d’Aosta and we also had pizza there in my childhood, in an old pizzeria most memorable because service was so slow we brought a deck of cards and played while waiting for pizza.
It wasn’t fancy pizza, and it was not at all invested in respect for Neapolitan tradition. In fact it was not obviously Neapolitan in any way. It was preceded by chickpea-flour farinata as a starter, which strongly suggests it was made by Tuscan or Genoese restaurateurs, at least originally. It was often cooked in a metal pan (like farinata) rather than directly on the brick oven floor. However, it was also not at all exotic. Some restaurants in town had been serving it since before World War II. I cannot think of any dish that is now so thoroughly assimilated and yet would have seemed exotic a mere decade ago.
Surely the portobello mushroom is an American supersizing of the originally French champignon de Paris? In Italy I only recall encountering the small ones, normally called “champignon”.
The village of Lymeswold was created as part of the brand idea
Private Eye magazine made great mockery of the whole thing, and to this day, I believe, includes occasional references to the Honorable Member for Lymeswold, invariably an elderly Tory of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ persuasion.
“The formulation of Baileys [Irish Cream in the 1970s] was motivated partly by the availability of alcohol from a money-losing distillery … and a desire to use surplus cream from another business … resulting from the increased popularity of semi-skimmed milk”
I´m old enough to remember eating pizza as a child before the 1950s in Argentina. The shop in my neighborhood in Acassuso in the outskirts of Buenos Aires was called Pepe. They were an Italian family business, and sold pizza in the winter and ice cream in the summer. No fancy pizza, to be sure, only mozzarella and tomato, perhaps anchovies. Also downtown in the city there are pizza shops that are said to have had Carlos Gardel and friends as clients … and Gardel died in 1935.
@David Marjanović: Beaten egg, cooked by the hot noodles, then with a little salt, pepper, and maybe parmesan and .some kind of minced pork product was how my grandmother and mother cooked the dish. I don’t think we called it “carbonara,” although I don’t recall what Mom actually did call it.
@Giacomo Ponzetto: In my lifelong experience, dating back to a childhood trip in 1979, pizza in northern Italy often tastes like ass. It can be good or lousy, just like American pizza, but it does not seem like a special local cuisine. It’s just a standard international dish. Things are different in the Two Sicilies, however.
“Bacon and parmesan are at best optional. Cream is German. ”
Aha! So the thing that a friend of mine considers edible is German carbonara… (I’m still not sure I want eggs there, but eggs, bacon and cream is really too much for me).
There’s a Yiddish expression, As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah (If my grandma had balls she’d be my grandpa).
You see bowdlerized versions of this in English, involving wheels and vehicles. I’m not surprised to learn that the expression exists in other languages.
This reminds me of the advice Sky Masterson’s father gave him:
“One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
When Guys and Dolls was first on Broadway, the men in the audience would have known that what you’d get an ear-full of was piss. But the women would either not have known, or could have pretended not to know.
Same principle applies to grandmas, wheels, and bicycles.
Another pertinent fact about Lymeswold is that it hasn’t been produced since 1992 — 31 years ago. Now its marketing might have intended to kid people into thinking that it was made in some small village, but I doubt that anyone was misled into thinking that there was any long tradition of making it, if they remembered a time before the name was invented.
The bicycle version has its own aesthetic value. It even can be counted as an improvement.
@GP — this depends on what you define as pizza:
—
L’apertura dei più antichi locali di vendita di pizze al tegamino risale agli anni trenta del XX secolo, e a partire dai successivi anni cinquanta si ha la certezza che il prodotto fosse regolarmente in commercio ed apprezzato. Fino agli anni sessanta del Novecento la pizza al tegamino era pressoché l’unico tipo di pizza servito sotto la Mole. In seguito, anche per via della massiccia immigrazione dal sud Italia, l’apertura di numerose pizzerie classiche portò ad un cambiamento nelle abitudini degli acquirenti, tanto che agli inizi del nuovo millennio la pizza al tegamino poteva dirsi essere divenuta una specialità di nicchia.
—
https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_al_tegamino
By coincidence a facebook friend just posted a link to this piece from a few months back with an instructive tale about how self-conscious anti-tradition radicals just end up adding an incremental encrustation to the previously-invented tradition. (Note also the Realpolitik angle of the Fascist regime’s desire to downplay pasta – Italy had to import wheat to serve its pasta demand but could produce domestically more rice than the then-prominence of rice in recipes would naturally consume.)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/italian-futurist-pasta
By the standards of invented old dishes Shopska salad is practically ancient — 1956 at the Bulgarian-Communist-starved-for-hard-curency-regime Sunny Beach resort on the Black Sea.
And then there’s that ancient German dance the lipsi.
@Brett:
@PlasticPaddy:
We agree that pizza in my Northern Italian childhood was neither fancy nor particularly Neapolitan. The scene is very different now, though. I’ve been to Naples and of course I’ve eaten excellent pizza there, but I didn’t find it noticeably different from or superior to the pizza served by the best Neapolitan pizzerias in Milan or Barcelona (I haven’t eaten pizza in Turin in ages).
