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.
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.
(sorry if this is the wrong com for this)
European cuisine in general is overrated and overhyped, because
IE: Polish sausage is always termed “Kielbasa” while Cantonese sausage is always called “Chinese sausage” but never “Lap Cheung”. Despite Kielbasa literally being the Polish word for “sausage”, it’s not as if it’s some super specific type of sausage like liverwurst or something
guy in the OP is a perfect example
I always see mayos overhyping food in general, but especially their own food, and taking stuff about it way too seriously, saying things like “so and so INVENTED beef stroganoff” (which is literally just pasta with ground beef mixed together lmao, calm down) But this mindset forces others to adopt the same, because you can’t afford not to care if one entire racial group is circlejerking itself off and making false and spurious claims of invention and uniqueness
There are certain foods that really were truly invented (like Soan Papdi, or Mousse) but for the most part, most things have always been invented in multiple places independently, even things like Mozzerella which isn’t unique to Europe but is just a stretch cheese that everyone from the Caucasus to Rajasthan has their own version of
this particular
is upset because he’s imagining some (probably fake) tradition where the feast for this particular saint is ONLY celebrated with pork pasta but never beef pasta? Yea that’s fake mayo shit, and I like pork
I still think it’s really funny to say that Italians didn’t invent pasta but stole it from the Chinese through Marco Polo even though that’s probably not true.
it do be kinda sus tho how all these european inventions start popping up after contact with other cultures
It’s even less specific than that. Neither ground beef nor pasta are required for the dish to be stroganoff. I’d say the sour cream based sauce does it, but I’ve also had versions where it’s a creamy mushroom sauce without the sour cream. Definitely a creamy sauce on beef over a starch. I wanna see someone serve it over potatoes and see who it gives an aneurism to.
In Brazil it’s commonly served over white rice. Made with strips of beef or chicken, button mushrooms, cream, white wine or cognac.
“European cuisine” is such a wide concept that it is almost meaningless. French cuisine or variations thereof is eaten as “fancy food” in many European countries due to its historic association with the elite but outside of that it makes little sense to lump Italian pasta, central European sauerkraut and North Atlantic dried seafood into the same category.
so is “Indian cuisine” or “Chinese cuisine”, people still use it all the time
also the diversity is irrelevant to my point
Phonetic translations like “kielbasa” aren’t preferred in Chinese. We actually eat something similar in China but we just call them Harbin Sausages since that’s the city where it’s from. Case in point “Lap Cheung” uses one specific nonsensical transliteration scheme for one specific dialect’s pronunciation. It’s unrecognizeable to most people and how anglos end up pronouncing this string of letters is completely divorced from the original word. I’d rather people just say Chinese Sausage.