How to Eat Like an Italian

Do a Google search for “easy recipe ideas,” and you’ll come up with a host of interesting menu suggestions, many of them of Italian origin or character. I find the same Italian presence daily in the various recipes I find in my inbox from such sources as Food and Wine, Epicurious, Bon Appetit, Southern Living, and The Kitchen. But I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Italian is the most popular cuisine in America these days.

I ask myself, what is it about Italian food that Americans love? Good Italian meals are usually simple, but also combine a rich combination of what cookbook author and chef Samin Nosrat calls the four basic factors: salt to enhance flavor; fat to amplify flavor and make appealing textures possible; acid to brighten and balance a dish; and heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food. That’s the chemistry, but it still doesn’t explain why Italian food appeals to our taste buds.

I perused Angelo Pellegrini’s The Unprejudiced Palate for an answer. A revered writer on food, he wrote that “its pretentions are modest.” At its core, Italian cooks emphasize green vegetables and the sparing use of meats to make their dishes satisfying as a steady diet. In detail, Pellegrini emphasizes five elements: the quality of the ingredients, the simplicity of the dishes, the potential health benefits, the variety of tastes, and shareability. (Most Italians serve family style at meals.)

As Margaret and Franco Romagnoli pointed out in their cookbook, Italy itself was a series of independent states until the mid-1800s when they united into one big very agrarian country. The farmers across this varied landscape were never rich in material wealth and had big families that worked from dawn to dusk in the fields. Food had to be tasty and economical as well as easy and quick to prepare. The 19 major regions not only differed in distinctive topography, but also climate, folklore, language, and ways of cooking. Very little that was not grown on the spot ever reached the table. Contrast that with an American menu that too often centers on meat. And whatever mimics Italian food generally contains too much pasta and way too much gooey cheese.

Pellegrino, who grew up poor in rural Italy before emigrating to the U.S., suggests that Americans lack a sense of culinary adventure because we’re victims of our own financial success. The Italians he knew had to subsist on “pilchards and polenta.” Americans consume plenty of meat, but don’t explore the entire animal – including glandular tissue and viscera – or the leafy vegetables and greens. Furthermore, most don’t take advantage of the bounty when fresh and available by preserving it for later use.

Pellegrino noted that the immigrant in the last century “will garden his plot of ground and adapt his Old World culinary tricks to his new ingredients. Still, he will eat dandelion salad, but now – instead of a main course – it will accompany roast flesh or fowl. He will eat cooked leafy mustard and turnip greens, cabbage and kale, spinach and chard, with appropriate meat dishes cooked in generous quantities of olive oil and butter.”

As for those vegetables: “A vegetable taken from the soil an hour or two before it is eaten is vastly superior to the commercial product that has lain in storage for days or weeks before it gets to the dinner table.”

Pellegrino describes how an Italian immigrant would dine in the U.S. “The dinner is prepared to be eaten; not to dazzle, simply served with a minimum of implements. The bread is good and the butter will not recoil in disgust. The soup is made from sound, flavored stock; the roast flavored with herbs and larded with olive oil; the vegetables simmered in meat juices; the cheese is real and the wine is clear, rich, and honest. The immigrant will wring from his environment all it will yield and forgo the motorcar and movies to increase the quality of his bread and wine.”

So there you have it. Use fresh fruits and vegetables, cut down on the meat, buy quality cheese and fresh pasta. Be creative about it, and you’ll cook like an Italian.

From your email, please click on the headline to view the blog on the website. You can log in and comment at the end of the blog to share your thoughts and start a discussion, or suggest a topic for Farmboy in the Kitchen.

If you’d like to share the blog, click on the Facebook icon or one of the others. Thanks!