Our first trip to Europe was 1972. Since, we retuned 57 + times. Usually, clients cover a portion of our travel expenses. We love learning more and more about food, wine, and healthier life styles. Brembo in Bergamo, Italy, has been a client for me 3 different times. My Euro manager married one of the most handsome Brembo engineering leaders. They now live in Michigan with their 3 children and he is a high level exec for Brembo. May 2025 deliver peace, joy, health, prosperity, and many fabulous meals to you.
I read with interest Ed Behr’s post on Alberto Grandi, the now famous or infamous food historian depending upon what side of the controversy one stands. While I believe that controversy can be constructive, the ferocious indignation his work has incited among Italian media, chefs, food critics, food professionals, and right-wing politicians, gives me pause. It says much about Italy’s insular relationship with criticism. On this point, the Swiss Daily NZZ commented, “Heated discussions are seen as part of everyday Italian life as long as none of their own dares to express reservations about the country abroad”. This may account for at least some of the backlash to Mariana Giusti’s article in the Financial Times. As for Grandi's credibility, Ed’s post and some of the comments appear to reflect a lack of engagement with the primary sources, namely Grandi’s two books and his numerous podcasts. Making sense of Grandi requires an ability to read and to apprehend spoken Italian. It seems that parties to the post have only anecdotal information regarding Grandi’s polemic with the exception of expat Bill Klapp who joins the chorus in denouncing Grandi after “wading through too many pages…” and comparing him to Berlusconi. Seriously Bill, listening to Grandi he doesn't puff up his chest and it's highly unlikely you’d read about the professor cavorting poolside with prostitutes.
As an historian steeped in the social and economic history of Italy, Grandi has dedicated his academic research on Italian food. To characterize his arguments as a kind of sophistry is inconsistent with the content and rigor of his arguments. Since his books were published and his podcast was launched, Grandi has excited millions of followers. The criticism remains intense. Following publication of his interviews and exposés, reactions pile upon reactions that flood the comment sections of online media. Grandi strikes back: “I like controversy” and confesses to a “passion for impossible missions.” I take the controversy that he stirs positively. Having read his work and listened to nearly all his podcasts and the available media uproar, I can’t reconcile assertions that the attention he is getting amounts to a self-aggrandizing marketing strategy. Rather, the greater volume of it has been generated and disseminated by his detractors. Meanwhile, his books and free-to-use podcast, DOI, have sustained commercial interest to his benefit. I don’t have a problem with that. I’d venture to guess he is the envy of many academics whose work gathers dust on library shelves.
But to return to Ed Behr’s post and associated comments:
I would first question whether interviews are the best means of judging an author and demystifying a complex subject, much less one as contorted as the history of the history of Italian food (redundancy intended). The effectiveness of the interview toward disassembling a multi-faceted subject is potentially limited by its depth of exploration, subjectivity, the quality of the questioner, time constraints, interpretation issues and audience engagement. I admit I struggled to understand Grandi’s message amid all the noise in my own head as I read him. Without addressing the many separate themes in Grandi’s books and podcasts which I believe might result in a fairer consideration of Grandi’s integrity, here are a few comments limited to Ed’s post:
I believe that Grandi’s statement in Der Stand - “Fifty years ago, olive oil was used for everything except cooking. For oil lamps, for example" was misrepresented, truncated, or lost in translation Apparently Grandi himself did not provided the context of his statement in the interview. I expect that what he intended was that during the ‘70s Italians used more butter, rendered pig fat, or margarine in cooking than olive oil. I lose track when he refers to olio lampante. This is perhaps what Elizabeth Minchelli refers to in her comment: “He is definitely pushing things to extremes, leaving out information etc. to make a splashy point”. As suggested above, lapses in information are not uncommon in interviews. But it’s clear from Grandi’s chapter “L’Olio d’oliva e la verginita ritrovata” (Olive oil and the newfound virginity) that Grandi acknowledges, if not implies, that “olive oil has been used in Italian kitchens forever.” Nevertheless, this is not his theme. In that chapter, his discussion ranges from the appearance of olive oil in VII century a.CE Palestine through the millennia to its status following the important improvements made in the ‘80s. The line he draws from antiquity spans the technical progress of olive oil as a result of selection of olive types, better management of the time of harvest, and the equipment and methods used to press it. He recounts the history of the patrician olive companies (Sasso, Bertolli [no relation], Carapelli, Dante]that hoarded the oil of hundreds of small backward family frantoi and blended it (probably involving no small amount refined olio lampante with oils of other Mediterrean countries. The goal was to maximize and globalize olve oil at least cost "made in Italy". It’s curious that the statements recorded in his interviews and then distributed and dissimulated by the media bear little relation to the information in his books.
