Almost every time you get into an "ethnic" or "traditional" restaurant, you are
committing yourself to a leap of faith. Unless you are originally from that
specific place, or country, you must trust the restaurant owner and, above all,
the cook: they normally say that the dishes they will serve you are "originally"
from place X or country Y, exactly as they had been cooked by any random person
down or up there for centuries, or millennia!
And it is quite hilarious to read the on-line reviews of restaurants by random
British people who praise the place for "serving the best Indian curry in the
East End", or "the best Alfredo Pasta this side of Milan".
You might know already that "curry" does not exist at all in India. Or better,
curry is actually the name of a tree native of the Indian continent and present
in other sub-tropical countries, whose leaves, both fresh and desiccated, are
widely used in the traditional cuisine of many places around India and Pakistan.
But there is no single dish called a "curry" in the whole Indian continent. The
name was actually made up by the locals in the 1850s to simplify the matter for
the barbarian colonialists who came there and started tasting those delicious
sauces accompanying anything from chicken, to lamb, to fish, to eggs. Every
single place has their own peculiar way of cooking meat and fish, and use
specific names for them. And since India is indeed a continent rather than a
small nation, you have literally hundreds or thousands of different ways of
cooking lamb or chicken or fish, using local, specific mixtures of herbs which
are sometimes totally unique of that place. Too much complicated for a bunch of
traders and bureaucrats! The indian cooks made a leap of faith and decided to
call them all "curry". They would have known what the customers meant when they
asked for "a curry": please bring me that delicious sauce you serve with lamb
and paneer! The name stuck, and now it is just "curry", all over the world.
But that's just a convention for illiterates: no proper Indian would get into a
street-food restaurant in Kolkata or in Delhi and ask for "a curry". As much as
you don't get into a pub in Brussels and ask for "a beer". As much as you can't
get into any random restaurant in Italy and ask for "Penne Alfredo".
Sorry for destroying a myth here, but "Penne Alfredo" is something that Italians
have never cooked for themselves. Simply, no one in Italy would ever dream of
"Penne Alfredo", because "Penne Alfredo" is not an Italian dish, at all. It
looks like "Penne Alfredo" were probably invented during the 1920s or 1930s by
Italian immigrants to the East Coast of the US, who started experimenting with
different ways to cook pasta in the new world. But there was nobody back in
Puglia or Lazio cooking "Penne Alfredo" until the late 1970s or maybe the early
1980s, when the dish was "reimported" as a "truly traditional one", mostly by
tourist restaurants.
Nevertheless, there is not any single "Traditionally Italian" restaurant around
the world that does not have "Penne Alfredo" in its menu. And, worse, you can
nowadays find dozens of restaurants in Florence, Rome, Naples, who surrendered
and started proposing "Penne Alfredo" to the tourists who had come to Italy to
taste the "traditional Penne Alfredo". And if you ask the owner of the
restaurant, they will swear that Penne Alfredo has been cooked in that same way
in her family for at least ten or twelve generations. And you gonna believe
her.
You would be also surprised to learn that the traditional "Pasta Carbonara" did
not exist at all in Italian cuisine until after the second World War. It
probably comes from the ingenuity of many Italian mothers, who had to make ends
meet in the poor and shattered post-war Italy. As a matter of fact, dried eggs
and bacon were indeed a major part of the rations provided by the US food aids
in the "Marshall Plan". Apparently, a primordial version of "Carbonara", the
"Cacio e ova" (literally, cheese and eggs), had already existed for decades, and
was mentioned already in several cooking books dating back to the 1700s. But in
the post-war Italy meat was rare, and mums had to make a leap of faith: putting
bacon in the "Cacio e ova" would have made a big difference in proteic intake,
so why not try it? The thing seemed to work, and the recipe stuck through and
became part of the "truly traditional Italian cuisine".
Only, Italians realised very early that "Guanciale" tasted much better than
bacon in a Carbonara, and they "reverted" to the "most traditional way" of
cooking Carbonara as soon as Italy started coming back on its feet after the
war, and meat became less of a rarity. There are nowadays religious wars about
whether you should put Guanciale or bacon in a Carbonara, or whether it goes
with Parmigiano or Pecorino cheese. And, in an ardent leap of faith, each
faction will enforce its version citing "dozens of generations" of "proper
Carbonara cooking". All Italians agree on one point: putting cream or double
cream in a Carbonara is a capital sin, and you will burn in hell for the
eternity if you commit such a crime! I must admit I am happy that the yankees
did not include any double cream in the Marshall rations, or we would have a
much worse-tasting "traditional" pasta dish, and another "cream vs double cream"
religious war.
