Italian Food Really Is Italian (with a Few Exceptions), Despite What Alberto Grandi Says

Dispatches from the World of Disinformation

A classic pizza Margherita in Naples. Kimberly Behr

ALBERTO GRANDI, AN ECONOMIC HISTORIAN at the University of Parma, has been debunking the idea that Italian food is Italian. Maybe he doesn’t mean to be taken literally, but he doesn’t hedge. His most recent book, written with Daniele Soffiati, is La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste: Bugie e Falsi Miti sui Prodotti e i Piatti Cosiddetti Tipici (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist: Lies and Fake Myths about So-Called Typical Products and Dishes). The title of an earlier book is a play on the Italian for an officially protected place-name. That book was Denominazione di Origine Inventata: Le Bugie del Marketing sui Prodotti Tipici Italiani — “Denomination of Origin Invented: Marketing Lies about Typical Italian Products.” (To whom is it a surprise that marketing could be composed of falsehoods?) With Soffiati, he created a podcast in Italian called DOI.

Grandi’s extreme statements seem more plausible because he’s right about some things. He’s thinking that as Italians became more affluent during the last 50 years, they began to eat differently, more meat for instance. There’s truth to Grandi’s assertion that for some Italians: “Their ‘tradition’ was trying not to starve.” He has in mind that Italy was united only in 1861 and there didn’t used to an “Italian” cuisine, just regional and local food. He’s annoyed at the recipe nitpickers, going back to Luigi Veronelli in the 1960s, who insist that certain dishes can be made in only one correct way, when that kind of rigidity is itself an innovation. He corrects misconceptions about a few items (carbonara, amatriciana, ragù alla bolognese), relying on Luca Cesari’s careful book about the origins of ten particular dishes, published in English last year as The Discovery of Pasta. Grandi points to tiramisù, now so popular in Italy and beyond, saying its mascarpone requires refrigeration, so it couldn’t be older than the 1960s. Information like that isn’t secret, but maybe it’s not generally known. It bothers him that the effort to codify and market Italian food and drink has led to a long list of officially recognized place-names and requirements, which is a strong level of control over ostensible tradition. The combined Denominazioni di Origine Protetta, Indicazioni Geografiche Tipiche, and Specialità Tradizionali Garantite total more than 300. The Prodotti Agroalimentari Tradizionali total more than 5,000.

Grandi starts with these reasonable points, and then he makes enormous leaps. Now that Italians are celebrating their foods (witness Slow Food), he says they’re constructing an identity based on false notions. Last year his views spread far beyond Italy via an interview in The Financial Times, where he said, “Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian.” Elements of the interview were repeated in other publications, and the assertions continue to spread. Grandi doesn’t hold back: “There is no culinary tradition.” He denies that some of the most basic, famously Italian foods are old at all.

Olive oil

“Fifty years ago, olive oil was used for everything except cooking. For oil lamps, for example. It tasted very sour and very intense. It was unsuitable for food,” according to Grandi in an interview in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard in August. “Italians tended to cook with lard, butter, or margarine. It wasn't until the 80s that the quality of the oil improved so that it could be used for cooking.” Of course most olive oil tastes much, much better now that it’s produced using stainless-steel equipment that’s easy to clean, so it doesn’t convey rancid odors to the oil, which has a fresh taste. But olive oil has been used in Italian kitchens forever. In the 1950 technical manual Olivicoltura, Alessandro Morettini of the University of Florence acknowledged that the amounts of olive oil then available in Italy (not exported) were “rather modest”: per capita consumption from 1923 to 1934 averaged only 5.4 liters. The alternative fats were seed oils, butter, and lard. But in the producing areas, consumption was “far higher than the average quantities.”

Pasta

“Until the First World War, pasta was only known in Naples,” Grandi told Der Standard. But in their scholarly history Pasta, Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban cite plenty of evidence for pasta being consumed in other parts of Italy for centuries. Rome in 1774 imported so much macaroni from Naples, they say, that the Roman makers got the imports from Naples prohibited. Serventi and Sabban refer to “enormous domestic consumption” in Italy in 1929, when there were 1,600 makers. In 1954, Italian per capita consumption was 28 kilos; that’s 1,344 million kilos for the whole country, clearly not all of it eaten by the million and a half people in Naples. Pasta was exported from Italy from an early date; it was popular in France. In the United States, Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook Virginia Housewife provides a recipe for baked macaroni “with cheese and butter as in the polenta” as well as “mock macaroni” made with crackers and instructions for making “vermecelli” with eggs from scratch.

Marsala

As Grandi pointed out in the Spanish newspaper El Pais last year, Marsala was “created, produced and widely marketed by an English merchant who added extra alcohol for better preservation during long voyages.” It was in the 1770s that John Woodhouse tasted and liked the wine of that western point of Sicily and decided it would be profitable to sell in England. For preservation, he fortified it with brandy. But the producers’ choice of grape varieties and the ways of raising them form a tradition in themselves. And either before Woodhouse or afterward, a culture — a tradition — grew up around the powerful, aged wine that was blended and fortified to make Marsala. High-quality examples of that unfortified local wine could be found in abandoned cellars in the area when, in 1980, Marco De Bartoli began to sell his unfortified alternative to Marsala (a story in itself). The naturally high-alcohol wine became part of De Bartoli’s early bottlings, before he had produced enough aged wine of his own. So maybe there’s an Italian tradition behind Marsala after all.