Once again, the statement “Until the First World War, pasta was only known in Naples” is strangely given out of context. It doesn’t square with Grandi’s lengthy discussion of pasta in the introduction to Denominazione di Origine Inventata where hetracks its Arab introduction and dissemination throughout the Medieval period and beyond.
Pizza gets everybody’s hackles up. Grandi makes the point that pizza was not exclusively Italian nor even Neapolitan. Flat discs of dough cooked in an oven with toppings were known throughout the Mediterranean (“pita, pitta, pida, piada, pizza…”). Grandi claims with good evidence that pizza occupied a place in the collective imagination of Italy only after the collateral effect of Italian emigration to North America between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the return of emigrants to their homeland thereafter. That Neapolitan pizza eventually found its identity doesn’t negate the history of the Italian diaspora and its influence on Italian food by those who returned enlightened to their homeland.
With regard to Marsala, there is no quarrel. Grandi’s only point is that the merchant John Woodhouse “invented” the fortified wine of Marsala that became widely commercialized in Britain by him and various other Englishmen. At first, Woodhouse landed Marsala anonymously on the London docks and counterfeited it as Madeira, a wine already much appreciated by the English. Woodhouse and company fabricated Marsala accordingly to English tastes. Grandi’s point is that these exports had little to do with Sicilian wine or its vinological practices. Nevertheless, the province of Trapani where Marsala was produced before Woodhouse was always a center of Sicilian viticulture, not distinct from so many grape-growing zones in Italy. Previous to Woodhouse, Marsala wine was not fortified other than through natural means. In Sicily’s hot and dry climate, overripe grapes were fermented to astoundingly high levels of alcohol. And some were the result of long cask ageing, now rare if not completely extinct. (see Jancis Robinson, The Oxford Companion to wine, 4th edition). For not having been fortified, Marco Bartoli’s high-quality Vecchio Samperi, cannot bear the Marsala name on its label.
Having digested Grandi, admittedly sometimes a hard swallow, I feel sympathetic to Italy’s struggle to identify itself. During the post-WW II economic boom when it discovered the prospect of prosperity, Italy had to catch up fast with other European nations. It achieved in 2 decades what it took others 100 years during the industrial revolution. As a newly established geographical expression in the years following the Risorgimento, and with its feet still mired in the mud of poverty, underdevelopment, and scarce integration for some time after, Italy has proved itself nimble and adaptive, not without the use of some tall stories. While it’s clear that many Italian food traditions have been invented out of a mythical past in the last 50-60 years, there is no disputing Italy’s ingenuity.
Great comment! Thank you, Paul. Interviews, I can say having been interviewer and interviewee, are a genre in themselves, and the best reflect skill and care on both sides. In terms of having an impact, they're a lot more potent than academic studies, and to push back against mistaken ideas, it made sense to me to address them.
Great post! I too have trouble with a lot of what Grandi says, but understand where he is coming from in the world of publishing. He is definitely pushing things to extremes, leaving out information, etc. to make a splashy point. I don't think his work I meant to be considered academically sound. More like sound bites. But it is fun to sift through it, think about things, and have these types of discussions.
As for specifics olive oil definitely wasn't being used to light lamps 50 years ago, although maybe it should have been since much of it was so damn bad. And when he talks about pasta consumption, I am pretty sure he is referring to pasta acsciutta (dried pasta) of a very specific and semi-industrially made kind and not the enormous variety of hand made pasta eaten all over Italy.
