Are neither Neapolitan pizza nor parmigiano cheese authentically Italian? That's what Italian Historian Alberto Grandi claims. But is he right?
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00:00This man is turning everything we thought we knew about Italian cuisine on its head.
00:07In the major Italian tourist cities, like Florence, Rome and Venice,
00:13it seems to me scamming the tourists has become a national sport,
00:17to feed them any old garbage and claim it's fine Italian cuisine.
00:21There's no reason to say Italians cook any better than the French, Germans or Austrians.
00:28Alberto Grandi is an Associate Professor of Economic History at the University of Parma.
00:33In his books, he claims that pizza has been a thing in Italy only since the 1950s,
00:40true Parmesan cheese comes from Wisconsin,
00:43and that Italian grandmas can't cook.
00:45What truth is there to his claims?
00:48To help make sense of it, we turn to Maddalena Fossati, Editor-in-Chief of La Cucina Italiana.
00:54She's advocating for Italian cuisine to be included on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.
01:00Of course, we also talk to ordinary Italians.
01:05Theory number one. Neapolitan pizza isn't from Italy.
01:12The pizza we eat today, Neapolitan pizza, is more American than it is Italian.
01:19Excuse me? Pizza is the quintessential Italian dish.
01:24Everyone knows it and loves it.
01:26In fact, pizza was founded as far back as the 18th century in Naples.
01:31Sure, it looked a bit different back then.
01:34Pizza was an inexpensive meal for Naples' poor lower class.
01:38Bread topped with whatever was left over at home.
01:41Before the great emigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
01:46the pizza eaten in Naples was a very basic product.
01:49It would have disappeared from our cuisine.
01:52The Neapolitans themselves despised it.
01:55Like all recipes, pizza has certainly evolved and changed, of course.
02:00That doesn't mean it doesn't have an origin, though.
02:03The birthplace of pizza is in Naples.
02:06Theory number two. Until the 1980s, olive oil was only used as lamp fuel.
02:13Today, Italians consume per capita up to 13 liters of olive oil a year.
02:19But is that a new thing?
02:22Olive oil was never part of the famous Mediterranean diet.
02:27For cooking, they used pork fat instead.
02:30Come again?
02:32Even in the 19th century, travelers raved about the taste of Italian oils.
02:37There were certainly people producing high-quality olive oil,
02:41but the kind that the vast majority of Italians knew was a very poor quality.
02:45It was scarce. There wasn't much of it.
02:47It was expensive, and it was used for everything but cooking.
02:51Theory number four. The only true Parmesan cheese comes from Wisconsin.
02:58Parmigiano-Reggiano is in essence an Italian cheese that originated in the Middle Ages, period.
03:05That's true. But it's changed significantly over the centuries.
03:09The original Parmesan was softer, its texture firmer.
03:13Not until after World War II did Italian Parmesan evolve into the crumbly hard cheese we know today.
03:20In Wisconsin, though, it's still made like it was 100 years ago.
03:27To taste the Parmesan our grandparents knew, we have to go to Milwaukee, not Parma.
03:32A 1,000-year-old cheese is just awful, though.
03:36Theory number five. Italian grandmothers can't cook.
03:42Not only do the grandmothers of this country know how to cook, they're the heart of Italian cuisine.
03:48Italian grandmothers didn't even know how to cook.
03:52Or rather, they could maybe cook three dishes like everyone else in the world.
03:56Holiday dishes, tortellini, lasagna, that sort of thing.
04:00The rest was just making do with what little they had.
04:06And is Italian culinary tradition truly about perfection and unchanging recipes?
04:14The whole world knows Italian cuisine. I don't think it's just 100 years old or 50 or 10 years old.
04:20These dishes have been handed down from great-grandfather to grandfather to the children and so on, down through the generations.
04:28The core of my work is really to show that traditions are invented and, above all, that they can change.
04:34That's essentially what it's all about.
04:38I know, of course, that we dressed differently 1,000 years ago, lived differently and had different ingredients.
04:44That doesn't mean we should deny that we were who we were.
04:49I think a lot of love goes into preparing food in Italy.
04:56Whether it's 400 or 40 years old, Italian cuisine is ultimately more than just the sum of its ingredients.
05:02Even its harshest critics can't resist it.