Pizza

Grandi is right that before 1960 few Italians had tasted pizza. It was a local Neapolitan food, although it had crossed the ocean to the United States in the early 1900s. “Pizza was invented in Naples, but it tasted awful,” Grandi said in Der Standard. “The dough was firm, burnt on the outside and still doughy on the inside. And without tomatoes. It was only thanks to the Italian diaspora that pizza was further developed and improved in the USA.” He concluded, “What you find in Naples today is an American invention.”

But the pizza I knew in the United States in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s bore no relationship to the pizza I found when I first visited Naples in 1992. There were some gummy crusts in Naples, but a few of the crusts excelled beyond any I’d had in the US. The quantity of condimenti on top was more restrained, but they were better, and the crust was bubbled in a way that back then you never saw anywhere but Naples. Tomatoes, sometimes whole, usually a plain purée, were the most popular topping. They were only one option when Emmanuele Rocca wrote his often-cited account in 1858 and when the French writer Alexandre Dumas visited in 1835. In contrast to Naples, in the US we always used to put sauce on our pizza, not plain tomatoes and never fresh ones, so it seems unlikely the Neapolitans were inspired to embrace tomato by Americans.

Parmigiano-Reggiano

Grandi repeatedly disparages the idea that Parmigiano-Reggiano could be traditional. “Perhaps the strangest story,” he told Der Standard, “is that of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Parmesan has a very long history, almost 2000 years. During this time, the cheese has undergone many changes. In its original form — small, soft, greasy, and black on the outside — it is produced in Wisconsin in the USA. Italian emigrants brought it with them. It was not until the 1960s that it was developed into its current form in Parma.” (He does say the Parmigiano made today in Italy is better than the Wisconsin version.) In El Pais, Grandi called current Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano a “recently created substitute.”

I can find two Wisconsin producers who make parmesan in flat wheels; one business started in 1939 and the other in 1979, so they aren’t in the historic line that Grandi cites. In fact, that history doesn’t seem to exist. From 1897 through 1939, the annual proceedings of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers’ Association make no mention of any Italian cheese, and Italian surnames are almost nonexistent in the lists of members. Finally, in the 1940 proceedings, the first reference to Italian cheese appears: “American cheddar cheese is the principal variety made in our factories although there is a small quantity of brick, Swiss, and an Italian variety manufactured.”

In truth, the historic Parmigiano-Reggiano wasn’t abandoned in Italy at any point in the 20th century. (For more about Parmigiano in general, see here.) The indispensable, authoritative history of the cheese is Mario Zannoni’s Il Parmigiano Reggiano nella Storia. In the 1200s, he relates, when Parmigiano was first made, it weighed about 13 kilos; now it averages 38 kilos. In a recent email to me, Zannoni confirms that the cheese of the past was always “lean and hard (not soft!)” — he doesn’t have a lot of patience for Grandi. The black that used to be applied was a mixture of oil with charcoal and different pigments, according to the producer, to slow the loss of moisture. The original cheese was smaller because centuries ago cows gave much less milk. Parmigiano was made in a flat shape so the hand-rubbed salt would penetrate faster, before spoilage organisms could go to work. Parmigiano slowly grew in size, and during the 20th century it changed from a flat wheel to a taller drum. That gave less surface area for evaporation as well as less crust, so less waste. The tradition from the start was to make the cheese dry and hard through acidity and heat, not by pressing it like similarly shaped cheeses in Switzerland and other countries.

Zannoni describes a series of changes that affected the cheese at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th. In place of spontaneous fermentation from ambient organisms, the cheesemakers began to use whey starter, so there were fewer problems with undesirable organisms and aromas. The vats were heated by steam, allowing more control and bigger batches therefore bigger wheels. Around 1915, the wheels, rather than being rubbed with salt were steeped in brine, whose faster action further reduced problems of undesirable organisms and aromas and, again, allowed bigger wheels. If Grandi were correct about the immigrant cheesemakers in Wisconsin, the precise time of arrival would be reflected in the particular techniques they brought with them. And contrary to Grandi’s assertion, in Italy during the 1960s there was no great change in the taste of Parmigiano or the methods for making it. With Parmigiano as with other cheeses, including in France, the greatest change has been a gradual increase in control.

There’s also a genetic component to the taste of traditional Parmigiano. After the Second World War, as Italian farmers largely switched to Holsteins, a few of the farmers producing milk for Parmigiano maintained one or the other of the old regional breeds, Bianca Modenese and Reggiana. Their yield of milk is less, but it makes more cheese per volume, and the milk contains the casein KBB, which gives the cheese a more elastic texture and permits longer aging. If you want really traditional Parmigiano, that’s the kind to buy.

With too many of his statements, Grandi is doing exactly what he says others have done: create myths. Contrary to his view, the strongest evidence suggests that 50 years ago the food in Italy was emphatically traditional, place by place, and for all that Italians are wealthier now and their habits have evolved, the foundations of Italian cooking remain traditional. ●