On topics like Parmigiano Reggiano I'm not sure of the whole Wisconsin argument but products like Parmigiano Reggiano (and so many others) did get codified into very specific products in the 70's and 80's as a way to survive and fight competition. The Consorzi, for better or worse, landed on versions of traditional products that have been changing for centuries and will continue to change.
Thank you, Elizabeth! The DOPs, like the appellations in France that were the model for the rest of the EU, are primarily marketing tools, which is often a good thing, because it can make the cheeses or whatever more economically viable. But the rules often narrow or otherwise alter a product, and they change from time to time. To be fair, the changes are often in the direction of higher quality. But that too is driven by marketing — the need to compete with the industrial version of the same. The tighter rules make the artisanal product more distinct from the industrial one. I'm off on a tangent!
Thanks for bringing this story to English speaking peoples' attention. History is a complex subject to pin down and, once again, we get simplistic narratives from Grandi's side as a juxtaposition to the simple myths of Italian cuisine that have pervaded the zeitgeist of the Italian food of today. I think Grandi's passion is driven by many Italian people's general resistance to the kind of food evolution that has made Italy's cuisine of today so special. The positive message he is sending to Italians is that it's ok to adjust and refine popular dishes. Cuisine imagination shouldn't be a slave to tradition and government mandates based on dubious half truths. Unfortunately, in today's hyper charged environment, Grandi also commits the same half truths in order to sell his ideas.
You're getting at something that's significant and about which it's hard to come up with facts — the ways that Italians are eating now and how they see their food as part of their culture. I suspect any study would have meaning only if it were done region by region, maybe looking separately at the largest cities while not lumping them together. I appreciate the kindness behind your generosity toward Grandi, but in the cases I cite, with the possible exception of Marsala, he isn't promoting half-truths. He's promoting falsehoods. It's hard to imagine how an academic could end up so far off in the world of imagination.
Ed, my first reaction was that this piece might be a bit too esoteric for some of your readers, having waded into Grandi myself, but, silly me, apparently that is not the case. By way of background, I am an expat dual citizen (Italian and American), now a permanent resident of Italia. I have had homes here in the Piemonte and in Puglia for 24 years. I waded through too many pages of Grandi before pushing his writing aside. He is an exemplar of the narcissistic, self-promotional Italian male perhaps best realized in Silvio Berlusconi and found even in Slow Food's Carlo Petrini on a bad day! Give Grandi credit for getting one hell of a ride out of a single fundamental truth: there is indeed no such thing as "Italian food". Never has been, never will be. There is Italian LOCAL and REGIONAL food, along with a handful of ingredients that have become national and universal in scope, such as Parmigiano-Reggiano (and good on you for pointing out that even it comes in widely variant types and qualities, based upon breed of cow and even the season of the milking and the age of the cheese) and prosciutti di Parma and San Daniele. That's it. The Italian people are shockingly xenophobic when it comes to food. Many would be tempted to starve to death if put on an exclusive diet of French or German food, and a cultured 76-year-old Pugliese friend had no idea what I was talking about when I suggested chicken piccata for dinner. And the bigotry can be just as powerful when applied to other regional Italian cuisines as it is when applied to the cuisines of other nations. The xenophobia is rooted in the ancient concept of "campanilismo", which, reduced to its essence, holds that anyone who lives beyond the hearing of the bell in one's own bell tower is a stranger. That concept of locality is most often applied with vigor to foods and dishes. I can still recall having purchased some particularly fine honey at the Saturday market in Alba years ago, and I shared my joy with my Italian friends. The reaction? "Yes, we know her. She is not from around here." It was true. She was from the countryside 12km away!!! And I agree with Nancy that Il Signor Grandi might need to visit Puglia, where the economy has been based upon olive oil forever, and butter and lard are virtually unknown. (Indeed, I have to bootleg my butter in from Brittany and Normandy! :) )
Thank you for providing further perspective on the regional-local nature of Italian food. I might have stressed it more, but I wanted to particularly address Grandi's most repeated extreme claims, which were also the ones I could respond to most easily with facts.
