I dont care that your not even 100 year old recipes of wheat cheese and tomato are being ruined your food is the basis for microwave meals and uni student food gtfo your high horse. Oh and italian cars are a joke
culinary nationalism is a drug. its also nonsense too. most of these were poor people’s food. they had variants - not only regionally, the way the culinary nationalism approves of - but also from household to household. a living culture tends to be proud of the idea that every grandma has their own way of making dumplings, the whole ‘you’re doing it wrong’ being more of a regional ribbing than an accusation of sacrilege.
My grandma being from india and her curry
except its entirely her own inventions including her chapatis which are the best ive ever had and nothing comes close.my grandma would routinely take her own cooking book, open it, read the recipe carefully and then do something entirely fucking random and say ‘if this works i hope i remember to write it down’.
and yet at the same time she was also intransigent with some things. ‘this is the best method to peel eggs wow you didn’t listen to me time to kill myself’, for an example. i think culinary nationalism takes that sort of affectation, which on some level is communicated on a personal level, and tries to make a dogma out of it. it is like taking folk religion and turning it into a scriptural dogma.
my grandma would routinely take her own cooking book, open it, read the recipe carefully and then do something entirely fucking random and say ‘if this works i hope i remember to write it down’.
This is how I cook lmao. Just look at some recipes for the general idea then do whatever I feel like instead. It generally works: cooking is easy as long as you know your ingredients and balance the flavors.
and yet at the same time she was also intransigent with some things. ‘this is the best method to peel eggs wow you didn’t listen to me time to kill myself’, for an example.
Lmao I’m also absolutely stuck on certain methodologies that I’ve found to work better than anything else, although most of those are knife safety things where if someone does it wrong I get anxious because it’s dangerous, to the point that I’ll insist on taking the knife away from them and chopping or peeling something myself if they won’t hold it right.
Lmao I’m also absolutely stuck on certain methodologies that I’ve found to work better than anything else, although most of those are knife safety things where if someone does it wrong I get anxious because it’s dangerous, to the point that I’ll insist on taking the knife away from them and chopping or peeling something myself if they won’t hold it right.
I know you hate to see me coming with my reasonably fast incredibly unorthodox knife cutting skills. You also can’t touch me lest I will pretty sure stab myself
cooking is easy as long as you know your ingredients and balance the flavors.
This right here. This is 90% of what matters.
culinary nationalism is a drug. its also nonsense too.
ESPECIALLY for Italy, a country that’s younger than the United States, and who’s language is actually 20 languages in a trench coat.
For most of post-Roman history a Venician and a Scicilian would have had absolutely no reason to associate with one another, culturally.
I’d blame Giuseppe Garibaldi, but he was actually kinda based
If Italy hadn’t been blown up a bunch and its government totally reformed by the events of the world wars it would be even more of a collection of city states in a trench coat.
culinary nationalism
dang this is too accurate
Come to Türkiye, we have the most reactionary people on the culinary nationalism. The idea of other neighboring nations having similar food to ours is enough to make an average Turkish seethe and mald.
I say to the turk all his food was invented in Greece and i say to the the greek all his food was invented in turkey
Fastest way to get yourself killed. We also have a “disagreement” with Armenians about some dolma varieties.
Fastest way to get yourself killed
Yeah. Getting murder any%
Implying any Balkan country stuff is from another Balkan country is a certain way to die. It doesn’t matter if the 99.9% of everything is same, it’s your fault for not getting the small nuances.
Bulgaria invented phones
My favourite in the wider south east Europe region is that everyone has their own variant of a Turkish/bosnian/greek etc coffee but if you call it a <rival country> coffee they are really not happy. I got my ass chewed by an old Serb for asking for a Turkish coffee once.
I got my ass chewed by an old Serb for asking for a Turkish coffee once.
Skill issue
I think culinary nationalism is universal to nationalism itself. It’s just that Europe’s identities are built on the basis of exclusion of neighboring countries, whereas nationalism in, say, Brazil or the United States is built on racial segregation in different forms. What differs from country to country are particularities like these.
With Turkey you have the fact of the post ottoman world being built on balkans scrambling to not identify with Turks, ‘the East’ and various elements of their traditional cultures while appropriating common pan west asian stuff - which includes cuisine. On top of that you have things like Sweden claiming to have invented ‘meatballs with spices from the east actually’ because, you know, something popular and so closely aligned with swedish identity can’t possibly be ‘non european’, ‘non swedish’ or, worse, ‘non white’.
With Italy I think what makes them particularly annoying is that Italian cuisine is easy to reproduce. That’s kind of the point. Unlike with, say, French cuisine, what adds flair to dishes in Italy are ultra specific regional ingredients. Not culinary methods. To add insult to injury the most influencial italic country in the world is not Italy. It’s New York City.