In any case, pizza seems very thin ice for Prof. Grandi to skate on. I’m sure his general point is correct and well worth making. Yet pizza seem to highlight that the romantic boosters of tradition are not entirely wrong either.
There seems in fact to be a Neapolitan tradition of making pizza in a certain way. There are different ways of making similar dishes in New York, Buenos Aires, Turin and so on. All these similar but different dishes called “pizza” have been rather standard fare in their respective cities for over fifty years.
However, it’s the Neapolitan version that has the most gourmet potential. I’ve seen the same thing happen in Turin, Boston and Barcelona: there used to be the local pizza places, and then “traditional Neapolitan” pizzerias started opening and serving what most people (including myself and I presume both Brett and PlasticPaddy too) found to be a better product.
It’s unsurprising that people run to the conclusion that what makes it better, or at least gives it better potential, is precisely that it is the traditional item the other versions originated from. Might it even be true in this one case?
I inherited from my aunt a book on Italian food published in 1958 (when such dishes were little known in the UK and you could only buy olive oil at the chemist’s). There’s a recipe in it for ‘Spaghetti with bacon, egg and onion’ which I used to make often at one time and always thought of as ‘carbonara’, having come across the name elsewhere. No cream, just raw egg mixed into the hot spaghetti as Brett describes.
In any case, pizza seems very thin ice for Prof. Grandi to skate on. I’m sure his general point is correct and well worth making. Yet pizza seem to highlight that the romantic boosters of tradition are not entirely wrong either.
There seems in fact to be a Neapolitan tradition of making pizza in a certain way. There are different ways of making similar dishes in New York, Buenos Aires, Turin and so on. All these similar but different dishes called “pizza” have been rather standard fare in their respective cities for over fifty years. […]
It’s unsurprising that people run to the conclusion that what makes it better, or at least gives it better potential, is precisely that it is the traditional item the other versions originated from. Might it even be true in this one case?
I can’t speak for Grandi, but I think there are several things going on here. In the first place, he’s not denying that there were similar dishes with similar names earlier and elsewhere:
So yes, there were things called “pizza,” but they were not sold in pizzerias and they were different from the Sicilian/Neapolitan dish that had migrated to communities like New Haven and Buenos Aires along with the Southern Italians who knew and loved it (and those are the two places I have had the best pizza — I’ve never been to Italy). And I’m sure Grandi wouldn’t deny that there are such things as traditional local dishes; after all, not every dish was invented by a committee in recent decades. What he’s decrying is the tendency to make such local dishes immutable national symbols and try to prevent them from changing (as of course Neapolitan pizza did in the New World, becoming larger and having a wider variety of toppings). Also, I’m pretty sure “what makes it better” is not that it’s traditional but that it’s, well, better — or at least that a whole lot of people prefer it to the alternatives. It’s the same reason Bach and Mozart are better than any number of worthy composers who get played a lot. There is such a thing as quality, even if it’s impossible to define to the satisfaction of those who need strict definitions.
All this talk of pizzas and bicycles has me wondering: if Grandi is right about pizza, what is going on in this scene of Bicycle Thieves (1948)?
Just before this scene, Antonio asks his son, “C’hai fame? Te la magneresti una pizza?” The “pizza” seems to be a special treat for the boy, but not an “exotic” one.
And here is the dialogue in the restaurant:
ENRICO (WAITER): Mezzo litro?
ANTONIO: No, un litro e una pizza.
ENRICO (WAITER): Qua pizze non se ne fanno.
ANTONIO: Come non se ne fanno?
ENRICO (WAITER): Questa è una trattoria, mica una pizzeria.
I find it difficult to understand how this dialogue is supposed to work if, as Grandi claims, “most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s.”
“Discs of dough topped with ingredients,” as Grandi calls them, were pervasive all over the Mediterranean for centuries: piada …
In Cologne one searches groceries and supermarkets in vain for Mexican tortillas de harina (as for las de maíz, all hope can be abandoned up front). There are similarly dimensioned things manufactured by Turkish companies and others, but they have sugar in them and are as a consequence disgusting. They are often called “wraps”.
However, last year I discovered granpiada at the salumeria toscana I frequent. They are as close to tortillas as it is possible to get without being tortillas. Whatever the Italians make of them, I make man-size enchiladas and burritos. As I said, corn tortillas are still beyond the event horizon.
Most people who have thought about much at all are aware that the vast majority of people in the past weren’t able to eat meat and cream and cheese on a daily basis, because they weren’t wealthy enough. The myth that such people would have been picky about specific ingredients seems to me like a strawman. (Actually, the idea that variant carbonara recipes are shocking for Italians seems like a strawman too, but maybe I just live a sheltered life.)
the vast majority of people in the past weren’t able to eat meat and cream and cheese on a daily basis, because they weren’t wealthy enough.
Not only in the past. But many well-to-do people here seem to have moved on to a different luxury – no meat, cream or cheese on a daily basis, instead purple carrots, blue tomatoes and expensive wines. They don’t work hard enough to need much protein replenishment, I guess.
I’ve heard that carrots were purple before they were orange.
Yes, old-timey carrots, I too have read something similar. Back-to-the-roots nationalists cover their tracks with carrots. But don’t forget the back-to-the-tubers enthusiasts: “There are more than 4,000 varieties of native potatoes”.