Indeed so. I have read quite a bit by other Italian food historians, and among the serious scholars not given to self-promotion, one discovers that historical Italian culinary facts are much harder to come by than historical facts in general. Believe it or not, there is no conclusive proof that Caterina de' Medici taught the French how to eat with utensils instead of their fingers, nor that she taught them how to cook!!! :)
Grandi’s recipe to boost his own stock is working. We recently had pasta carbonara at a restaurant called La Carbonara on Campo de Fiori in Rome, and the waiter was very upset about “some stupid FT interview” suggesting that pasta carbonara was an American dish.
Ed, thank you so much for this. I have restocked your post (I'm not sure what that means but I did it anyway) and also mentioned Paul Bertolli's discussion, a little more generous to Grandi I think. As I commented on Paul's page, my own sense is that Grandi is pretty much a blowhard who is creating a name for himself as the Bad Boy of La Cucina Italiana. I can assure you (and Grandi) that no one, NO ONE, in Italy was lighting lamps with olive oil 50 years ago which was around the time that I bought an abandoned farm in a poor mountainous region of eastern Tuscany. Possibly during the time of Imperial Rome, yes, and olio lampante, really bad rancid poorly madeolive oil, was used as an all-purpose machine oil but oil for the table was a treasured ingredient, even though in "my" mountains lard (not lardo but strutto) was used for frying. As for pasta, again, I think Grandi simply doesn't know what he's talking about and is trying to be provocative, nothing more. As you've pointed out, there is plenty of evidence for the use of pasta and its importance. But I am ranting and I probably should, like you, go back to the sources and cite some examples. Which I shall do in the next couple of weeks for sure. As for pizza, I don't agree that it's an American "invention"--there's too much evidence otherwise, but that it was a major Thing in Napoli, there is no doubt. It's possible that, somewhat like tiramisù and sun-dried tomatoes and limoncello, a Thing from an obscure or unheralded place in Italy got picked up by Americans, popularized, and brought back to Italy. More on that later. Sorry to run on at the mouth.
Thank you! It's hard to understand how Grandi could be so unmoored from truth and making a career out of it. I looked a little at his published academic work, and I have the impression that it's more cautious than his books for the public and interviews.
Our first trip to Europe was 1972. Since, we retuned 57 + times. Usually, clients cover a portion of our travel expenses. We love learning more and more about food, wine, and healthier life styles. Brembo in Bergamo, Italy, has been a client for me 3 different times. My Euro manager married one of the most handsome Brembo engineering leaders. They now live in Michigan with their 3 children and he is a high level exec for Brembo. May 2025 deliver peace, joy, health, prosperity, and many fabulous meals to you.
I read with interest Ed Behr’s post on Alberto Grandi, the now famous or infamous food historian depending upon what side of the controversy one stands. While I believe that controversy can be constructive, the ferocious indignation his work has incited among Italian media, chefs, food critics, food professionals, and right-wing politicians, gives me pause. It says much about Italy’s insular relationship with criticism. On this point, the Swiss Daily NZZ commented, “Heated discussions are seen as part of everyday Italian life as long as none of their own dares to express reservations about the country abroad”. This may account for at least some of the backlash to Mariana Giusti’s article in the Financial Times. As for Grandi's credibility, Ed’s post and some of the comments appear to reflect a lack of engagement with the primary sources, namely Grandi’s two books and his numerous podcasts. Making sense of Grandi requires an ability to read and to apprehend spoken Italian. It seems that parties to the post have only anecdotal information regarding Grandi’s polemic with the exception of expat Bill Klapp who joins the chorus in denouncing Grandi after “wading through too many pages…” and comparing him to Berlusconi. Seriously Bill, listening to Grandi he doesn't puff up his chest and it's highly unlikely you’d read about the professor cavorting poolside with prostitutes.
As an historian steeped in the social and economic history of Italy, Grandi has dedicated his academic research on Italian food. To characterize his arguments as a kind of sophistry is inconsistent with the content and rigor of his arguments. Since his books were published and his podcast was launched, Grandi has excited millions of followers. The criticism remains intense. Following publication of his interviews and exposés, reactions pile upon reactions that flood the comment sections of online media. Grandi strikes back: “I like controversy” and confesses to a “passion for impossible missions.” I take the controversy that he stirs positively. Having read his work and listened to nearly all his podcasts and the available media uproar, I can’t reconcile assertions that the attention he is getting amounts to a self-aggrandizing marketing strategy. Rather, the greater volume of it has been generated and disseminated by his detractors. Meanwhile, his books and free-to-use podcast, DOI, have sustained commercial interest to his benefit. I don’t have a problem with that. I’d venture to guess he is the envy of many academics whose work gathers dust on library shelves.