So you take all the contradictions of culinary nationalism and add the fact that italian culture flows not from Rome, but from the United States. Kinda like how the Renaissance came from Asia. The classical italian city states like Venice, Florence, Genoa all did social engineering and reinvented their cultures from the ground up using writings that only Greeks and Arabs had cared about for centuries at that point. But this time the ‘source of culture’ is the United States, the empire which rules Europe - not the ‘Roman Empire’ of a wall with a town annex in the dardanelles.
Sometimes, sometimes I snap the spaghetti in half before cooking it just to make an Italian cry.
For anyone not getting the amazing layers of this gif in the context of the comment. The actor playing the “crying Indian” in the old green washing ad campaign this is clipped from was actually Italian.
who the hell invented caring about that, lol.
It was “I’m married to an Italian man” instagram circa 2024
But then you can’t do one long continuous slurp
so what? you’re just supposed to have one side be cooked a whole minute longer than the other? have a 10% margin of error on your cook time??
Why not just get a shorter type of pasta from the start?
The worst part is when they get an emotional attachment to the particular way their great-grandma made it, even if it’s blatantly culinarily wrong. Like, my wife’s uncle married this Italian woman, and her mom got on my MIL’s case for using sautéed onions in her tomato sauce. Yes, she thought one of the most fundamental culinarily bases was wrong because that’s the way her lowlife Sicilian family did it.
I need you to, at least roughly, write down this fucked up recipe for me
Just sautéed garlic and then add the tomato. Not sure what combination of whole/crushed/paste tomato they used.
now this feels like grandma got sick of cutting onions and that just turned into a whole thing
Mama mia my alfa romeo broke down after 3 miles. Time to fill the tank with caca e peepee
i did learn how to make my pasta better after listening to Italians. i think we yankees all learned to dump the sauce on top from the same prego commercial
listening to italians
MODS! MODS! BAN THIS PERSON
oh gosh oh geez ive been made
you’ve done it nowOh no my tomato bread isnt traditional. Oh no my egg on pasta has bacon in it the world is ending wont anyone think about how special we are. We used to be the romans you know!!
yeah, but back then they ate bread and olives with fermented fish sauce and drank vinegar with it. no pasta, not a tomato in sight. just people, stabbing each other while trying to get the taste of vinegar out of their mouths.
Vinegar tastes so good, though. Especially red wine vinegar. You know how lemonade is better when it’s tangy? It’s the same thing.
and drank vinegar with it.
Posca is actually really good when it’s hot as fuck outside. I don’t know if it wrecks your teeth but I feel like it can’t be worse than soda in that regard
This shouldn’t be in bad posting.
Italian food is delicious. But holy fuck, most of it’s as conceptually difficult as making a baked potato
I saw an argument that most Italian food actually don’t look good. They taste good, don’t get me wrong I like Italian food, so you’ve probably associated the appearance with the taste by now. But a cheese pizza, a carpaccio, a carbonara, a calzone, a pasta al burro or a cacio e pepe, a standard bruschetta, a lasagne or an arancino before you cut into it etc all look worse than they would taste.
Compare that to a gumbo, a paella, a biryani, a xiaochao stir fry, a shakshuka, a bibimbap, a goulash, etc. They look appealing from the get go.
I would imagine this sort of effect is entirely cultural and based upon what sort of foods an individuals culture/subculture considers valuable.
I don’t really see any reason why any of the dishes you describe would be intrinsically more aesthetically appealing than Italian food other than ones cultural/subcultural standards for what good food ‘should’ look like. It is not as if any of these dishes, Italian or not, are somehow closer to some platonic ideal of Human Food. If such a platonic ideal did exist it’d surely be the cuisine of an African hunter-gatherer from a very, very long time ago - which probably didn’t look like gumbo or xiaochao stir fry.
I grew up in a context where Italian-American food was prized as the best and according to my brain that stuff ‘looks’ good in a way that the dishes you describe do not. It’s all just cultural programming at the end of the day, with individual variation, naturally.
I think it’s due to the fact that outside of some tomato dishes and pesto, Italian food mostly seems to vary from beige to brown while having a homogeneous texture, while the others I mentioned are vibrant or has large colour contrast and/or different textures.
This might be whats activating our monkey brains, what our hunter gatherer ancestors look for. Evolutionary pressure into seeking a diverse diet instead of eating the exact same berry or the exact same animal every day. Why tide pods look like they would taste good. Why a candy with food colouring tastes better with one without even if they have the same identical taste.
It’s a reason why garnish exists, its first goal is to add visual contrast to a otherwise monotonous dish. The taste a garnish adds is secondary, if the taste was more important, it would have been added to the cooking process earlier to infuse more flavours like a bay leaf. And quite often traditional Italian food is finished with fresh parsley or fresh basil or gremolata in a restaurant setting.