I remain skeptical. Let me pick one old pizzeria per city.
Naples: L’Antica Pizzeria Da Michele (est. 1906) proclaims that “they respect tradition at any cost,” in particular refusing any toppings beyond the basic minimum.
New Haven: The Original Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana (est. 1925), seemingly the oldest in town, credited with inventing white-clam pizza.
Turin: Da Michele 1922 a pizzeria serving pizza al tegamino since the thirties.
Sure, pizzerias may have opened in Turin later than in New Haven. But no more than a decade later. Sure, pizza in Turin may have been worse than in New Haven (rather likely) or more different from the canons of Neapolitan tradition (not as obvious). But it was already sold in pizzerias before World War II, and it seems to have been an adaptation of the Neapolitan dish just as in New Haven.
All in all, I retain the impression that Grandi starts with a perfectly valid point, but then overstretches it to strike a bolder contrarian pose.
That’s certainly plausible — I guess it comes with the territory.
I think the article on fondue is trying too hard to be jaded and demystifying. The wiki on raclette offers sightings of melted cheese in the Alps in early modern and even medieval days. Maybe they didn’t always use chic little cheesepots or fancy-handled skewers? Or put the same interesting flavorings in the melted cheese? I still think it counts as hallowed.
Stu : you can find a lot of stuff in Cologne (and even more in Linz, believe it or not), but you can not find actual nixtamalized masa harina in Europe, at least in my experience. You can _import_ it _to_ Germany, at best. At bulk. You have to import huge amounts, not something for even a small restaurant chain, let alone one. Trust me, we checked it out when we wanted to open a small thing with some friends.
@gp, hat
I would also say that a part of what consumers perceive as “quality” is “coolness/fashionability”. Otherwise advertisement would stress only aspects related to quality (in the example of Napoli style pizza, say, quality would comprise use of bufala mozzarella, dough ingredients and preparation, use of forno a legna or “superhot tile” to ensure proper cooking while still retaining moisture, use of quality fresh or freshly prepared/ well conserved toppings, employment of competent pizzaiolo and waiter who can carry 6-8 pizzas in one trip and ignore all other requests when the pizzas come out of the oven, etc., with some customisation of adjustable parameters like depth, oiliness, spicing, and consistency of tomato topping or tomato sauce, according to local taste or owner/pizzaiolo prejudice).
Funny that the oldest pizzerie in both Turin and Naples are Da Michele. I visited the sites to see if there was any relationship, but the Turinese Michele was a Tuscan emigre, while the Neapolitan Mike was from a family that had been serving pizza there even before he opened his place:
>Questo era Michele Condurro, il famigerato maestro pizzaiolo, il capostipite della famiglia di pizzaioli che dal 1870 hanno fatto della pizza napoletana la cifra della propria vita.
Does 150 years count as genuine tradition? Their website also mentions the beloved old Italian movie Mangia Prega Ama, starring an actress with a name dating back to imperial times — Julia.
And looking up her filmography, she got her break in the early flatbread-centered movie Pizza Mistica.
Ah. I didn’t know exactly what capostipite meant. It sounds like more accurately, the founder of Da Michele’s in 1906 named the restaurant for the family patriarch, who’d gotten them into the pizza business a few decades earlier
@Kristian: Some previous comments about the history of carrots colors.
My understanding is that heirloom carrots can be a lot of different colors. However, my personal experience with wild carrots was that they (the taproots of the Queen Anne’s* lace plant) were off-white to pale yellow. My next younger brother was a huge lover of carrots, and the wild Queen Anne’s lace grew all over the place in Michigan, so my parents decided to try harvesting and cooking some of the wild roots. We pulled up a bunch of large plants, but my mother only ended up boiling one or two. As might be expected for a wild plant, unimproved by human breeding, the carrots were not enjoyable to eat. Even when boiled to make them soft enough to chew, they were stringy and coarse, and they had very little flavor and certainly none of the detectable carrot sweetness we expect today.
* My father.seemed obsessive about figuring out which English Queen Anne they were named for. The queen regnant would ne the most obvious choice normally. However, the blood-like red blooms that grow in the center of the larger white inflorescence suggested it might have referred to Anne Boleyn. Wikipedia offers an alternative, almost certainly bogus, theory:
Giacomo Ponzetto: “Surely the portobello mushroom is an American supersizing of the originally French champignon de Paris?”
Oops, apparently the New York Times and I were bamboozled by the Italian(-sounding) name into thinking that the portobello mushroom came from Italy. Thanks for the correction. As discussed at the Portobello posts, portobello is simply a rebranding of brown mushrooms that have been allowed to mature and grow large, and this marketing strategy could have originated in the US, though the mushroom industry has avoided taking credit. Champignon de Paris is just the French word for the same species Agaricus bisporus; the species is not native to France particularly, but its commercial cultivation did originate there.
I commented on me having to go to my grandmother’s burial some days ago, somewhere on the hattery, and I’m closing tabs, and I noticed that I was reading an article about Dubravka Ugresic’s death. They died within two days. My grandmother two days later. Can’t find the particular comment of the post.
I commented about how upset I am that it is a Bulgarian custom to bury a loved one on the very next day. This is a custom that upsets me.