But to return to Ed Behr’s post and associated comments:
I would first question whether interviews are the best means of judging an author and demystifying a complex subject, much less one as contorted as the history of the history of Italian food (redundancy intended). The effectiveness of the interview toward disassembling a multi-faceted subject is potentially limited by its depth of exploration, subjectivity, the quality of the questioner, time constraints, interpretation issues and audience engagement. I admit I struggled to understand Grandi’s message amid all the noise in my own head as I read him. Without addressing the many separate themes in Grandi’s books and podcasts which I believe might result in a fairer consideration of Grandi’s integrity, here are a few comments limited to Ed’s post:
I believe that Grandi’s statement in Der Stand - “Fifty years ago, olive oil was used for everything except cooking. For oil lamps, for example" was misrepresented, truncated, or lost in translation Apparently Grandi himself did not provided the context of his statement in the interview. I expect that what he intended was that during the ‘70s Italians used more butter, rendered pig fat, or margarine in cooking than olive oil. I lose track when he refers to olio lampante. This is perhaps what Elizabeth Minchelli refers to in her comment: “He is definitely pushing things to extremes, leaving out information etc. to make a splashy point”. As suggested above, lapses in information are not uncommon in interviews. But it’s clear from Grandi’s chapter “L’Olio d’oliva e la verginita ritrovata” (Olive oil and the newfound virginity) that Grandi acknowledges, if not implies, that “olive oil has been used in Italian kitchens forever.” Nevertheless, this is not his theme. In that chapter, his discussion ranges from the appearance of olive oil in VII century a.CE Palestine through the millennia to its status following the important improvements made in the ‘80s. The line he draws from antiquity spans the technical progress of olive oil as a result of selection of olive types, better management of the time of harvest, and the equipment and methods used to press it. He recounts the history of the patrician olive companies (Sasso, Bertolli [no relation], Carapelli, Dante]that hoarded the oil of hundreds of small backward family frantoi and blended it (probably involving no small amount refined olio lampante with oils of other Mediterrean countries. The goal was to maximize and globalize olve oil at least cost "made in Italy". It’s curious that the statements recorded in his interviews and then distributed and dissimulated by the media bear little relation to the information in his books.
Once again, the statement “Until the First World War, pasta was only known in Naples” is strangely given out of context. It doesn’t square with Grandi’s lengthy discussion of pasta in the introduction to Denominazione di Origine Inventata where hetracks its Arab introduction and dissemination throughout the Medieval period and beyond.
Pizza gets everybody’s hackles up. Grandi makes the point that pizza was not exclusively Italian nor even Neapolitan. Flat discs of dough cooked in an oven with toppings were known throughout the Mediterranean (“pita, pitta, pida, piada, pizza…”). Grandi claims with good evidence that pizza occupied a place in the collective imagination of Italy only after the collateral effect of Italian emigration to North America between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the return of emigrants to their homeland thereafter. That Neapolitan pizza eventually found its identity doesn’t negate the history of the Italian diaspora and its influence on Italian food by those who returned enlightened to their homeland.
With regard to Marsala, there is no quarrel. Grandi’s only point is that the merchant John Woodhouse “invented” the fortified wine of Marsala that became widely commercialized in Britain by him and various other Englishmen. At first, Woodhouse landed Marsala anonymously on the London docks and counterfeited it as Madeira, a wine already much appreciated by the English. Woodhouse and company fabricated Marsala accordingly to English tastes. Grandi’s point is that these exports had little to do with Sicilian wine or its vinological practices. Nevertheless, the province of Trapani where Marsala was produced before Woodhouse was always a center of Sicilian viticulture, not distinct from so many grape-growing zones in Italy. Previous to Woodhouse, Marsala wine was not fortified other than through natural means. In Sicily’s hot and dry climate, overripe grapes were fermented to astoundingly high levels of alcohol. And some were the result of long cask ageing, now rare if not completely extinct. (see Jancis Robinson, The Oxford Companion to wine, 4th edition). For not having been fortified, Marco Bartoli’s high-quality Vecchio Samperi, cannot bear the Marsala name on its label.
