Italian cuisine may be one of the most recognised and loved in the world. It is often imagined as a collection of ancient recipes and local traditions preserved by skilful nonnas over the centuries. But now, a food historian is exposing the common myths and false stories, arguing that the Italian cuisine as we know it is barely a few decades old.
Food is no doubt an integral part of the country’s culture and identity – so much so that Italians cherish Neapolitan pizza or pasta alla carbonara as much as their great historical and artistic treasures. Tales abound of centuries-old local feuds over what city has the best filled pasta, while every local cheese or cured meat is likely to boast links to the Renaissance or the Middle Ages.
Alberto Grandi, food historian and professor of economic history at the University of Parma, has been debunking Italian food myths for years. Grandi claimed, in a Financial Times interview in 2018, that pasta alla carbonara was invented in Italy just after World War Two using U.S. Army provisions like bacon and powdered egg yolks, countering the common belief that the authentic recipe includes pork jowl and Roman pecorino cheese. This theory is backed by other authors, but it caused outrage in a country increasingly obsessed with maintaining the lore of Italian authenticity in food.
Grandi’s latest book, La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist), written with his podcast co-host Daniele Soffiati, and published in April 2024, stirred up new controversies with its provocative title. The idea that many beloved recipes and products such as cheeses or cured meats have hundreds of years of history, Grandi and Soffiati claim, is pure fantasy. Food is constantly changing and evolving. No product or recipe has always been as we know it now, and most dishes have a shorter history than most people imagine.
Grandi argues that migration is what made Italian cuisine what it is today. Millions of people left Italy in the 19th and 20th Centuries, emigrating to South America, North America, and other European countries. They were leaving behind a country that was poverty-stricken, where the diet was limited to a handful of products; Pellagra, a disease caused by lack of vitamin B3, was endemic in several areas of Italy at the end of the 19th Century.
The Italians who landed on New York’s Ellis Island left hunger and misery behind. And it was in the “new world”, Grandi argues, that Italian immigrants found the wealth and ingredients to create the recipes that eventually popularised Italian food worldwide.
However, many Italians are not familiar with this history. They might imagine that their beloved recipes were born in Italy, passed down, unchanged, from generation to generation and eventually exported abroad by Italian migrants. “It might seem that the rest of the world didn’t know how to eat until all of a sudden Italians arrived,” says Grandi. He believes it’s pure myth – popularised by social media – that nonnas taught Americans how to cook rich, genuine Italian food.
Pizza is the most famous example of this. Born as a cheap street food in Naples, in the 19th Century it was almost synonymous with poverty and filth. Pizza is “a crust of leavened bread dough, oven-toasted, with a sauce of a bit of everything on top”, wrote Pinocchio author Carlo Collodi in 1886. He added that pizza had “an air of complex filth that perfectly matches that of its vendor”. A bit harsh, I admit, even if it’s true!
It was in America, says Grandi, that pizza became “red”. While fresh tomatoes were among the original toppings, Italian immigrants to the U.S. popularised pizza prepared with tomato sauce, a product that industrialisation made easy to access and store. And it was in the U.S. that pizzerias really started to take off. Scholars call this process “the pizza effect”: when a product leaves its place of origin, gets profoundly transformed and then returns to its place of origin to be fully embraced in a completely different form.
Grandi also angered Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese producers when he argued that parmesan has evolved for the better over the last few decades, and the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese that was eaten in Italy 100 years ago and earlier – a smaller wheel with a black rind – is now only made in Wisconsin.
The shift in the Italian culinary landscape started with the rapid expansion that occurred in Italy post-WWII. The boom brought new possibilities to millions of Italians. Cars, supermarkets and refrigerators meant that people who were limited to a daily local supply could travel to restaurants, buy new products and create new recipes. Tiramisu, says Grandi, is a great example of this: a dessert created in the late 1960s that is based on supermarket ingredients and only possible with a refrigerator.
With the new products and brands also came marketing. “Television influenced our cuisine and gastronomical identity greatly,” says Grandi. He argues that most of Italy’s gastronomic traditions were invented by food marketers. Carosello, a short television programme that aired in Italy every night from 1957 to 1977, introduced new products and brands through stories, sketches and iconic characters. Carosello provided the consumer education upon which Italian home cuisine was then built, especially by mothers and grandmothers.
“Cuisine is no longer part of our identity,” says Grandi, “it is our identity.” He argues that after decades of industry decline and economic stagnation, Italians have no faith in the future – that’s why they “invent the past”.
“We don’t need to make up stories about Italy’s amazing products,” says Cavallo, echoing Grandi. “We shouldn’t create a situation in which changing recipes is the end of the world because that’s the opposite of how Italian food came to be.”
I thought this was an amusing story, as well as correcting our understanding of the history of Italian cuisine.