I would wager that Buenos Aires pizza is as indebted to Genoa as to Naples — the local classics include fainá (clearly < Ligurian fainâ rather than Standard Italian farinata) and fugazza (ditto < Ligurian fugassa, not Italian focaccia) alongside Southern recipes like alla pizzaiola.
Grandi is operating within a narrow definition of pizza that excludes such things, but that didn’t seem to be the habit of Italian migrants, who happily sold them in pizzerías.
I suppose that if we rephrase his claim as “the current pizza prototype (dough+tomato+cheese) is more American than it is Italian” it might make more sense — there’s no mozzarella in any of the above dishes.
I would wager that Buenos Aires pizza is as indebted to Genoa as to Naples
Interesting, I hadn’t been aware of the Genoese background.
Grandi is operating within a narrow definition of pizza
I would say rather that he’s operating with the common understanding of pizza (what you expect to get if you walk into a pizza place), and pointing out that what the mass of humanity considers “pizza” is a small subset of the wider category.
seal of approval
As I’ve said, I don’t think the “wheel” version is bowdlerized – it works differently.
Portuguese too. Has been blamed on Islam or directly on warm weather.
“There’s a Yiddish expression, As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah (If my grandma had balls she’d be my grandpa).”
Yeah, Serbian has a similar vulgar version (hint: it’s not balls).
David Marjanović – you could say it works differently, but the truth is that it doesn’t work at all. The point of the expression is that *of course* if some not-A were A then B would be so. But since A is impossible, not-B. And testicles on a grandparent does imply the grandpa. But why would wheels make grandma a bicycle?
Kristian and Stu – on carrots, see also https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1087
PlasticPaddy – I once had a very good pizza in Spiddal. https://www.tripadvisor.ie/Restaurant_Review-g551545-d2304940-Reviews-Fiordigrano_Pizza_Cafe-Spiddal_County_Galway_Western_Ireland.html
The point of the “wheels” expression is a different one: that it is absurd to act as if it were enough for some not-A to be A in order for B to follow.
I don’t doubt that DM distinguishes the points of the two expressions, but I wonder what proportion of speakers of any language have access to both expressions and make such a distinction.
If my bicycle had a dick, what would it be?
@bloix
Sounds great. Will try to remember for my next visit to the Connemara Gaeitacht. I am not sure Grandi would approve of the Hawaiian Pizza, although it is a fine illustration of the dialectic: supporters of the opposing principles of pineapple and melted cheese are forced into a synthesis that neither group of supporters might have chosen freely. Irish fans of pasta with a chicken sauce may have to ask for this specially, as it does not seem to be included on the menu.
Yes, I wish that place had been there when I was in Galway.
If my bicycle had a dick, what would it be?
This, obviously.
“He’s operating with the common understanding of pizza”
To an extent* it makes the idea trivial. Of course, my idea of a modern “hat” (what I expect to find in a shop that sells “hat”) is different from that of Tolstoy. I am also not surprised that Austronesian (outside of Taiwan) is more uniform than its relatives in Taiwan. When something spreads globally, is offered by chain eateries and answers the very same expectation that “in Burundi it must be the same as in Moscow” as McDonalds – well, it must have underwent some process of (commercial) narrowing.
*Now the extent:
First I easily may not realise it (even if that means I’m being silly). Of course they offered Baileys to st. Patrick: If Irish people are capable of inventing it, it would be incredibly stupid not to offer it to st. Patrick. Baileys is great. When I was a teenager all girls and most (or all) boys were really happy to see Baileys.
Same with pizza (modern).
Second, if Italians actually did not know pizza with cheese (or other main ingredients – not necessary all) it is indeed surprising (see above about Baileys).
I am also not surprised that Austronesian (outside of Taiwan) is more uniform than its relatives in Taiwan.
Actually, I’m not sure that’s true. Although at some fundamental level the diversity is greatest in the Homeland, there are some pretty weird Austronesian languages out there in the wild where they’ve been hobnobbing with Papuan.
(Joel, of course, will Actually Know.)
Se mia nòna a l’avìa le roe a sarìa
This part of the saying, at least, scans and rhymes; it’s not too surprising that the variable part is extrametrical (or vice versa, whichever you prefer).
It was often cooked in a metal pan (like farinata) rather than directly on the brick oven floor.
This is how NYC “Sicilian” pizza is made: it’s consequently cut into smaller rectangles rather than almost-triangles.
It’s just a standard international dish.
Nowadays an extraterrestrial one, ever since the characterization of the surface of Io (the Jovian moon) as “a pan pizza, extra cheese”.
Italy had to import wheat to serve its pasta demand but could produce domestically more rice than the then-prominence of rice in recipes would naturally consume.
A rush of brains to the head would have gotten the Fascists to publish cookbooks based on rice noodles.
I would also say that a part of what consumers perceive as “quality” is “coolness/fashionability”.
Quite. But also familiarity. Nothing else can account for the popularity of 白虫曲轴箱油 bái chóng qūzhóu xiāng yóu ‘white worms in crankcase oil’ as sold in (some) Chinese restaurants worldwide, or of Taco Bell in the U.S., which (as I am sure Stu will agree) is neither Mexican nor Tex-Mex, it’s just Taco Bell.
