From the Financial Times:

Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong

From panettone to tiramisu, many ‘classics’ are in fact recent inventions, as Alberto Grandi has shown

Marianna Giusti MARCH 22 2023

Parma is quiet at night. The man sitting opposite me is paranoid someone will overhear our conversation. “They hate me here,” he explains in a hushed voice. He checks behind him, but the only other person in the osteria is a waitress who has had nothing to do since serving us our osso buco bottoncini. The aroma of roasted bone marrow wafts up from the table. Amy Winehouse’s cover of “Valerie” plays on a faraway radio.

“Can I badmouth them?” he asks. I tell him he can. After all, he hasn’t been invited here to expose corporate fraud. He has come to tell me the truth about parmesan cheese.

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; this is the first time he’s spoken to the foreign press. When his 2018 book, Denominazione di origine inventata (Invented Designation of Origin), started racking up sales in Italy, his friend Daniele Soffiati suggested they record a spin-off podcast.

Since its launch in 2021, their Italian-language show, called DOI after the book, has had three seasons and more than one million downloads. 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 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.

Grandi has made himself unpopular in some quarters by criticising Italy’s mighty food and drink sector, which, by some estimates, accounts for a quarter of GDP. On the podcast, he jokes he should only leave his house “with personal security guards, like Salman Rushdie”. In 2019, the Italian ambassador to Turkey reprimanded Grandi at a conference in Ankara after Grandi ridiculed Italy’s 800 protected designations, products whose quality is recognised by the EU as inextricably linked to their area. …

As an Italian living abroad, hearing a food expert say that our national cuisine, with its reputation for tradition and authenticity, is in fact based on lies feels like being let in on an unspeakable family secret that I’d always suspected. …

“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.

Or maybe because it’s fun?

A much huge amount of the good stuff in life is invented by people appealing to a hazy tradition to justify their innovations (see, for example, the American Founding Fathers on “the rights of Englishmen”).

From about 1958 to 1963, during the economic boom that followed years of wartime poverty, Italy saw the same kind of progress that the UK had witnessed over the course of a century during the Industrial Revolution, Grandi says. “In a very short time, Italians who’d had their bread rationed were living in abundance. This level of prosperity was completely unforeseen, and to them at the time it seemed endless.” The nation needed an identity to help it forget its past struggles, while those who had emigrated to America needed myths that would dignify their humble origins.

I really don’t think Italians were lacking in identity, regional or national, even if the country of Italy dates to 1870.

Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention. In the 1920s, Angelo Motta of the Motta food brand introduced a new dough recipe and started the “tradition” of a dome-shaped panettone. Then in the 1970s, faced with growing competition from supermarkets, independent bakeries began making dome-shaped panettone themselves. As Grandi writes in his book, “After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.”

And that’s bad because?

Tiramisu is another example. Its recent origins are disguised by various fanciful histories. It first appeared in cookbooks in the 1980s. Its star ingredient, mascarpone, was rarely found outside Milan before the 1960s, and the coffee-infused biscuits that divide the layers are Pavesini, a supermarket snack launched in 1948. “In a normal country,” Grandi says with a smile, “nobody would care where [and when] a cake was invented.”

And it’s bad that Italy isn’t a normal country when it comes to its extraordinary cuisine because?

Parmesan, he says, is remarkably ancient, around a millennium old. But before the 1960s, wheels of parmesan cheese weighed only about 10kg (as opposed to the hefty 40kg wheels we know today) and were encased in a thick black crust. Its texture was fatter and softer than it is nowadays. “Some even say that this cheese, as a sign of quality, had to squeeze out a drop of milk when pressed,” Grandi says. “Its exact modern-day match is Wisconsin parmesan.” He believes that early 20th-century Italian immigrants, probably from the Po’ region north of Parma, started producing it in Wisconsin and, unlike the cheesemakers back in Parma, their recipe never evolved. So while Parmigiano in Italy became over the years a fair-crusted, hard cheese produced in giant wheels, Wisconsin parmesan stayed true to the original.

And it’s bad that Italian parmesan cheese has progressed over the last century because?

In the story of modern Italian food, many roads lead to America. Mass migration from Italy to the US produced such deeply intertwined gastronomic cultures that trying to discern one from the other is impossible. “Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian,” Grandi says squarely.

Italian-Americans were richer than Italians, so they could afford more nice things, like pizza, than their cousins back home. Not surprisingly, now that Italians are much less poor than they used to be, they enjoy innovations made by Italian-Americans.

Pizza is a prime example. “Discs of dough topped with ingredients,” as Grandi calls them, were pervasive all over the Mediterranean for centuries: piada, pida, pita, pitta, pizza. But in 1943, when Italian-American soldiers were sent to Sicily and travelled up the Italian peninsula, they wrote home in disbelief: there were no pizzerias. Before the war, Grandi tells me, pizza was only found in a few southern Italian cities, where it was made and eaten in the streets by the lower classes. His research suggests that the first fully fledged restaurant exclusively serving pizza opened not in Italy but in New York in 1911. “For my father in the 1970s, pizza was just as exotic as sushi is for us today,” he adds.

When I spent a week in Italy in 1980, I only had pizza once, in Brindisi, and it was disappointing. I presume pizza in Italy is much tastier today.

When, after meeting with Grandi, I visit my 88-year-old grandmother, Fiorella Tazzini, at home in Massa, Tuscany, she is perfectly put-together, as always, in a starched cream shirt and a black cardigan. …

“I remember the first pizzeria I saw,” she recalls. “I must have been 19 or 20, in Viareggio, half an hour from home. The first time I saw a mozzarella was even later, it must have been in the 1960s; your mum was already born. It was when they opened a supermarket here.”

Mozzarella comes from the south of Italy, hundreds of miles away. To find out more, I call a friend’s Sicilian great-aunt. Ninety-five and a little deaf, Serafina Cerami answers the phone immediately. “We ate a lot of mozzarella in Sicily before the war!” she shouts down the line. Like pizza, mozzarella was fast-tracked to global fame through the funnel of mass migration to America from the Italian south. ..

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.”

And 130 years doesn’t make for tradition because?

Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. ..

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.”

When asked if the obsession with a national cuisine started with the baby boomers like him, a generation that never experienced Italian cooking before the postwar period of expansion, he smiles: “Indeed, like many other things, this too is all our fault.”

And the fact that Italians and many more around the world increasingly love their cuisine is bad because?