Having digested Grandi, admittedly sometimes a hard swallow, I feel sympathetic to Italy’s struggle to identify itself. During the post-WW II economic boom when it discovered the prospect of prosperity, Italy had to catch up fast with other European nations. It achieved in 2 decades what it took others 100 years during the industrial revolution. As a newly established geographical expression in the years following the Risorgimento, and with its feet still mired in the mud of poverty, underdevelopment, and scarce integration for some time after, Italy has proved itself nimble and adaptive, not without the use of some tall stories. While it’s clear that many Italian food traditions have been invented out of a mythical past in the last 50-60 years, there is no disputing Italy’s ingenuity.
Great comment! Thank you, Paul. Interviews, I can say having been interviewer and interviewee, are a genre in themselves, and the best reflect skill and care on both sides. In terms of having an impact, they're a lot more potent than academic studies, and to push back against mistaken ideas, it made sense to me to address them.
Great post! I too have trouble with a lot of what Grandi says, but understand where he is coming from in the world of publishing. He is definitely pushing things to extremes, leaving out information, etc. to make a splashy point. I don't think his work I meant to be considered academically sound. More like sound bites. But it is fun to sift through it, think about things, and have these types of discussions.
As for specifics olive oil definitely wasn't being used to light lamps 50 years ago, although maybe it should have been since much of it was so damn bad. And when he talks about pasta consumption, I am pretty sure he is referring to pasta acsciutta (dried pasta) of a very specific and semi-industrially made kind and not the enormous variety of hand made pasta eaten all over Italy.
On topics like Parmigiano Reggiano I'm not sure of the whole Wisconsin argument but products like Parmigiano Reggiano (and so many others) did get codified into very specific products in the 70's and 80's as a way to survive and fight competition. The Consorzi, for better or worse, landed on versions of traditional products that have been changing for centuries and will continue to change.
Thank you, Elizabeth! The DOPs, like the appellations in France that were the model for the rest of the EU, are primarily marketing tools, which is often a good thing, because it can make the cheeses or whatever more economically viable. But the rules often narrow or otherwise alter a product, and they change from time to time. To be fair, the changes are often in the direction of higher quality. But that too is driven by marketing — the need to compete with the industrial version of the same. The tighter rules make the artisanal product more distinct from the industrial one. I'm off on a tangent!
Thanks for bringing this story to English speaking peoples' attention. History is a complex subject to pin down and, once again, we get simplistic narratives from Grandi's side as a juxtaposition to the simple myths of Italian cuisine that have pervaded the zeitgeist of the Italian food of today. I think Grandi's passion is driven by many Italian people's general resistance to the kind of food evolution that has made Italy's cuisine of today so special. The positive message he is sending to Italians is that it's ok to adjust and refine popular dishes. Cuisine imagination shouldn't be a slave to tradition and government mandates based on dubious half truths. Unfortunately, in today's hyper charged environment, Grandi also commits the same half truths in order to sell his ideas.
You're getting at something that's significant and about which it's hard to come up with facts — the ways that Italians are eating now and how they see their food as part of their culture. I suspect any study would have meaning only if it were done region by region, maybe looking separately at the largest cities while not lumping them together. I appreciate the kindness behind your generosity toward Grandi, but in the cases I cite, with the possible exception of Marsala, he isn't promoting half-truths. He's promoting falsehoods. It's hard to imagine how an academic could end up so far off in the world of imagination.
