garlic bread italian style

Italy is famous for food, and indeed many English words referring to food come from Italian. Pizza and pasta of course, but there are also others you may not be aware of, such as broccoli, zucchini, biscuit and sultana. From my experience of Neapolitan culture Italians are extremely proud of their cuisine. The following are a few points that stood out for me about Italian food.

Breakfast: Italians do not, generally speaking, have breakfast, an espresso and a biscuit being the standard morning fare. Because we were doing pretty hard farm work in the morning and lunch was not served until at least midday, this was a major problem for us, and one morning Daniela nearly collapsed from the need of morning sustenance. I revived her with a mushy persimmon from a nearby tree. In the end we had toasted bread with freshly squeezed olive oil every morning, and the attitude of our hosts toward our “Anglo/German” breakfast boarded on hostility.

Pasta: The notion that Italians like pasta is certainly true. With a few notable exceptions we ate carb-heavy pasta dishes for both lunch and dinner (wild boar and tomato was my favourite). The specific shape of the pasta went with specific sauces and it was important to our hosts that you did not put the wrong shape of pasta with the wrong sauce. On a visit to the village shop we were amazed to discover that the tiny village grocer supplied roughly thirty or so different shapes of packaged pasta, ranging from rice shaped ones to two-foot long hollow logs. The shop stocked very little else.

Coriander: Italians appear to have an unconditional hatred of coriander. I would like to emphasise that this is not an isolated case but applied to all the Italians I surveyed on the issue, including a few northerners. They all expressed their disgust at the idea of eating the lush herb in the strongest terms, frequently likening its flavour to vomit. On the other hand they didn’t mind the taste of illegal worm filled cheese. When I innocently suggested sneaking some coriander into the pasta our hosts reacted as if I had suggested lacing it with arsenic. Given that coriander has a mild and delectable flavour, I can only conclude that the Italian reaction to the herb is linked to a kind of food patriotism in which Italian cuisine is flavoured with parsley and basil, and coriander represents a threat to their culinary identity.

Mozzarella Cheese: To me, being from New Zealand, Mozzarella was a yellow cheese you bought pre-grated and put on pizzas; in fact true Mozzarella is unsuitable for cooking. True Mozzarella is a very mild rubbery white cheese made from the milk of a water buffalo and squeezed by hand into huge balls. It is bought fresh and consumed immediately and raw, eaten like a steak or a large hunk of chewy tofu. If cooked it becomes almost too rubbery to eat. It is without doubt extremely good and I hope one day to try it seasoned with a bit of chopped coriander.

Garlic Bread: When we were in Rome Daniela ordered garlic bread at an authentic restaurant. When the appetiser arrived we were surprised to observe that it consisted of a piece of bread accompanied by a clove of garlic on a toothpick.

Pizza: Naples claims the title of the city from which Pizza originated, and the Pizzas there are, to be sure, very good and very juicy. According to the Neapolitans, with which we dined, the true and original pizza is the marinara, consisting simply of the crust, tomato, garlic and oregano (no cheese). It is also acceptable to order the famous margarita, which is more or less the same as the marinara except that it has mozzarella cheese (although its not real mozzarella cheese because it’s made from a cow not a buffalo to allow it to be cookable). Apparently all pizzas in the old time were marinara but when the queen, Margarita, wanted a pizza with her favourite cheese she thus created the pizza that bears her name. As mouth watering as these classics are, and we waited a long time for them, I like my Pizzas with something a little bit more. Discouraged by the horror of my Neapolitan friends we decided not to get the “Fantasia.” We did, however, get a pizza with mushrooms and this was perceived by the Neapolitans to be a gross extravagance, almost as bad as having breakfast.