History

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.”

Had some lib tell me of some "European" recipe that had been made "since the dawn of time." It had potatoes in it. Since then, I'm generally distrustful of any European "tradition" that would have required every single person from that country to know how to read and have ample access to the resources to do it, let alone all the other cultures that also happened to live in those same countries and probably did things differently.

European cuisine before the introduction of New World crops (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, corn, beans) must have been a fucking wasteland. If you're interested in food stuff for the common peasant in Europe, read the first volume of Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism. Spoiler: most people had some kind of gruel (oatmeal basically) and ocassionally a few veggies except on feast days, "recipes" by and large were for the wealthy elite.

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.)

The EU after decades of financial imperialism hollowed out Italian heavy industries in favor of Germany and France. Italians have to now trademark their food to survive instead of sharing their culture freely with the rest of the world. The EU shall never be forgiven for this.

But Dr. Pagliacci, I am the Italian in my life

someone please hit me with a non-paywalled link so I can piss myself off a bit (and learn something, I'm kinda curious now)

So italian cuisine is made up? Very interesting subject, I hope to learn more about it.