Pasta with everything
1001 things to do with a pizza - 1002 if you can bring yourself to eat it
Italian food has the reputation the world over of being something special. Well, we live here and I'm damned if I get it. Here are some things you might not realize about real Italian food.
Bread and Cake
Why do they insist on putting alcohol in the mix? If I wanted to get drunk, I would buy the local sheep-dip flavored lager at 30p a pint and get truly plastered! You're in the supermarket and see a really attractive Swiss Roll which you impulse-buy. When you get it home it tastes like your mouth on the morning after. Because in Roman times, salt was a currency which you could be paid in (hence the word 'salary'), salt is deemed a 'luxury' and therefore not included in most bread (pane). Salt (sale) was also taxed once upon a time so it was left out of bread to keep the price down.
Marie Antoinette would definitely be at home in our local supermarket - 'let them eat cake' - well, you might just as well use one to make your chip butty with, it will taste the same either way.
Don't ever bother asking if the bread is 'morbido' (soft) as you will be told yes before being sold the perfect accompaniment to a smash and grab raid.
Click pictures to enlarge
Dinners
Starters
Anti-pasto (just in case you needed reminding of the main event) is a mixture of tepid and cold salamis, hard bread and slimy mushrooms (of variety or varieties unknown). If you are favored, you will also get a lump of sweaty sheep's cheese or a hard waxy one or possibly even both. If you manage to struggle through this, then you move on to the main course.
Pasta
Pasta is the quintessential Italian food. Just for variety, you can choose between lots of different types of pasta such as Cannelloni, Fettuccine, Fusilli, Lasagna, Linguine, Penne, Ravioli, Spaghetti, Tortellini, Tagliatelle and Vermicelli to name the more common ones. Let me let you into a secret - they all taste like pasta! You can select the sauce to go with the pasta as long as it contains tomatoes and mushrooms, of course. If you feel really adventurous you can ask for a pinch of chili powder to go in to make it 'arrabiata' (literally - angry).
Gnocchi
Ah, you were pondering about having potatoes instead, weren't you? No, you can't - you have to have to have them mashed up, mixed with semolina or flour and fried. Don't even think about it - your stomach will not thank you if you do.
Meat
This is served separately to the pasta and most people wisely avoid it. For a nation which does not believe in cremation one wonders why they subject their meat (carne) to such treatment. If you order the meat course expect to be faced with burnt offerings which are so tough you could repair shoes with them as well as being highly-salted (so that's where the salt goes). You might just get served a salad with it but that will be limited to a couple of sorry-looking lettuce leaves and some more of the ubiquitous tomatoes.
You'd think that something as simple as ham was impossible to spoil - wrong! No, the Italians cannot produce ham without adding 'flavoring' (as well as injecting it with water) so that it ends up tasting like a slimy version of a packet of mixed herbs.
Pizza
The No2 Italian food and, accordingly, you will find pizzeria everywhere - mostly boasting that a pizza from them is cooked 'al legno' which just means that the heating used is wood. What this adds is a rather smoky taste and a tendency to burn the crust (since it is difficult to control the temperature very accurately). Apart from being burnt, your pizza might well be swimming in grease from the salami. The main function of a pizza as far as I can see is to provide a purpose in life for the otherwise insipid and inedible mozzarella (which, by the way, comes in a convenient puddle of slimy, colored water just waiting to ruin your clothes). One final comment about pizzerias is that they all close for the same evenings thus making it impossible to buy one on the one evening when you actually feel brave enough to face one.
The biggest joke of all for a nation which cannot conceive of a meal without pasta is that we have yet to find a supermarket which sells tinned spaghetti!
Even the local Chinese restaurant only serves 'pasta' on its lunchtime menu and dumbs-down its evening meal to take account of Italian tastes (perish the thought that anyone might realize that a curry is meant to be hot).
Then why not wash it all down with a thimble-full of Italian coffee? There is scarcely room for water in this minute cup of almost 50/50 caffeine and sugar. You can ask for a large milk coffee if you like but chances are you will be refused because it is just 'too weird'.
If you are on the road and have to stop and buy some food, at least go for a supermarket - don't go in a shop selling 'prodotti tipici' as this means unsalted bread, slimy salami and sweaty sheep's cheese.
To my mind Italian food is limited in taste and, even when you think that surely there is nothing anyone can do to spoil a staple food, sure enough the Italians manage it! Thank goodness for the expat food delivery service; I shall never get used to eating Italian food.
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