There is also the Blench Theory of Formosan Languages: that they are the result not of really deep divergence, like Modern Anatolian would be if it existed, but of settlement from different parts of Malayo-Polynesian-land and partial convergence.
@DE, you are right. Yes, to treat them as close you need to substract areal influences. (I still hope pizza in Burundi too is different from ours. “Differently wrong”)
i, like Bloix, have always understood the “wheels” versions of the saying – in yiddish or english – to be a cleaned-up version for polite/’mixed’ company. it’s hard for me to imagine otherwise, given the contrast range of vehicles i’ve heard in that version of the english (some seeming to be improvised on the spot) and the unanimity of “balls” in the other version (in yiddish, my experience is more limited but similar, with “אײער / eyer” [‘eggs’], the colloquial standard term*).
and, unrelatedly, pizza with fainá is one of my favorite variations!
.
* Bloix’s “beytsim” (also eggs, but from the hebrew/aramaic side of the lexicon) isn’t a version i’ve heard in the wild, but i wouldn’t consider it a separate version, since it’s the same literal referent (unlike, say, a substitution in english of “nuts” (nearly as colloquial-standard as “balls”), which i’ve never heard used in a grandmother counterfactual).
to treat them as close you need to subtract areal influences
It works the other way round, too: the genetic diversity of the Oti-Volta languages (for example) is very much skewed to the eastern end of their range, where they probably originated, but areal effects have made the modern eastern languages seem a good deal more closely related to one another than they really are.
you can not find actual nixtamalized masa harina in Europe, at least in my experience.
Doesn‘t seem to be a problem in Vienna. You can get good masa here: https://www.maiztortilla.at/
Quite good, although she makes SoCal style tacos, which plays into this whole theme of what is real authenticity anyway.
Casa Mexico in Vienna also imports perfectly good corn tortillas and decent tamales .
Flour and corn/flour tortillas are actually widely available in Viennese supermarkets (and, I think, produced in the Czech Republic.) I am honestly surprised Vienna is in any respect less provincial than Cologne.
Beytsim is definitely Hebrew, not Aramaic (also -im plural, not -in).
@PlasticPaddy:
This is exactly what fancy pizzerias do in Italy today! Some are more invested in tradition, some in creativity, but they are all distinguished by how much they brag about their dough, their leavening, the precise source of their ingredients, and their inevitably wood-fired oven (which is one reason I’m unsure pizza al padellino is strictly more heretic than New Haven pizza: is it less traditional to slide a tin pan into a wood-fired oven, or to lay the dough directly on the bricks of a coal-fired oven?).
Even the Turinese Da Michele, which unlike its Neapolitan namesake is not a fancy pizzeria — though it may be trying to acquire that status through a rediscovery of pizza al tegamino — advertises it’s using “olio IGP Fabbri e pomodori biologici Pomilia.” Come to think of it, that’s probably a sign it’s a mere wannabe, because the fancy thing is advertising the superiority of your flour.
I’m all for it, by the way. Fancy pizzerias may be somewhat annoyingly trendy and pretentious at times, but they’ve brought about a noticeable improvement in pizza. And they remain very reasonably priced, though probably a tad more expensive than the child-pleasing pizzerias of old.
@John Cowan
Now that you mention it, the saying scans for me too, but in a different way that only admits the logical truncation. The setup is an ottonario:
Se / mia / nò/na a l’a/vìa / le / ro/e
The punchline is a senario:
a se/rì/a ‘n / tran/vaj.
It’s doubtful that a Piedmontese speaker would elide a consonant in the fourth-syllable synalepha as I do, but then again l is a mere approximant, isn’t it? Everything else seems kosher — the cross-line episynalepha is standard in Italian verse.
If my bicycle had a dick, what would it be?
Or this? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7095134.stm
Copenhagen has some pretty authentic taquerías now. When my Mexican friend orders five tacos more even though she’s full, it can’t be bad. Maybe it’s a tie in to that, or maybe to the gluten free wave, but soft corn tortillas and even blue masa are easy to find. (I think there are two places within 500m of my home).
I also have two pizzerias with Italian-speaking cooks within a slightly larger distance, call it 700m.
I’m waiting for goat birria to arrive.
@V
See https://taiyari.nl/about-taiyari/ (and https://nixtamaiz-tortilla-bakery.business.site/ though I’m not sure what’s up with the two different companies — maybe they split up?)
I understand they supply many restaurants with both freshly made corn tortillas and related products as well as the masa.
Background: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2017/12/01/daar-is-de-tortilla-a1583193
Kelly van Harten is also listed as the founder on the Nixtamaíz website.
(Translation from DeepL.)
Yeah, but my friend (who is an American of Mexican descent) told me he researched it and said none of it is actually nixtamalized. I don’t know. Maybe he failed to see this one. I’ll message him.
Pizzaschnitten (Viennese streetfood, at least 20 years ago).
Pizzaslices, a Danish compound of impeccable pedigree. And we don’t match the Benelux (yet), I don’t know of any places nixtamalizing their masa on-premise. They probably use imported Mexican supermarket brands, but I’ll ask next time I’m there.
