Penne for your thoughts

Why Italian food’s endless ramble of cheese, meat and tomato sauce is overrated Claudia McNeilly

The menu at your standard Italian American restaurant is a crash course in excess. Plates of spaghetti Bolognese are finished with greedy fistfuls of Parmesan and served alongside creamy bowls of fettuccine alfredo, the very essence of which depends on the emulsification of butter and cheese. Most restaurants also offer lasagna—a casserole-like concoction involving yet another heavy handed application of shredded dairy and ground meat. There are also bulbous meatballs and piping hot pizzas.

Despite the endless ramble of cheese, meat and tomato sauce, Italian American food is best described lacking. Sure, quality tomato sauce can bring a whisper of acidity; and you are also occasionally graced with a splash of balsamic vinegar or a pinch of red pepper flakes. However, the meagre garnishes pale in comparison to more flavourful dishes found scattered across the rest of the world.

There is no Italian American equivalent to Korean banchan, the small plates of mouthwatering fermented vegetables served at nearly every meal. Nor is there a counterpoint to Thai green papaya salad, where a blank canvas of tart fruit is enlivened by the sweetness of palm sugar and the astringency of fresh lime. Even in Poland, with the comparable blandness of meals based entirely off sausage meat and boiled potatoes, they have figured out that sauerkraut keeps things interesting by contributing a burst of much needed acidity.

Of course, there is more to Italian food than pizza and pasta: it’s hard to deny the potent anchovy and garlic drenched Bagna Cauda of Piedmont or the copious fresh seafood of Campania. However, the wheat and meat-heavy offerings at Italian American restaurants are undeniably bland by any comparable measure. And yet, no cuisine is more beloved by our North American palates.

When Italian food was brought to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, meat was still a luxury in Italy. Inspired by the availability of inexpensive pork, beef and chicken, Italian Americans began incorporating generous portions of meat into what was once a vegetable and grain driven cuisine. Colossal meatballs, veal chops the size of dinner plates and other meat-forward specialties took shape, creating a new genre of Italian cooking known as Italian American food.

By the 1920s, Italian American cuisine had been officially accepted into the North American mainstream. When Italian American immigrant Ettore Boiardi opened his restaurant called Il Giardino d’Italia in Cleveland, Ohio in 1924, he likely never imagined becoming the iconic avatar of Italian cuisine for families across North America. However, once the restaurant became a success, Boiardi went on to found Chef Boyardee — a mutated version of his own name chosen so that Americans might have less trouble pronouncing it — in 1928. The U.S. military commissioned the company during the Second World War for army rations, and the company never looked back – a staple of family pantries across the continent.

Decades later, our hunger for Italian food is as ravenous as it has ever been. David Chang documents this phenomenon in his Netflix series Ugly Delicious. “Think about all the bad Italian restaurants in America,” he says in the series. “Think about all the restaurants that even open up in New York City to this day, how many of them are Italian? Italian never goes out of style.” Chang seems perplexed, and even angry, by the undeniable popularity of Italian food. But our affinity for pizza and pasta makes sense. Based almost entirely off of cheese, meat and wheat, Italian ingredients share a striking familiarity to those already on many North American kitchen tables. Once you take off some of the makeup, a cheeseburger is just a flattened down meatball composed of the same three ingredients as tagliatelle Bolognese.

The idea that we prefer familiar foods is hardly news. Not only does it explain why your grocery cart looks the same every week, but our preference for the recognizable has also been backed up by science. A 2015 study in the journal Neuron found that subjects chose familiar foods over those that they did not know as well, even if they had already decided that other foods were more delicious.

Maybe this explains why we rarely bat an eye at paying high prices for Italian food. Few would question a $20 cheese pizza or complain about a $16 plate of spaghetti, but the idea of paying more than $10 for a plate of chicken chow mein, a dish that involves far more ingredients that include plenty of fresh vegetables and chicken, makes us cringe.

As if that weren’t enough, proponents of Italian food hardly listen when anyone tries to bring these problems to their attention. “You just have to go to Italy,” they say, where the tomatoes are described as being as juicy as Jolly Ranchers; the mozzarella so smooth you’ll want to use it as moisturizer on your skin. I have taken these stalwarts by their word, travelling to Italy to eat pizza in Florence and Carbonara in Rome, waiting, with each bite, to have my guaranteed religious experience.

It’s true that the cheese and tomato sauce were better than most renditions available at your average grocery store. But as the farmto-table movement continues to push local food to the forefront of mainstream consciousness, restaurants across the globe are taking equal care to source quality meat, cheese and produce from artisanal purveyors. Great ingredients undoubtedly lead to better cooking, but they no longer guarantee that pizza in Italy will be better than pizza prepared in other, less Italian corners of the world.

Years after my first trip to Italy, I encountered the best Neapolitan style pizza of my life at an unassuming pizza counter in Tokyo called Savoy. It’s here that the thin crust bubbled under the heat of the wood-fired pizza oven, its insides maintaining a satisfying, springy chew. The sauce was as sweet as late summer tomatoes. But it was a smattering of fresh garlic shavings — which steeped the pie in an addictive symphony of sweet and spicy flavours — that completely eliminated the need for cheese.

There is simplicity and comfort to be found in great Italian cooking, like the late great Italian chef Marcella Hazan’s foolproof instructions for four-ingredient tomato sauce. But while there are exceptions to every rule, most of the Italian American food that we know and love – the colossal meatballs and soggy lasagnas – is hardly the stuff of gastronomic fantasy. A bland serving of fettucine alfredo is not better than a fiery bowl of Sichuan dan dan noodles. A cheese pizza is not worth more than a plate of chow mein.

Our favouritism towards Italian food pits other cuisines at an unfair disadvantage. We may still be drawn to that which is most familiar, but it’s also time we admitted to our Italian food bias and, ultimately, to our mistakes.