This may be a circumstance in which I underestimated the effect of my Autism, if you are correct. The garnish stuff is a good point, that is basically universally done.
It is possible that, in addition to the cultural context of my raising, I just in general prefer more homogeneity in my food aesthetically in addition to generally preferring to eat the same few things all the time. Wouldn’t be super surprising, now that I think about it.
This thread is full of Americans pretending like their stereotypes of other nationalities are real and then also yanks being mad that they’re getting stereotyped as the “hotdog and french fry” place
Fix It Again Tony
this would be a lot more compelling if the food in italy weren’t among the best in the world
Top 3 European cuisines for sure
oh my god someone else thinks Italian food is overrated? I’m not alone huzzah
Pasta is Chinese. Raviolis are dumplings. Tomato is American.
Oh you invented putting cheese on bread, did you?
Oh you invented putting cheese on bread, did you?
Jumping off of this: The foodsphere, even removed from the italians, knows a lot of “nooo that’s not correct”. The only thing as annoying as the italians though are the people who think the Earl of Sandwich invented that. It’s putting literally a thing in bread, people have been doing it since we have bread
I’m a fan of americans that are cheese sandwich purists, and if you put any ingredient besides cheese in there it becomes a “melt” not a “cheese sandwich”. this was a big deal on reddit in 2019 i think
you can one-up these people by pointing out a grilled cheese is just a type of panini that also includes melts
Un panino Americano per favore.
omg one of my most favorite reddit rants of all time!
You People Make Me Sick
A grilled cheese consists of only these following items. Cheese. Bread with spread (usually butter). This entire subreddit consist of “melts”. Almost every “grilled cheese” sandwich i see on here has other items added to it. The fact that this subreddit is called “grilledcheese” is nothing short of utter blasphemy.
Let me start out by saying I have nothing against melts, I just hate their association with sandwiches that are not grilled cheeses. Adding cheese to your tuna sandwich? It’s called a Tuna melt. Totally different. Want to add bacon and some pretentious bread crumbs with spinach? I don’t know what the hell you’d call that but it’s not a grilled cheese.
I would be more than willing to wager I’ve eaten more grilled cheeses in my 21 years than any of you had in your entire lives. I have one almost everyday and sometimes more than just one sandwich. Want to personalize your grilled cheese? Use a mix of different cheeses or use sourdough or french bread. But if you want to add some pulled pork and take a picture of it, make your own subreddit entitled “melts” because that is not a fucking grilled cheese.
I’m not a religious man nor am I anything close to a culinary expert. But as a bland white mid-western male I am honestly the most passionate person when it comes to grilled cheese and mac & cheese. All of you foodies stay the hell away from our grilled cheeses and stop associating your sandwich melts with them. Yet again, it is utter blasphemy and it rocks me to the core of my pale being.
Shit, I stopped lurking after 3 years and made this account for the sole purpose of posting this. I’ve seen post after post of peoples “grilled cheeses” all over reddit and it’s been driving me insane. The moment I saw this subreddit this morning I finally snapped. Hell, I may even start my own subreddit just because I know this one exists now.
You god damn heretics. Respect the grilled cheese and stop changing it into whatever you like and love it for it what it is. Or make your damn melt sandwich and call it for what it is. A melt
Okay but traditional closed sandwich made from separate pieces of bread actually do appear pretty late. Wraps are old as dirt, trenchers are from the middle age but you guys also get mad when I call an open faced sandwich a sandwich so trenchers are obviously not it, and dipping bread in stews and soups is related to sandwiches but if my potato on rye isn’t a sandwich then this sure isn’t.
This reminds me of a old ass buzzfeed video that was like “Chinese-American Millennials and their grandparents eat Chinese-american food” and all the Millennials were “wow this is so inauthentic and fake, i hate this”
While the grandparents were like “hey we didnt have this back home, but it doesn’t taste half bad”
I love when a cuisine becomes popular half the world over and you get to see what they get up to with it, it is fascinating
I will put pineapple on my pizza and the more upset you get the more pineapple I will put on my pizza
Fking eyetalians put french fries and hot dogs on pizza and call it “pizza Americana” but they cry about pineapple lol
That’s just Italians being funny
that’s like the classic “american fried rice” in thailand which is regular fried rice with cut up hotdogs and sweetcorn in it, seasoned with ketchup
Accurate
I love when people still treat pineapple on pizza as some shocking new development. I grew up in rural ass Ohio in the late 90s/early 2000s and the pizza places had pineapple as an option.
I wish I liked pineapple (the texture doesn’t do it for me) because I’d be ordering it a lot more just to see who gets offended.
Take some inspiration from the swedes here
Blatant fredophobia on Hexbear? Its more likely than you think
