My girlfriend is Italian but isn't stereotypically hot-headed or anything, however one of the few times I've seen her extremely annoyed is when I tried putting garlic in the carbonara.
You don't. ever. do that.
Gordon Ramsay's carbonara is all "wrong" but he's just futzing around in his own kitchen and not caring too much about authenticity.
Mo is half Italian. One day I said "Do you think I put too much garlic in that?" and she said "Excuse me, I can't understand what you're trying to say."
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
Haha, yes that's the way it works for many Italian foods. There are some like carbonara though where the authenticity comes from strictly limiting the set of ingredients. Like many dishes carbonara was "working class" food before it became a thing served in high-end restaurants, and it traditionally has four ingredients: pasta, guanciale, egg, and a cheese like pecorino. Sometimes other meats are used but guanciale is traditional because ham jowls were cheap and the working class could afford it.
There's no law of God or man that says you can't put other things in it but then according to the traditionalist view what you end up with isn't carbonara anymore. And if you leave it on the heat a bit too long it becomes scrambled egg spaghetti, which isn't carbonara either.
Food absolutism...
It is silly to talk about dishes like that as though there were some "correct" set of ingredients, or a "tradition" that is absolute. This kind of dish, like most recipes, has "traditionally" been made in different ways and with different ingredients. "Tradition" varies from time to time, place to place, person to person. The idea that a particular dish is supposed to be made in one precise manner with one precise set of ingredients is very modern and very western.
Pasta alla carbonara became well known as a named dish after the second world war, as US troops had bacon and eggs that were used in it. Other than that, people have used whatever kind of ham and cheese they had available.
About the only thing that has been a staple in Italian cooking for the masses throughout the centuries is garlic - and it is specifically missing from "upper class" food specifically to distinguish it from "lower class" food.
So if an Italian doesn't want garlic in their food then they are either a snob, or they just don't like the taste of garlic, or they have misunderstood the issue. (Begin born Italian does not automatically endow one with a full knowledge of traditional Italian cuisine.)
We don't want some sort of documented authenticity. We want food that tastes good. Same concept applies to electronics: we don't crave somebody's approval of intellectual purity, we want it to work.
Mo says that when her ancestors arrived in Boston, they couldn't get fresh tomatoes. Everything was cooked-to-death dark-red-brown gunk in cans. That was the origin of the brutal dark red sauces in US-Italian cooking.
She cooks that kind of sauce, which I dislike. I dilute it with heavy cream and parmesan and garlic until it's pale orange. She also cooks a lighter sauce with fresh cherry tomatoes, which is great.
Like many dishes carbonara was "working
Nero Wolfe taught us that the proteins in eggs are fragile. That's why I was shocked, shocked to see Uncle Roger heat a wok until the oil smoked and, first thing, destroy the eggs for his egg fried rice.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
Marco Polo brought noodles to Italy. Tomatoes and coffee came from the new world in the 1500s. What did the Italians eat before that?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
The Romans ate pasta, including spaghetti. It is often difficult to be absolute about history, but all indications are that the Chinese and the Italians (Romans, or others) developed pasta, noodles, and related foodstuffs independently.
Tomatoes came from South America, but coffee is African and came to Europe via the Middle East.
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Huh, my Italian neighbor grows her own tomatoes for her sauce... I think she stews 'em to take the skins off.
I should grow some. The soil here is mostly clay... not great for veggies. But plenty of cow manure around. :^)
George H.
Sorry about the coffee. I meant chocolate.
Wikipedia:
"Coffee had spread to Italy by 1600, and then to the rest of Europe, Indonesia, and the Americas."
so the question stands.
The water was dangerous and Italian beer is awful. I guess they drank wine.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc The best designs are necessarily accidental.
Sure. OTOH, you wouldn't put ground beef in braciole and still call it braciole!
I used to make scacciata for my relatives each time I'd visit. On one visit, my mother opted to watch the process to see why mine was so much better than hers (and the locally available storebought ones).
As I was putting it together, she kept getting agitated -- complaining that I was putting "too much" of this/that/etc. I finally stopped, exasperated, and asked: "Do you want to make it YOUR way? Or, do you want it to TASTE GOOD?!"
We make a "chinese meal" that has evolved considerably from it's original intent. So, we call it The Chinese Meal (or The Pork Dish) as it's no longer true to its origins (but, easier to make). As with most of my Rxs, it is very sensitive to choice of ingredients, suppliers, quantities, etc.