(In other news, I found a store that carries fresh mulberries when available, but that’s when a single huge old tree on a biodynamic farm north of Copenhagen decides it’s time. About ten days in mid-late summer…)
“Cal” is not* quicklime, CaO, but slaked lime, Ca(OH)₂, which you get by wetting quicklime. Of course, the basic solutions you get after dumping them in a pot or water are identical.
* To the extent that these closely related compounds have well-defined common names…
Jen in E: That’s a great story! I like this line: “Stewart had denied the offence, claiming it was caused by a misunderstanding after he had too much to drink.”
He thought the bicycle had consented.
Fwiw, Wikipedia in Spanish refers to quicklime as “la cal”, la cal viva to be precise, and to calcium hydroxide as cal hidratada. Though there is a bit of a conundrum there: that you can’t boil something in a powder speaks for itself.
.
Still, either the mistake was introduced by the newspaper or Taiyari was since notified of the distinction, because they write here:
@Jen in E. What a bicycle gets up to in the privacy of its owners Hostel bedroom is not the business of the Law. I would be prosecuting the cleaners for breaking into the bedroom.
There is a subsidiary question as to why there wasn’t adequate stabling for the bicycle in the Hostel’s zones and messuages. I’d be prosecuting the Hostel’s administration as well.
A bicycle deprived of communion with its own two-wheeled kind is of course liable to engage in all sorts of depraved conduct.
(I’m channeling Flann O’Brien.)
(And I’m reminded of that superb scene in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot where the postman (drunk of course) is attempting to mount his steed. I think your man in Ayrshire had many defences. Sack his lawyer for incompetence!)
When it comes to the history of pizza, I highly recommend Nathan Myhrvold’s four-volume 17 kg Modernist Pizza.
It has a couple of hundred pages dedicated to the origin of pizza.
It’s been a couple of years since I read it, but the gist is something like this:
* Flatbreads with topping have been made in the mediterranean basin since time immemorial.
* In the 1800’s Neapolitan pizza was typically deep-fried balls of dough.
* In the early 1900’s some enterprising New Yorker baker of Italian extraction (I have forgotten the details) decided to sell bread with toppings, and called it ‘pizza’.
* This American idea of pizza was exported all over the world, (WWII was important) but was adapted everywhere.
* The Italians took to it, like fish to water, and decided that Neapolitan pizza was the ‘original’.
* What we now know as ‘Authentic Neapolitan Pizza’ probably only came to dominate after WWII.
* The ultimate development in the Pizza was achieved in Ontario in 1962, when the Hawaii pizza was invented.
The book is seriously impressive. Both well researched and beautifully illustrated.
scene in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot where the postman …
Errk. That movie is Jour de fête. IIRC Les Vacances also has some bicycling (because Tatti on a bike is a thousand gags already) but not drunken.
The ultimate development in the Pizza was achieved in Ontario in 1962, when the Hawaii pizza was invented
Stuff with pineapple on it was the height of “perceived” luxury in post-WW2 Germany. I give you Toast Hawaii, and please keep it.
Actually it was the combination with the cheapest of greasy “processed cheese”, tasteless air-bread etc. that made the whole thing revolting. Some of my best friends are pineapples, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.
Popup: Thanks very much for that; I’ll never read the book, but I’m glad to have the summary of the history, which all sounds reasonable.
Official hostility to quote unquote Hawaiian pizza caused a constitutional crisis in Iceland in early 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/21/icelands-president-would-ban-pineapple-on-pizza-if-he-could
I see your Toast Hawaii, and raise a Riz Casimir, a Swiss classic from the 60s. (Or even the Swedish 1970s classic Flygande Jacob. What could possibly be more exotic than bananas and peanuts!?)
@popup
This is not completely bogus for Asian cuisine…
https://www.prashad.co.uk/green-banana-satay-recipe/
@Languagehat
Popup: Thanks very much for that; I’ll never read the book, but I’m glad to have the summary of the history, which all sounds reasonable.
I’m not doing it justice. Nathan Myhrvold is a seriously impressive person, who has taken his considerable skill and fortune and turned it toward (mostly) benign ends. His first foray into cooking was the USD500 cookbook monstrosity Modernist Cuisine, which broke ground in many different ways. (Although not so much in the history or science of cooking, as Harold McGee covered most of that in his epocal On Food and Cooking¹.) He has since written another 2500 page œuvre on ‘Modernist Bread’, before tackling the ‘Modernist Pizza’. Rumours have it that they’re working on ‘Modernist Pastry’.
¹ Now, that’s a book that ought to grace any cooks bookshelf. It’s packed with useful information, on anything from ingredients to cooking methods. And it’s much more affordable than the ‘Modernist’ books.
the USD500 cookbook monstrosity Modernist Cuisine
Whereas the pizza book is only $300!
Isn’t Myhrvold’s fortune mostly from patent trolling? I wouldn’t call that “mostly benign”.
Compared to some ingredients, the retro recipes we made with pineapple tended not to be that bad.