Ed, my first reaction was that this piece might be a bit too esoteric for some of your readers, having waded into Grandi myself, but, silly me, apparently that is not the case. By way of background, I am an expat dual citizen (Italian and American), now a permanent resident of Italia. I have had homes here in the Piemonte and in Puglia for 24 years. I waded through too many pages of Grandi before pushing his writing aside. He is an exemplar of the narcissistic, self-promotional Italian male perhaps best realized in Silvio Berlusconi and found even in Slow Food's Carlo Petrini on a bad day! Give Grandi credit for getting one hell of a ride out of a single fundamental truth: there is indeed no such thing as "Italian food". Never has been, never will be. There is Italian LOCAL and REGIONAL food, along with a handful of ingredients that have become national and universal in scope, such as Parmigiano-Reggiano (and good on you for pointing out that even it comes in widely variant types and qualities, based upon breed of cow and even the season of the milking and the age of the cheese) and prosciutti di Parma and San Daniele. That's it. The Italian people are shockingly xenophobic when it comes to food. Many would be tempted to starve to death if put on an exclusive diet of French or German food, and a cultured 76-year-old Pugliese friend had no idea what I was talking about when I suggested chicken piccata for dinner. And the bigotry can be just as powerful when applied to other regional Italian cuisines as it is when applied to the cuisines of other nations. The xenophobia is rooted in the ancient concept of "campanilismo", which, reduced to its essence, holds that anyone who lives beyond the hearing of the bell in one's own bell tower is a stranger. That concept of locality is most often applied with vigor to foods and dishes. I can still recall having purchased some particularly fine honey at the Saturday market in Alba years ago, and I shared my joy with my Italian friends. The reaction? "Yes, we know her. She is not from around here." It was true. She was from the countryside 12km away!!! And I agree with Nancy that Il Signor Grandi might need to visit Puglia, where the economy has been based upon olive oil forever, and butter and lard are virtually unknown. (Indeed, I have to bootleg my butter in from Brittany and Normandy! :) )
Thank you for providing further perspective on the regional-local nature of Italian food. I might have stressed it more, but I wanted to particularly address Grandi's most repeated extreme claims, which were also the ones I could respond to most easily with facts.
Indeed so. I have read quite a bit by other Italian food historians, and among the serious scholars not given to self-promotion, one discovers that historical Italian culinary facts are much harder to come by than historical facts in general. Believe it or not, there is no conclusive proof that Caterina de' Medici taught the French how to eat with utensils instead of their fingers, nor that she taught them how to cook!!! :)
Grandi’s recipe to boost his own stock is working. We recently had pasta carbonara at a restaurant called La Carbonara on Campo de Fiori in Rome, and the waiter was very upset about “some stupid FT interview” suggesting that pasta carbonara was an American dish.
Ed, thank you so much for this. I have restocked your post (I'm not sure what that means but I did it anyway) and also mentioned Paul Bertolli's discussion, a little more generous to Grandi I think. As I commented on Paul's page, my own sense is that Grandi is pretty much a blowhard who is creating a name for himself as the Bad Boy of La Cucina Italiana. I can assure you (and Grandi) that no one, NO ONE, in Italy was lighting lamps with olive oil 50 years ago which was around the time that I bought an abandoned farm in a poor mountainous region of eastern Tuscany. Possibly during the time of Imperial Rome, yes, and olio lampante, really bad rancid poorly madeolive oil, was used as an all-purpose machine oil but oil for the table was a treasured ingredient, even though in "my" mountains lard (not lardo but strutto) was used for frying. As for pasta, again, I think Grandi simply doesn't know what he's talking about and is trying to be provocative, nothing more. As you've pointed out, there is plenty of evidence for the use of pasta and its importance. But I am ranting and I probably should, like you, go back to the sources and cite some examples. Which I shall do in the next couple of weeks for sure. As for pizza, I don't agree that it's an American "invention"--there's too much evidence otherwise, but that it was a major Thing in Napoli, there is no doubt. It's possible that, somewhat like tiramisù and sun-dried tomatoes and limoncello, a Thing from an obscure or unheralded place in Italy got picked up by Americans, popularized, and brought back to Italy. More on that later. Sorry to run on at the mouth.
Thank you! It's hard to understand how Grandi could be so unmoored from truth and making a career out of it. I looked a little at his published academic work, and I have the impression that it's more cautious than his books for the public and interviews.
Meant to say I have re-stacked your post, not restocked it!
Great fun read.