Is it still pizza when folks put pineapple on it??
Different regions of the country make "classic" italian dishes in very different ways. E.g., the northeast favors ricotta-based dishes (lasagna, stuffed shells, ravioli, cannelloni, etc.) while western states seem to prefer "meat" variants.
[I've often wondered if they make meat cannoli! X-( ]And, many foods are simply not sold in restaurants (I've only found pastina served once, in The North End). So, folks in those areas are never exposed to them outside of "home cooking".
I'd hardly imagine her ancestors' experiences to be the definitive source of Italian-American cuisine! Mine grew tomatoes (and figs!) in their New Hampshire and Connecticut (note that you can't grow figs in that zone!) gardens for "first sauce".
There's a huge variation in canned "processed" tomato products. And, sadly, certain brands are only available in particular parts of the country (shipping cases of what had previously been a "local" brand gets expensive). So, each time I move, I have to reformulate many dishes.
I rely solely on crushed tomatoes as the base for my sauces (because blanching fresh romas takes way too long). If I'm making a veggie lasagna, I'll add tomato paste to give it a "less bright" taste (so the subtle flavors of the vegetables can compete more fairly)
Sauce from fresh fruit tends to be brighter and more acidic. You use different sauces for different types of dishes (northern/southern/sicilian). Likewise, the majority of pasta noodles are made from the same basic ingredients -- just different shapes. You choose the shape based on the desired taste/role the pasta will have in the dish. Imagine making a lasagna out of cavatelli??
Putting cheese *in* the sauce changes the flavor of the sauce *and* cheese; putting all your pizza toppings in a blender and spreading the resulting solution on the bread dough is very different from assembly a pizza out of discrete items.
E.g., when I use garlic, I tend to leave "noticeable chunks" in the dish as special flavor morsels (and NEVER use desiccated garlic!)
[OTOH, Parmesan is pretty bland (ditto pecorino romano) so not really worth drawing attention to in a dish]
Food in Ancient Rome:
Prior to the overseas spice trade with India et al garum was the condiment of choice, I've never tried it but reported to be a bit like a Thai fish sauce. High in MSG. They find shipwrecks of trading vessels at the bottom of the Mediterranean sometimes, likely lost in a storm with all hands, the cargo holds still laden down with hundreds of urns of the stuff with the manufacturer's marks on them. Flavius Maximus' best garum, accept no substitutes.
Carbonara doesn't really need additional garlic anyway; the guanciale is spiced for curing and often there's some garlic flavor from that to begin with, and pecorino is a delicate, sweet cheese. Extra garlic added overwhelms the flavor of the pecorino and when summed with the spice the guanciale already provides it overpowers the other flavors and the dish loses something, not gains.
There's also "food aesthetics" to consider sometimes less is more.
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not unlike Worcestershire Sauce
Scrambling eggs doesn't destroy the proteins, they're denatured and alter their structure they have to to make the egg solidify and scramble! but I don't think you're destroying proteins completely unless you're carbonizing them, burning them.
In carbonara the egg & cheese while cooking is supposed to be heated enough so that they form a homogeneous mixture and thicken up but too much heat and the egg denatures too much and you get scrambled egg spaghetti - which isn't carbonara!
Yes a lot like that too, though I expect the flavor of garum was less complex than Worcestershire sauce and a lot more "fishy." Worcestershire sauce doesn't taste very strongly of fish to me.
Most American kitchens have a bottle of the stuff kicking around that's not used very often; the owner staring at it from time to time when they open the cupboard looking at it like "what do I do with this stuff other than use it for that one recipe that called for it, years ago?"
Like put it an hamburger marinade, that's what my parents seemed to use it for sometimes and not much else.
Food is sort of like circuits in that there are sleek and elegantly simple constructions that are hard to improve on - like carbonara. There's stuff that does the job, like meatloaf, with a lot of potential variations. Meatloaf isn't particularly elegant but you wouldn't turn down a good meatloaf.
And then there are some combinations which most would agree just don't work like canned peaches on filet mignon. Maybe a master chef could make a variant of that some people would like, but it seems like a kludge from the start.
Well it's the best analogy I got.
Oh and simple dishes can be the hardest to do well because when the set of ingredients is limited any errors in quality or preparation of any one of them tends to stand out more, like how it's said that putting too much sauce on some dishes can be a sign of an un-confident chef.
somewhat unrelated. Mo is your wife? Why did you choose Mo as a nickname?
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