1940 Marseilles, in Anna Seghers’ novel ‘Transit’, 1942:
‘Die Pizza ist noch ein sonderbares Gebäck. Rund und bunt wie eine Torte. Man erwartet etwas süßes, da beißt man auf Pfeffer. Man sieht sich das Ding naher an, da merkt Man, daß es gar nicht mit Kirschen und Rosinen gespickt ist, sondern mit Paprika und Oliven. Man gewöhnt sich daran. Nur leider verlangen sie jetzt auch hier für die Pizza Brotkarten.’
Great quote!
FWIW I had thought the “(mostly) benign” was a reference to how the fellow’s money had been spent rather than how it had been earned in the first place.
When money is ill-gotten, it is immoral (or something equally to be deprecated, such as being starry-eyed and greedy) to say that it was then spent benignly. This would let Hannibal Lector off the hook of analogy. In one movie, he served his guests with delicious braised something-or-other that was, of course, a fresh organ from someone he had just killed.
The fact that property is theft means merely that nations are comfortably accustomed to living with a bad conscience. It doesn’t get worse when the subject is brought up in the Guardian.
Toast Hawaii
That took me back, for a turn – in the 70s, it was still a thing; something to prepare quickly when my parents had surprise guests. My brother and I liked it – count that under the usual children’s preference for junkish food.
We didn’t even get the pineapple or the jam/cocktail berry/tomato center. Parisertoast with just the bread, reconstituted ham and processed cheese, with a croque monsieur well hidden somewhere in its ancestry.
@Keith, @Stu and others
The “Mostly benign” did indeed refer to how Myhrvold is spending his fortune these days. He’s spent a lot on development of vaccines and also some interesting nuclear power designs. And of course his cooking. He’s hired a handful of chefs and photographers whose main output is books of recipes. Mostly benign.
He got his first billion when he sold a company to Microsoft, where he also served as CTO for quite a while. Also at least in part benign.
It’s true that Intellectual Ventures has a checkered reputation. Some of what they’re doing is clearly patent trolling, but by no means all. Admittedly not entirely benign.
In many ways he seems like a big child, spending inordinate amounts of money on toys. He certainly seems to make less of a mess than e.g. Musk.
The upside of this is… his scientific papers.
Being less counterproductive than Lone Skum is a low bar.
I would be prosecuting the cleaners for breaking into the bedroom.
They were acting as agents of the owner, who had the right to enter under the circumstances.
A bicycle deprived of communion with its own two-wheeled kind is of course liable to engage in all sorts of depraved conduct.
Up to and including murder: see A. Davidson, “Or All The Seas with Oysters”, wherein Davidson explains the safety-pin/clothes-hanger/bicycle life cycle.
Some of my best friends are pineapples, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.
As James Michener called it, a prolific and dangerous weed edible only by a happy accident.
David Marjanović : “Portuguese too. Has been blamed on Islam or directly on warm weather.”
I talked to someone about this and they pointed out that someone would have to look after the body and it would make them uncomfortable.
The success in Japan in tradition-invention (gastronomic and otherwise) was adverted to upthread, but I for some reason was thinking about how they like to adapt and modify their own “traditions” (of whatever antiquity vel non) in ways that make foreigners uncomfortable. There used to be pre-pandemic a Japanese restaurant in midtown Manhattan close to where my office was at the time whose primary audience was Japanese ex-pats etc., so they did not conform to “American” expectations of what is versus isn’t Japanese food. This meant that among other things they would offer somewhat more “traditional”* Japanese dishes dressed up Italianishly with tomato sauce and melted cheese, which tends to totally freak out Westerners because it seems so “un-Japanese” but has been current in Japan for decades. Maybe it’s because the occupying U.S. Army introduced them to chicken parm in the late Forties, maybe it was other vector. Anyway here’s a nice photo of one of the things you could get there: https://www.reddit.com/r/JapaneseFood/comments/bhgvcl/thick_sliced_tonkatsu_with_tomato_cheese_sauce/
*Tonkatsu, of course, is not an “ancient” Japanese dish, but a Meiji-era adaptation of schnitzel. But Americans are used to encountering it in Japanese restaurants, and it’s often served with a definitely-not-Viennese sauce.
Barbarian Eggplant Cowpork.
Public-service reminder, especially to Germans: the point of the breading is that the meat doesn’t dry out – therefore, you don’t need any sauce with Schnitzel. At all.
And that’s before we even get to bonne viande, courte sauce.
My frist encounter with something like pizza was in a country which has became “abroad” since then (Lithuania)? It was more or less croque-monsieur and was called in Soviet simply “hot sandwich” (горячие бутерброды), sold from a kiosk. A piece of bread, some ham, some cheese, and put it in an oven. I think some herbs (parsley) or/and a piece of tomato (but not ketchup or any other sauce) could be present on ham under the cheese. I thought How? Why no one invented it before!? It was wonderful. And then they were selling it at the metro station not far from my school as capitalism was approaching, but that time I mostly ate ice cream and coca/pepsi-cola (those were favorite… articles of lechery? of my classmate who I went home from school with). What I was doing to hot sandwichs is just the same thing you sometimes do to the sole piece of your favorite food on your plate: postpone it. Except that the sandwiches were still in the kiosk, and I could eat them every day but kept postponing them for months.
This was myfirst association.
