Most Italians think nothing of cooking every meal from scratch and therefore I would get NO applause, back home. They think some of my Londonized Italo-fusion food is weird and wacky, but I am prepared to take that on the chin if it means we benefit nutritionally. I like to change the proportions of vegetables and herbs in classic dishes so I can shoehorn in all sorts of greens, then I blend them so I can hide them in pasta sauces so the kids will eat them with less resistance… More on all of those strategies later. What would shock them more than irreverence with Italian recipes, however, would be to not cook at all. It has taken years of my mother’s fabulous cooking and my brother and me following in her footsteps for them to accept that despite being mudbloods we have proven our worth are now in their very snobby and demanding Italian club. My other side of the family, the Poles lived in the Middle East for more than two decades and I remember my aunt explaining that they were appreciated and respected for their religion as religiosity was the key, not so much the religion one followed. It feels the same way with Italians. That you have standards when it comes to food is the key, not so much that the food has to be only Italian. These standards are obviously taste but also hygiene, integrity, aesthetics and health.
Italians are in fact, the biggest snobs when it comes to any nationality other than themselves trying to turn out Italian food, even if that individual is an accomplished Italianophile. Wanting to be like the Italians is not enough. It reminds me of my days working in a huge cosmetics company, when we used to blind test Chanel No.5 vs new fragrances we were developing. When tested blind (in an unmarked lab bottle), Chanel never did well at all, but when presented with the “marketing mix” of ad, concept, bottle, brand, then it smelled better to the testee and always whipped every other fragrance’s ass. This is because so much of the trust, expectation and enjoyment comes from the pre-conditioning of the smeller or in the kitchen, the taster. With the exception of people like Massimo Bottura, most Italians are ultra-conservative when it comes to food in general, critical even of each other. There is endless debate, for example, on what constitutes the best way to make sugo (pasta sauce – more on that later) as there are as many recipes and techniques as there are households and each one attests they are the right.
The more open-minded of them enjoy other cuisines but few and far between are those who feel open enough to credit a foreigner who attempts to cook Italian food. The prejudice is all-powerful. It took much longer for burgers, sushi, Chinese food, and other imports to crack the Italian market, and I am not surprised. It is almost a latent xenophobia, the suspicion that foreign food elicits. Thankfully and also in some ways tragically there is change afoot.
Italians are very demanding in general. This may surprise you as from the outside they may seem shambolic. With their knackered political system and last-minute organization of major events, you might assume they are falling apart at the seams but I can tell you that their houses are spotless, their hygiene is like no other and their kitchens are for the most part organized and shipshape. They also don’t tend to like gimmicks and in my experience, turn their noses up at restaurants if there is even a hint of corners being cut. I remember one of my best friends (who happens to manage her large family-run restaurant set up by her father) pursing her lips and explaining that the pasta she was chewing (we were out for dinner) had had “la cottura frenata” (direct translation = the “breaks applied” to the cooking it was undergoing). The result was that since her pasta had been par-cooked to almost al dente, then dunked in cold water and then reheated with the sauce just before serving, it had a chewier, less yielding texture which smacked of fast food and bulk-cooking. Here are a few other foibles / sins in the eyes of Italians that I know:
- Italians look down on those who twiddle their spaghetti and other “long” pasta with the help of a spoon, which amusingly, foreigners think make them appear sophisticated.
- They frown upon mixing disparate flavours in the same plate, so always use clean crockery for different dishes
- They prefer their mineral water from glass bottles
- For digestive reasons don’t drink milk in any form beyond 11 am (hence all the eye-rolling at foreigners ordering cappuccini post lunch).
- Will almost exclusively eat fish in specialized fish restaurants or in their own homes
- They will almost always peel their fruit (peaches, apples, pears, you name it)
Digestion, manners, cleanliness, structure and punctuality around meals are equally all-important. The culture around food is not dissimilar from the huge crumbling millenia-old relics you see casually dotted about the land: both part of the scenery, taken for granted and immutable.
I aim to crack some of those myths by reporting back from my nearest and dearest, and present you with the “capsule collection” of failsafe family dishes cooked by my beloveds. What do we eat? How do we get our kids to eat? 
What are the things we insist upon at the table so that our kids grow up with sophisticated and discerning palates? Un-filtered home-cooked secrets are soon to be revealed…. Watch this space.
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