The second is that some 15 years ago street vendors began advertising and selling “Ossetian pies”. People began to cook them too. They did not look like something I want to try and then my aunt began cooking them and they were different from normal pirogi in that they were baked in a pan – apparently like Turin pizza.
I did not like them:(
Pita was widely sold here in 90s – apparently some people found the idea of a bread that you can put something inside (pocketbread) attractive. But they were sold in supermarkets and the bread tasted like it could be better when fresh and I did not know that I’ll once be interested in the Middle East (or else I’d try to find hummus) and I did not like them either.
Israeli cuisine has tried to define itself, as a matter of national pride, but has so far not come up with anything as distinctive as pizza, that is not a very obvious claim to some Arab dish (hummus, falafel, shakshouka). However, there are some local improvisations no one else would claim: behold, chicken schnitzel served in a pita.
O! I should have tried v/fors[c]hma[c]k.
(again there was a period of popularity of a fastfood chain (or more than one) offering pancake/crepes in 00s and to my surprise they also offered forshmak ).
Or not. I like forshmak and I like bread, and those pitas were just unimpressive (and they were factory-made, which is how all borodinsky is made, and maybe even Armenian lavash (also see video) in our shops is made, but not Uzbek lavash available from tandyr. And maybe it is not good for pita).
Speaking of Armenian lavash:
В 2017 году СМИ сообщили о том, что бывшие сотрудники «Газпрома» и «Роснефти» запустили в Москве сеть бртучечных под торговой маркой «Левон’с» (Levon’s Highland Cuisine)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Бртуч
“In 2017 mass media reported that former Gaprom and Rosneft employees launched in Moscow a brtuchechnaya chain under the brand name Левон’с (Levon’s Highland Cuisine)”. Everything is beautiful here: бртучечная, former (!) Gazprom employees, Левон’с, the apostrophe in Cyrillic (even Rosy O’Gradie[‘]s was with one apostrophe) and the fact that this report is quoted here as a speculation…
Бртуч (арм. բրդուճ; мотал, Մոթալ, с арм. — «завёрнутый»; упоминается также как бурум, дурум, брдуч, брдудж, бртунч и т. д.)
My friends (actually a linguist whose site occasionaly was referenced here) called it безумбургер.
But how come that brduj (or transliterated from Russian brtuch or from Armenian brduch) sounds like burrito and looks like one?
And seriously, could Mexicans have borrowed it? I understand that the idea is simple (provided that you have right bread which is not…) but they borrowed shawarma. Armenians were all over the Middle East (and were compared to Jews in this respect) and of course there are other nations who make similar breads…
therefore, you don’t need any sauce with Schnitzel
Genau. Still, in this thread I am almost obligated to point that Vienna’s traditional dish is really just a Cotoletta alla Milanese, as every Italian visitor to Vienna is happy to inform you.
Actually even that story may not be true, but it does seem to be true that “eingebröselte Schnitzchen” weren’t consistently identified as “Viennese” until the early 20th century.
Purely linguistic note: I did not know when I first made acquaintance with the dish as a boy that the “katsu” in tonkatsu is a clipped form of katsuretsu (カツレツ), which is what happens when you borrow the English word “cutlet” and subject it to Japanese phonotactics. Presumably a borrowing of Italian “cotoletta” might have yielded slightly different output?
Presumably just コトレッタ- “kotoretta”. So we would have “tonkoto” and “kotodonburi”
I should have previously checked out Japanese handles the more challenging “Schnitzel.” Apparently シュニッツェル (shunittseru), if wikipedia can be trusted.
Wouldn’t cutlet be borrowed nowadays as katoreto? It seems like at some point it was decided that t with no following vowel was better represented as to rather than tsu.
So even Japanese transliteration conventions may not be as “traditional” as they’d have you think?
I clicked the article about brtuchechnaya:
DeepL
And to appeal to a wider audience, they added trendy fillings like hummus, making the product “a little less ethnic.”
(А чтобы привлечь более широкую аудиторию, в продукт добавили модные наполнители вроде хумуса, сделав его «чуть менее этническим».)
.
A little less ethnic…
Hummus is “less ethnic”?!
@Drasvi
Burrito in Spanish means literally little donkey. Burro + ito, burro descending from Latin, and -ito being a standard diminuative ending. And though I don’t know how brduj is spelled, from the spelling I’m thinking it sounds much less similar to the Spanish word burrito than it does to burrito in English.
@Terry K, actually it was an expression of surprise rather than an actual question. I was staring at a brtuch here (the article in Russian WP, a link to the google-translated version) and it looks like a burrito and has b-r-t.
But it is from the “brtooch house” in Moscow, and the owners know how burrito is served in Moscow. They even offered a version with corn bread. Also millions versions of similar sandwiches must be made in regions where people bake lavash – because when you have lavash you wrap absolutely anything in it.
One the other hand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_pastor : The Lebanese version, shawarma, was brought to Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a wave of Lebanese immigrants, mainly Christians such as the Maronites who have no religious dietary restrictions on eating pork.[5 “Sharwarma: Taco al pastor’s culinary ancestor”. BBC News. 2015-09-02.])
It is quite plausible that the eidea of baking such bread arrived from the ME, and also if there was Mexican-Lebanese cultural contact, I wonder if there also was Mexican-Armenian cultural contact.